Discovering and Nurturing Your Child's Gifts: 7 Ways to Start This Week

When we read about people with remarkable gifts, we usually read about the gift. We rarely read about the person who noticed it first.

Elvis Presley grew up poor in Tupelo, Mississippi. When he was a boy, he wanted a rifle for his birthday. His mother, Gladys, steered him to a guitar at the local hardware store instead. Jazz trumpeter Chuck Mangione had a father who took him to every live performance the family could manage and made a point of introducing him to the musicians. And long before John and Charles Wesley began the movement that became Methodism, their mother Susanna was teaching her children, one by one, at her own kitchen table.

Not every story is a gentle one. The father of the Jackson family saw his children's musical gift early and drove them hard, sometimes harshly. The talent was real, but so was the cost. It is a reminder that noticing a gift is not the same as pressuring a child to perform. Our job is to discover and nurture, not to drive.

The gifts we overlook

Most hidden talents are lost in ordinary moments. A child lines up toy trucks for an hour, covers the walls with crayon, or keeps pressing the keys of a cousin's piano, and we see only the mess or the noise. We scold, clean up, and move on. Real gifts often find their way out eventually, but sometimes late, and sometimes not at all.

I have seen this in my own family. When I was in high school, my sister, two cousins, and I used to challenge each other to copy portraits from magazines. One of those cousins, Jose, loved music too, but his singing voice was not strong, and his siblings teased him for it. There was no piano at home, so he practiced on a friend's piano and taught himself. His mother sometimes scolded him for disappearing for hours.

Jose kept going anyway. He grew up to train and conduct the Jeremiah Singers, a choir that has performed at the royal palace in Thailand, while teaching at an international school in Bangkok. Along the way he became a watercolor artist with his own one-man shows and an award-winning photographer. All of this came late in his life, and with little encouragement in his childhood. I often wonder how far those gifts might have gone if someone had noticed them when he was seven.

I had my own small gift for drawing, too, and I let it go. God led me to reading, writing, and the work He had for me, and I am grateful. But I still have a few "what could have beens."

What nurturing looked like in our home

When our daughter showed an interest in drawing, we decided not to let it pass. We kept paper within reach, and at her busiest she went through about a ream every two months. At five, she joined an art summer workshop at UP. Her early work was mostly scribbles; her later drawings were full of detail, and her costume designs for a school play were remarkably imaginative.

Then she discovered books. We spent more on her library than we ever planned to, and it was worth every peso. By ten, she was writing compositions better than mine in my first year of college, and her writing was published in Merry Pens, a Miriam College student publication. At 17, as a freshman at Ateneo, she had an essay, "The hipster revolution," published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer's Young Blood column for young writers. We did not create her gifts. We simply made room for them.

Today she is a lawyer at a law firm, arguing cases in litigation. The little girl who filled reams of paper and read everything she could find now makes her living with words, reasoning, and persuasion. Looking back, the signs were there all along.

Seven ways to discover and nurture your child's gifts

1. Watch what they do when no one asks. The activity a child returns to on their own, again and again, is usually the strongest clue.
2. Notice what makes them lose track of time. Absorption is a sign of a gift, even when the activity looks like play.
3. Keep the tools within reach. Paper, crayons, books, a ball, a secondhand keyboard. Gifts grow where the materials are close at hand.
4. Show them the real thing. A live concert, an art exhibit, a basketball game, a visit to a workshop. Let them see what their gift can become.
5. Praise effort, not only results. Children keep at what we notice them working hard on.
6. Guard against pressure. Encouragement says "I see you." Pressure says "perform for me." Children can feel the difference.
7. Remember that some gifts are not academic. A child who struggles with math may be gifted with people, movement, or music. Read: What If Your Child's Gift Isn't Academic? →

A charge for parents

Paul once reminded young Timothy to "stir up the gift of God, which is in thee" (2 Timothy 1:6, KJV). Our children cannot always do that for themselves. Putting food on the table is part of our calling as parents, but so is helping our children discover the gifts God has hidden in them, and then making room for those gifts to grow.

May our children's gifts bloom into blessings for the world. And when we are old, may we look back and know we did our part.

— Pastor Gerry Limoso, Founder and President, The Eastbridge School. First written in 2007; revised in 2026.