My hurried, crooked, parking alignment, three feet from the curb confirms the rush of my excitement when I arrive to a Thanksgiving party last November hosted by old school friends and their parents. They were outside waiting for me to arrive with wide waves of welcome and a beautiful gift related to a forty-year-old inside joke born from an adolescent incident occurring one summer night when we were much younger.  

Although I will not share historical specifics of our youthful merriment, I can tell you we use the phrase: O Tannenbaum! to memorialize the joke as both salutation and touchstone in many of our current day communications, and at all of our special event interactions. I am fortunate in this world to rely on a steady anchor of an inside joke fitted many summers ago, grounded in friendship, high spirits, and remembrance.  

Last summer, after accepting an invitation from IEA to visit camp Yunasa West, I drove on gorgeous Colorado-in-July twisty creekside roads to tour campgrounds, hang out by the lake with Fellows, break bread with staff, and facilitate an art workshop with campers. 

Several of the remarkable experiences I had at camp include: circles of children and camp counselors and Fellows together in conversation, activity, or easeful silence; children seeking out Fellows to share progress on a project or a thought process; camp counselors welcoming me with an inheritance of being former campers themselves; dialogue with a young camp counselor who made excellent suggestions to help me best serve children in my art workshop; witnessing the simultaneous kindness, precision, and flexibility of Nicole and her IEA team in developing and supporting both the structure and flow of the camp day; being let in on a camp inside joke cryptically called Peach Juice!, which is where I wish to focus for the rest of my writing today. 

Although I do not have permission to share details of Peach Juice! with you, I can tell you it is a mighty, mighty inside camp joke, hatched during an ordinary moment, post Pandemic, from the same muse I suspect served me and my friends well in our O Tannenbaum! youth. Celebrity enough of an inside joke to have its own polished Peach Juice! board game, complete with a Michael Piechowski game character, unveiled this past summer by a bright and industrious camper. I hope the legacy of Peach Juice! has the fortitude and legs to thread through the Yunasa West community for the next forty years and beyond.  

Human happiness within the circumstances of time, space, memory, and shared experience is perhaps one of the best ways to find some meaning in this life. O Tannenbaum! has happened. Peach Juice! has happened. I was there. You were there. I hope everyone has something like Peach Juice! in their lives to hold and carry as a personal and community talisman and (also) amulet in bright times and in dark (as I write, IEA’s Pasadena and nearby areas are on fire). I also wish I could somehow see out ahead to witness these camp friends in adulthood, reuniting for a few birthdays and holidays, arriving and parking in crooked haste in order not to miss a minute together nor the toast to the well-being and bestowal of Peach Juice! 

Thank you, IEA and community of camp Yunasa West 2024, for the wonderful visit this past summer. Keep up your good and virtuous work. Stay safe and take good care. Until we meet again…Peach Juice! 

Catherine Zakoian is a licensed and national board certified counselor based in Boulder, CO. For close to 25 years she has specialized in counseling gifted, profoundly gifted, and twice exceptional (2e) children, adolescents, teens, adults, families, and organizations.

Learn more about her and her practice at: https://catherinezakoian.com/

IEA’s annual Yunasa camp concluded powerfully at Camp Copneconic in Fenton, Michigan! Throughout the week, we watched all 79 campers – including 23 leadership campers – get to know themselves and each other in gentle yet profound ways. As ever, our leadership campers demonstrated incredible talents to connect with younger campers, support one another and be positive role models to all. All campers were empathetic, compassionate, sensitive and full of personality. It was an honor for the entire staff to watch the growth that transpired in each child.

Yunasa’s theme this year is passion. In a Fellow’s Workshop named Found Poetry, campers created a poem using reading materials focused on passion. It was a collaborative effort that culminated in a beautiful and powerful passage:

“This close relationship, it felt very natural,

An absolute thunderbolt merged with part of your being

My life had changed

Practice; how to play anew

Grand devotion, imported in my life

Such a devastating event, a slow burn, a sensitivity that resonates

Obsessively thought about

Devoted to this love story.

Fire, that’s me!”

In addition to Fellows Workshops, campers also spent time each day practicing psychosynthesis – a guided imagery meditation followed by in-depth discussion. Psychosynthesis helps one to focus, concentrate, be in tune with their senses, and be more aware of the present moment.

