Lykkelige Barn (Happy Children)
The Parents’ Network for Highly Gifted Children in Norway
PRESS RELEASE
I feel so different (boy, 7 years old)
Your son has developed into a troublemaker" (teacher referring to a gifted child who’s bored at
school)
I’ve got tears in my eyes. For the very first time our son was playing happily in a group of
children. (Mother after a camp for highly gifted children)

Many years after most European countries have had their organizations, parents with highly gifted children in Norway have got theirs. The network was founded on Merket Camp on August 12th 2007.
Lykkelige Barn (Translated: Happy Children) is a support association for parents with children who think faster than average, in addition to making it possible for these children to meet.

The target of the association is not to exclude, but to include those who need it. No one will be stopped by an absolutely distinct limit, if you sense that the child/family fits and needs the society represented by the network. There are several kinds of giftedness, and several different intelligences has been defined. This network has been founded by parents who have felt the problems related to
classic intelligence. The target audience is families with children whose intelligence is so high that the children experiences problems in finding their peers in their daily environment. These children will normally have an IQ ranging in the top 2-5% of the population.

Why hasn’t such an association emerged earlier?
In Norway there’s a saying that you can’t be better than the rest. In addition it has been politically incorrect to give highly gifted children the opportunity to move forward at their own pace. Many parents are plainly afraid to admit to their surroundings that their children are highly gifted.

What is our starting point?
The members who started the network have a series of experiences in meeting society. In Norway it is quite OK to be a good runner, skilled piano player or outstanding soccer player. For kids with these talents there are talent competitions, camps, special schools with dedicated teachers and clubs with coaches. This is a good thing. It gives these children the opportunity of self development based on their own abilities  and the children have an environment of peers.
A totally different setting meets the children who are fast thinkers and their parents. The school is generally the only arena for the development of these skills  at the same time that it has its limitations as it is supposed to take care of the multitude of children’s abilities. We confirm that in Norway today there are no other arenas for children who have special gifts in these areas. We feel that our children often are misunderstood, and that they lack social points of contact where they can meet their equals. We mean that there is too little accept in Norway for this kind of talent, and we see that the Norwegian school isn’t able to care for highly gifted children  something that makes them misfit, and in some cases losers at school.

One example of meeting the official Norway:
After the school reform "Kunnskapsløftet" (The promise of knowledge) one father thought there should be a possibility of getting extra support for his child’s school, as the law states that every child has the right to an individual plan of education. In a teacher-parents meeting he had just found
out that his son started to misbehave more and more at school because the teacher had no more challenges for the kid. The boy then attended second grade, and he had completed the fourth grade curriculum in most subjects. When his father contacted the local psychiatry team he got the following answer: Kunnskapsløftet was designed so that those below average should be helped up, not for those kids already in front should increase their gap. We don’t fund a knowledge elite. In other words, there weren’t any more money for extra teaching resources, even though the boy
reportedly had developed behavioral problems related to his giftedness.

Luckily this isn’t the case everywhere. Many children are met with openness and a genuine wish from the teachers and others to help the child. Unfortunately there is not much literature and research in Norwegian about how highly gifted children best can be integrated in the Norwegian
school system. The subject is also worryingly absent in the Norwegian teachers’ education.

What do we seek?
Many of the parents have heard that they are making broiler-kids since they are using many hours a week to give their children extra challenges in addition to what the school provides. We would like to underline that the target of our association is to exchange information  not to get the kids to be as smart as possible, but to be sure that they are as happy as they can be (as the name reflects). We wish that our children should have good lives, and highly gifted children who don’t get sufficient challenges may be both restless and in discomfort.
But being highly gifted should make things a lot easier? Then you can just flow through school with top grades. This is a statement many of us have heard. Unfortunately this is far from the truth. Research shows that the children regarded as good students rarely are those who can be regarded the highest gifted. The highest gifted unfortunately turn out to be losers at school, something we as an organization regard as an important field we’d like to focus on. Highly gifted
children are by no means a uniform group of children. It is a big challenge to provide satisfactory offers for the kids to prevent them fall behind on the one arena they in fact have the best starting point. Another target is to provide a social playground where they can meet with their peers. Experiences from other countries, Denmark among others, show that children who in other situations behave very reserved, bloom and find friends in an environment of their equals.
For further information please contact our press contact Ieva Fredriksen at
pr@lykkeligebarn.no or visit our web site http://lykkeligebarn.no