When a child with exceptional consciousness comes to Earth, this calls for an approach that differs from the average.

One of my services is tailored support for exceptionally gifted children. This is customized guidance focused on the development of the child. Exceptionally gifted children not only differ from the average; they are also very different from gifted children, and they differ from one another as well. Exceptional giftedness cannot be expressed in a number, just as intelligence cannot be expressed in a number.

How do you know that your child is exceptionally gifted?

Over time, I have worked with hundreds of exceptionally gifted people, in the Netherlands and abroad. My assessment of giftedness is based on experience and knowledge. You could call it an eagle’s-eye perspective. The children I meet are very diverse, and yet they share certain similarities. They are extraordinarily sensitive — in no way average — and if you are familiar with sensitive children, this sensitivity in exceptionally gifted children goes many times deeper. It is not limited to the five commonly known senses; it involves an inexplicable knowing of what is to come, of what is and is not visible and yet certainly exists. If you have such a child, you know exactly what I mean.

These are not always children who are good at academic skills and tasks. They do not all read at the age of three, and they are not all interested in mathematics. However, perceiving at a high level and being extremely empathic and sensitive is something they all share — each in their own way. What these children want to learn and what they are good at depends on their personal preferences and interests.

Exceptionally gifted children are often very good at adapting to the expectations of others. This is a major pitfall at school, where the child usually appears quite ordinary. If your child, before starting school, is already capable of many things, speaks two languages, draws, reads, or takes an interest in the world at a level far beyond their age, or if your child is so sensitive that they feel the emotions of others or foresee events before those involved see them themselves, then as a parent — and certainly as a mother — you usually know that your child is different and not average. As soon as your child enters school or a setting with other children, you may notice that the child adapts and that their behavior suddenly becomes strange. As a parent, be extremely alert to this. This adaptation marks the beginning of a gradual loss of the Self — and therefore of identity.

What do you pass on to your child?

Exceptionally gifted children are deeply connected to nature and to the well-being of all animals and people. They worry about their living environment, but this almost never seems to interest anyone at school. What do you pass on as a parent? What does your child see in your attitude and beliefs? Does your child become a guardian of the Earth? Exceptionally gifted children want people to realize that they are destroying their living environment. They are deeply concerned about adults who do not understand where things are heading. Selflessness and unconditionality are inherent to their nature from birth. If a person does not care about their living environment, it essentially means they do not care about themselves — that they do not see themselves as important. This is exactly what these children worry about so deeply.

For you as a parent, this is also an important point. What do you understand by love? How is your self-love? At school, many things are projected onto children, except the importance of self-love and taking good care of oneself. People are not used to encouraging each other to become the best version of themselves while making autonomous choices and strengthening their uniqueness. Schools are certainly not designed for this, and most educators have no idea — often because they themselves lack self-love.

A loving relationship means a mutual ignition of the self.

This applies not only to adult relationships, but also to the loving relationship with your child. Do you model in your life how your child can develop, how they can form opinions, how they can learn skills, and how they can remain true to themselves? Do you teach your child how not to become a pleaser and not a victim? Have you thought about what it means to live without identifying as a victim or a pleaser?

The stability of adulthood depends on the integrity of the parents

When I speak with adults during coaching sessions, the issue of not having been seen for who they truly are almost always arises, along with the pain of that absence. This lack of love and recognition is related to external adaptation and the “just act normal, that’s already crazy enough” mindset. This phrase is directly connected to a socially accepted norm regarding self-worth. Apparently, you are not worthy of being fully yourself, especially if that means standing out. You were corrected and kept in line from a very young age. I will explain this mechanism so that you can break through it.

Parents raise children, which ideally means guiding them through the three most important phases of life so that children become adults (the phases of ages 1–7, 7–14, and 14–21). When parents make the mistake of taking the parenting process personally, the child will never fully complete the transition through the biological phase (puberty to young adulthood, ages 14–21). Instead, the child becomes stuck at the same low frequency as the parents.

What do I mean by this? Parents unconsciously carry wounds from their own childhood. They project these wounds onto their children in certain ways. If the parent is unaware of this, they pass on what the child internalizes, and the child takes over the parent’s trauma. This is called generational trauma. I observe that in gifted adults this often relates to parents denying giftedness — not seeing the child for who they are. Their giftedness was not seen, or it was seen but ignored, often because the parent denied or minimized their own giftedness. The child had to meet the expectations of the parent, and this expectation continues into adulthood. The adult of today never truly became an adult, because they are still under the unconscious influence of the parent. There is still an active parent–child relationship, with the now-adult child remaining trapped in old energies and patterns from childhood.

