On the Wish for Our Children to Be Special, and the Gift We Have Stopped Seeing in Ourselves

An essay on the parent who needs their child to be extraordinary, what the wish underneath that need reveals, and the gift the parent has often stopped seeing in themselves.

There is a particular look on a parent’s face when they describe something extraordinary their child has done. A widening of the eyes. A leaning forward. A quality of hope so undefended that it is almost painful to witness, because you can see how much the parent wants this to be real.

I have seen this look many times in my office. It appears in many forms. It is on the face of the parent talking about their child’s place on the travel soccer team, the win at the gymnastics meet, the pageant placement, the standing ovation at the dance recital, the early academic acceleration, the spelling bee, the way the coach noticed her, the way the teacher said she had never seen anything like it. Each story is different. The look on the parent’s face is often the same.

I want to write about that look. Not to mock it. It is one of the most tender things a human being carries. I want to write about what it is, where it comes from, and what it might be pointing toward — because I think the wish underneath these moments is real and important, and worth examining.

A note about genuinely gifted children

Before going further, I want to be clear about something this essay is not about.

Some children are genuinely gifted. They have real talents that need real engagement. The bright child who is bored in school needs more challenge, and a parent finding her an advanced program is responding to a true developmental need. The young athlete who genuinely loves her sport benefits from coaches who can develop her. Honoring a child’s actual gifts is part of loving them well.

This essay is not about whether the child is gifted. It is about the parent’s relationship to whatever gift may be present, and about a quieter dynamic that often runs underneath. The question is not how much talent the child has. The question is whose needs are being served by how that talent is being shaped, supported, or pushed.

Children are genuinely perceptive

Here is something true. Children are often genuinely perceptive, intuitive, and attuned in ways that adults have largely lost.

A young child frequently senses the emotional weather of a room before anyone has spoken. A child often knows when a parent is upset despite the parent’s effort to conceal it. Children pick up on tension, on grief, on the unspoken. They have not yet built the thick filters that adults develop. They are, in a real sense, more porous to the felt reality around them.

Many children also have a natural relationship with wonder, with the invisible, with the felt sense of presence and connection. A child may speak easily of a grandparent who has died as though the grandparent is nearby. A child may have a vivid inner life, imaginary companions, a sense of the sacred in ordinary things. Spiritual traditions across the world have long recognized that children arrive with a kind of openness that the world gradually teaches them to close.

The most loving thing a parent can do with a child’s natural perceptiveness is not to enroll it in something that promises to make it more visible. It is to honor it. To take the child’s intuitions seriously. To not shame the child out of their sensitivity. To let the child remain porous and attuned for as long as the world allows. That is the real cultivation of a child’s gift. It costs nothing, and it asks everything, because it asks the parent to be genuinely present.

The wish underneath

Now to the harder and more tender part. Why does the promise of an extraordinary child activate such powerful hope in some parents?

I have come to believe, after many years of clinical work, that the parent most drawn to proof of their child’s specialness is very often a parent who has lost contact with their own. The wish for the extraordinary child is frequently the displaced wish for the extraordinariness the parent cannot feel in themselves.

Consider a parent who is, by any external measure, genuinely gifted. Intelligent. Capable. Someone who accomplished real things in a demanding field before stepping back, perhaps to raise children, perhaps for other reasons. And consider that this same parent, when you ask them about their own intelligence, their own creative gift, their own excellence, cannot feel it. The capability is there. The felt sense of it is not. They know, abstractly, that they did impressive things. They cannot locate, in their body, the felt experience of being a person who is extraordinary.

For a parent in that position, a child whose specialness can be witnessed and celebrated carries enormous unconscious weight. If the child is special, then something extraordinary is real and present in the family, even if the parent cannot find it in themselves. The child becomes the carrier of the gift the parent has lost contact with. The child’s demonstrated specialness becomes proof that the family contains something remarkable.

This is not a conscious calculation. No parent thinks, I will use my child to carry the excellence I cannot feel in myself. It happens below awareness. It happens through that undefended look of hope, through the willingness to spend time and money that is sometimes hard to spare, through the longing for the achievement to be real. The love is completely real. And underneath the love, often, is a parent’s own unclaimed gift, looking for somewhere to live.

The same pattern, in every arena

This dynamic appears wherever childhood has been turned into performance, and it is worth naming directly, because many parents will recognize themselves more easily here than in a narrower frame.

Consider the parent on the sideline of a children’s soccer game whose body cannot stay still — who shouts instruction, who critiques the coach, who replays the missed goal in the car afterward, who cannot simply let the eight-year-old run around in the grass and enjoy the game. Consider the basketball parent who has the child in three leagues and a private trainer before the age of ten. The volleyball parent tracking club rankings and college recruiting for a twelve-year-old. The parent who treats the child’s swim times, gymnastics scores, or tennis ranking as though something essential is at stake in each one.