Yunasa also integrates specialized learning with traditional camp activities, so campers get a full experience of a weeklong sleep-away camp. Throughout the week, campers balance their day by participating in waterfront activities such as kayaking, sailing, tubing, fishing and riding in pontoons. Some land-based activities are also hugely popular such as archery, horseback riding, zip-lining and other rope courses.

Yunasa was a fun-filled week packed with exploration, friendships, growth and passion. Thank you to all campers, counselors, Fellows and staff for making it yet another amazing and memorable week. Have a great year ahead! We look forward to more summer fun in 2020!

Click here to view the entire Yunasa Michigan photo album. Sign up for e-newsletter to be the first to know when Yunasa 2020 dates and application information.

These are common behaviors of gifted children, and it is not unusual that parents of gifted children have concerns about their child’s friendships. Gifted individuals possess a unique combination of characteristics that can influence how and why they establish friendships.

The gifted child may only have one or two friends, but they will likely be very deep friendships.

Gifted kids may have an extremely close connection to one or two people rather than a large group of friends. This is okay. It does become a problem, however, when there is a falling out with one of these very close friends, which can cause great distress in a gifted child. It is important to be sensitive to this, to help your child navigate through this difficult experience, and to help him or her understand that there are other friends out there.

Additionally, the gifted child’s friendships are often extremely meaningful and deep. A study by Miraca U. M. Gross found that hierarchical stages of friendship and what a child looks for and requires in a friend develops based on mental age, rather than chronological age, especially in the early years. Gifted children look for others with whom they can relate on a deeper level, and they feel more intensely than their non-gifted peers.

The gifted child will often make friends with others much older than he or she.

Gifted children look for intellectual peers. If there are no kids their age who are on a similar intellectual level, they often tend towards making friendships with older kids, who have more knowledge and life experience than that of their age peers.

As Jim Delisle says in Parenting Gifted Kids: Tips for Raising Happy and Successful Children, “Gifted children often prefer the company of adults or older children. The reason is obvious: They don’t need to explain who they are or how they know what they know. Accepted as bright, competent individuals, the stigma of being smart is not a stigma at all” (22).

Additionally, the aforementioned study by Gross indicates that your gifted child’s expectations of friendship may differ from his or her chronological peers, making it difficult to connect on that deeper level gifted children crave. In addition to seeking out older children as friends because they are mental age peers, the study suggests that gifted children “may also be looking for children whose conceptions and expectations of friendship are similar to their own.”

Activities of interest to your gifted child that combine children of different ages can be an excellent place for him or her to develop friendships.

The gifted child may also make friends with others much younger than he or she.

To the gifted child that does not find many chronological peers at his or her intellectual level, younger children are often satisfying companions. Younger children are not supposed to be on the same intellectual level as them, so gifted children understand why younger children are different intellectually. This friendship will often take shape as that of a mentor/mentee relationship, with the gifted child acting as a role model for the younger child.

Gifted children need intellectual peers.

Stuck in a classroom based on their chronological age rather than intellectual or academic level, gifted children often struggle to form connections with their classmates. Additionally, they think differently and have different interests than their classmates; the lack of commonality can create an even wider divide. If your child cannot find intellectual peers at school, enroll him or her in activities that lend themselves to interaction across a wider age group or activities with other intellectually advanced kids.

Gifted children need to spend time with other gifted children.

It is important for your child to understand that he or she is different from most kids of the same age, but it is equally important to know that there are other kids out there like him or her. Knowing they are not alone really helps gifted kids. Try to find a program or group for gifted kids that your child can attend, like IEA’s programs, even if it is only in the summer. If there are no appropriate local or in-person opportunities available, the internet and technology make it much easier for our gifted kids to connect with each other despite geographic separation.

Friendship is an important need for both children and adults. It is the primary catalyst for children learning to develop and grow their social self. To a gifted child, however, friendship is different, and it is important to recognize these differences. Understanding your gifted child’s social needs can help avoid misinterpreting their behavior (“Why does my child only have one or two friends?”) and can help your child build new friendships and nurture existing ones.

Want more information about gifted children? Sign up for our e-newsletter to get articles and resources pertaining to gifted youth in your inbox.

This post is part of the Hoagies’ Gifted Education Page August Blog Hop on Gifted Friendships. Check out all of the other great blogs participating in Hoagies’ August Blog Hop here.