When parents do not remain stuck in judgmental or self-judgmental patterns, the phase of puberty results in true adulthood. Unfortunately, most people never reach true adulthood but remain firmly trapped for the rest of their lives in deep, low-frequency judgment patterns, dependent on the opinions of their parents and others.

At what level of consciousness are you living now?

I often speak about layers of consciousness. Exceptionally gifted people are born with a certain level of consciousness. You may call it giftedness; I call it consciousness. If you are someone who is born with a higher level of consciousness but is forced to adapt to the prevailing norm of a lower level of consciousness (lower frequency), it is inevitable that you develop survival mechanisms to cope. If you had an unconscious parent, you may carry the patterns of their pain and still project them onto yourself. What your parents passed on to you is a collective phenomenon known as the victim mentality.

Do you allow collective negative thought patterns to influence your mind? The world of the victim mentality is an inner world of gossiping, complaining, judging, and worrying. Most people complain internally about their lives, their relationships, and continuously worry about everyday matters. You may think it is very human to complain, but it creates a negative frequency in the energy field of both the complainer and the perceived victim. In other words, the more you complain (out loud or internally), the more harm you do to yourself and others.

You can easily test this by setting a clear intention for yourself as soon as you wake up in the morning. You will notice that this single action influences your state of mind throughout the entire day. And not only that — your state of mind also influences others. It creates a ripple effect.

The low frequency of the victim mentality means that you identify with what you think. Your judgments determine your identity and give you a sense of safety — which is, of course, false safety. When you judge and are aware that you are judging, you are no longer trapped in your mind, and the frequency around that judgment shifts. What matters is how seriously you take your judgment. When your identity rests on judgment, you negatively affect people wherever you go — not through your opinions, but through the turbulent frequency you radiate into your environment. You probably recognize such people; you may even have a few in your family or social circle.

The victim can fixate on the smallest and most irrelevant details in life. They are unaware of being a victim. Their state of mind and actions feel completely legitimate and like the only possible option. At low frequency, this is the type of person who blows things far out of proportion and embraces opinions that are factually far removed from reality. Every judgment is a self-judgment. Many people live in this state of mind — including your child’s teachers, colleagues, and family members.

Integrity → Insight → Change

In every phase of early development, you have many opportunities to heal aspects of earlier cycles, or — depending on how you and those around you handle these challenges — to imprint these low-frequency patterns even more deeply into your psyche. The third seven-year cycle is the most critical, as it is the final opportunity for parents to help the child reach true adulthood. If parents are not deeply rooted in integrity, they fail to create the right environment in which the child can successfully navigate this most challenging phase. This determines whether the child enters adulthood as an integrated adult or as a wounded child masquerading as an adult.

The secret of integrity is being able to maintain your own space without reacting to your judgments or self-judgments. The turbulence of this period in a child’s life draws you in as a parent, likely reactivating turbulence from your own adolescence. It is therefore crucial to separate the two. Recognize what is your pain and transform that pain into growth. Close the cycle of your own adolescence so that you can be both mature and open, giving your child a clean slate to develop into who they are, without projections from your own emotional baggage. Learn as a parent to step back and trust that your child is walking their own path and developing autonomously. When parents truly understand how crucial their role is during this phase of their child’s life, they act with less judgment and feel more secure.

Integrity as a vibration means far more than merely holding on to values. It is a quality of the soul and at the same time a deeply physical property. It is essentially a function of the immune system in maintaining the strength of the body. When you recognize your child’s higher frequency from the moment of birth and continuously hold that frequency for them, through thick and thin, you witness a living miracle unfolding before your eyes.

Understand who you are

Understand what shaped you in order to release aspects of conditioning that do not belong to you. Over time, this makes you a master at understanding how conditioning works. When you are free from the trap of the victim mentality, judgment transforms into integrity. This is the alchemy of the victim mentality — the transformation from victim to an integrated human being. It is the same experience, but viewed from a higher level of consciousness.