Consider the pageant parent who dresses and rehearses and coaches a small child for a stage, and whose own mood rises and falls with the judges’ decisions. Consider the dance parent, the competitive-cheer parent, the parent who has turned a child’s music lessons into a daily site of pressure. Consider any arena of childhood — and there are now a great many — where the activity that should be play has become performance, and where the parent cannot tolerate the child simply exploring, simply having fun, simply discovering what they like and what they do not.

The dynamic underneath all of it is the same. The parent who cannot let the child just play is very often a parent who needs the child’s performance to carry something. The child’s goals, scores, trophies, placements, and rankings become the proof of the family’s worth. The child’s excellence becomes the carrier of the excellence the parent cannot feel as their own. And the love is real the entire time. The sideline parent loves their child. The pageant parent loves their child. That is precisely what makes the pattern so hard to see from the inside.

There is a simple and revealing question a parent can ask themselves. When my child performs poorly — loses the game, places low, has an off day — what happens in my body? If the honest answer is that something close to panic, shame, or anger arrives, something disproportionate to a child’s ordinary bad day, then the child’s performance is carrying more than it should. It is carrying something of yours. The intensity of your reaction is the information. A child’s lost soccer game does not, by itself, produce that much feeling in a regulated parent. The extra feeling is coming from somewhere else.

Children need enormous room to be ordinary. They need to be mediocre at things, to try a sport and discover they do not love it, to play badly without the family system trembling, to explore widely and abandon things freely. This is not a failure of childhood. It is childhood. The exploration, including the exploration that leads nowhere, is how a child discovers who they actually are. The child who is allowed only to excel, only to compete, only to perform, is robbed of the unhurried, low-stakes wandering through which a real self is built.

If you recognize yourself on the sideline — and many loving parents will — the redirection is the same. The intensity you feel watching your child compete is worth turning toward with curiosity rather than shame. It is very often pointing back to your own unlived or unfelt gift, to the arenas where you were not allowed to simply play, to the parts of your own childhood that were turned into performance before you were ready. The work is yours, not your child’s. And as you do it, your child gets handed back something precious: a game that is allowed to be a game.

Where the gift actually lives

If you recognize yourself in this — if you have felt the pull of wanting your child to be proven extraordinary, and if you also carry a quiet sense that you yourself have a gift you cannot quite feel or claim — I want to offer a gentle redirection.

The extraordinariness you are looking for is not missing. It is not located in your child’s performance, waiting for the right achievement to make it visible. It is in you. It has been in you the whole time. What is missing is not the gift. What is missing is your felt contact with it, your permission to claim it, your willingness to take up space as someone who is genuinely excellent in your own right.

The loss of contact usually has a history. Many genuinely gifted people were raised in conditions that did not allow them to feel their gift. A parent who was threatened by the child’s brightness. A family that valued modesty so highly that any claiming of one’s own excellence felt dangerous. A culture that taught, especially to women and especially to those who became caregivers, that their gifts should be set aside in service of others. A season of life in which a demanding identity was put down for good reasons, and the gift seemed to go quiet along with it.

The gift did not go quiet. It went underground. It is still there. And the work of recovering felt contact with it is real work, often deserving of clinical support, but it is genuinely possible. It involves grieving what was not claimed. It involves dismantling the old prohibition against taking up space. It involves the slow, sometimes frightening practice of letting yourself feel, in your body, that you are a person of genuine capacity and worth.

What this means for your child

And here is the part that matters most for the child.

The child does not need to be proven extraordinary in order to be loved. The child does not need to carry the family’s specialness. The child does not need a list of placements and trophies. What the child needs is a parent who is in contact with their own gift — because the parent who can feel their own excellence does not need the child to perform it.

When you reclaim contact with your own extraordinariness, something is freed in your child. They no longer have to be the carrier. They can simply be a child — perceptive, intuitive, gifted in their own ordinary and genuine ways, free to develop those gifts on their own timeline rather than in service of a parent’s unmet need. The pressure lifts. The child gets to be a child.

The most powerful thing you can do for your perceptive, sensitive, gifted child is not to enroll them in another program, sign them up for another team, or schedule another lesson. It is to do your own work. To recover your own gift. To let yourself be extraordinary in your own right, so that your child does not have to be extraordinary for you.

A closing thought

There is genuine magic in the world. Children really are perceptive. Intuition is real. The felt sense of connection — to those we love, to those who have passed, to something larger than ourselves — is a true part of human experience, and the spiritual traditions that have honored it for thousands of years were not wrong to do so.

Honoring the child’s gifts is real work, and it is important. So is allowing the child the unhurried room to discover those gifts on their own. Both matter. They are not in tension. They are the same act of love.

If you have been looking for the extraordinary in your child, look also at yourself. The gift you have been hoping to find is very likely already yours. It always was. And reclaiming it is the truest gift you could give your child — because a parent who knows their own light does not need to go searching for it in anyone else.

For the clinical companion to this essay — a deeper look at the dynamics of the parentified and narcissistically-recruited child, and the work of recovering parental contact with one’s own gifts — see the related piece at thecourageousself.com.

April Wright, MA, LMFT is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California and Florida. She blogs about attachment, healing, and the courageous arts of becoming oneself at courageous-arts.com and sees clients at thecourageousself.com.