Be courageous in maintaining your integrity: you challenge everything and everyone who does not meet your high standards. You make conscious choices aligned with who you are. Living with integrity means engaging in a battle with the whole world — without fighting externally, because the battle is internal. It may hurt at first to live with integrity, but you soon notice how good it feels and wonder why you did not do it sooner. Living with integrity means using discernment in an objective and impersonal way.

Tailored support for gifted children

What does all of this have to do with tailored support for gifted children? This is the foundation. Everything described above forms the basis for customization, because from this place you approach both yourself and your child from the core and base your choices on that. You see who you are, you see who your child is, and it cannot be otherwise than that you make choices from integrity.

When parents are conscious — aware of their past, aware of their wounds, and willing to take responsibility for them — they do not ignore the educational and developmental needs of their child. Why? Because they do not ignore their own needs. Parenting is then based on the identity and needs of the child, not on the average.

When you then engage in conversations with the school about education — often with people who are not conscious of themselves, let alone of your child — you stand in your power as an autonomous, integrated human being and act accordingly on behalf of your child.

Are problems really problems?

Being gifted is often seen as a problem, as a burden that is heavy to carry. At school, many gifted children experience difficulties. They appear unmotivated, slow, distracted, or socially awkward. All these standard lists of problems circulate in trainings and among teachers and are treated as reality. However, this perception is the perception of the average. Realize that adults label gifted children as problematic because they cannot deal with their difference. The issues teachers frequently perceive as problems are the teacher’s problems — not the child’s. From the teacher’s level of consciousness, the child does not meet expectations, and thus a problem arises. The child does not match the teacher’s reality. Meanwhile, the child has a very different problem that no one sees: they are increasingly disconnecting from themselves.

Teachers are a special group of people from whom something is expected that they cannot deliver — simply because class sizes are too large, diversity is too great, and workload is too high. As a teacher, despite societal pressure, realize that you are dealing with human lives — lives that are being shaped and that have a profound impact on society as a whole.

A child’s consciousness is not protected at school, but constrained.

That is the real problem. Not listening to the mother and not taking her seriously creates an extremely unsafe feeling for the child. On the other hand, if the mother goes along with the system, the child can also experience a deep sense of unsafety.

What specific challenges do exceptionally gifted individuals face?

• It is not easy to find work that is sufficiently interesting and challenging.
• They must learn to tolerate stupidity or incompetence in others.
• They must try not to become negative toward authority.
• They run the risk of withdrawing.
• They are at increased risk of developing habits of extreme fault-finding (Hollingworth, 1942, p. 299).
• They risk losing their identity (due to forced adaptation to the average).
• They may experience existential depression at a very young age.

What do children need? Stories, mythology, values, traditions, being grounded in the history of their parents and ancestors and feeling proud of it, hero stories, practical skills, and an awareness of the present moment.

Gain clarity first — direction follows

For the well-being and safe development of the child, it is essential that the mother listens to her inner voice and follows it. I regularly receive emails from mothers who strongly feel that something must change because their child is not being seen at school, while at the same time their environment — or an inner voice — holds them back. Sending an email and expressing your concerns is already an opening toward something new.

My advice to parents — and to mothers in particular — is: follow your gut feeling and never ignore it. With tailored guidance, we always find solutions that place your child at the center. Anything else is harmful.

I am not saying this is easy, because sometimes beliefs must be cleared and personal fears confronted. Ultimately, after gaining clarity, forming a vision for your child’s upbringing, and determining direction, you operate from an entirely different place — a place of overview and self-alignment. It feels painless and comfortable, even in difficult situations, because you are being yourself.

Clarity and direction are especially important when raising exceptionally gifted children, precisely because they are so different. As parents, you step onto a developmental path of clarity and direction.

You must be strong in order not to fight

Remaining at your level of consciousness and disengaging from low energies may result in blame from others, because they are projecting. From their level of consciousness, they experience reality differently than you do. That is not a problem — unless you fail to recognize it. You lead. You guide yourself and your child from your level of consciousness, and you base everything on that. You communicate with compassion about what you will do; you do not need to justify yourself. Dependence on your attention and helplessness falls away, and there is calm within you. Those who do not understand you are confronted with themselves. Without intense discussions, people are reflected back to themselves. You remain steady as a parent, loyal to yourself and your child. Realize this: when parents make different choices, teachers may feel bypassed. That has nothing to do with the parent — it has to do with the teacher.

Finally, I want to leave you with this: The physical world is the end product of our choices.

If you need a sparring partner in this process, you are always welcome to contact me.