Choosing Meaningful Gifts for Gifted Children This Holiday Season

By Reby Parsley & Kali Fedor, Ed.D. - Parent, Family & Community Network Chair and Chair-Elect

The holiday season is upon us, and many families and educators are thinking about gifts. For gifted children, choosing the right toys, games, and books can feel especially difficult. Gifted learners often seek depth, complexity, and authenticity—not just entertainment. The toys, games, and books that truly resonate with them are the ones that spark curiosity, invite exploration, and can be returned to again and again with new ideas and new questions.

Regardless of age, a meaningful gift for a gifted child is not necessarily the most complicated or expensive one, it’s one that offers opportunities for:

• abstract thinking – encouraging patterns, logic, and symbolic play.
• complexity and open-ended exploration – more than one right answer or way to play.
• depth and connection –touching on real-world ideas, scientific processes, artistic creation, or meaningful storytelling.
• authenticity – tools, materials, and experiences that let children do the real work of scientists, engineers, designers, writers, and artists.

These kinds of gifts support problem-solving, creativity, self-direction, and the joy of tinkering, building, imagining, and discovering.

This season, it is also important to consider whether gifts help gifted children understand themselves and the world around them. The concept of providing mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors, first introduced by Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop, offers a helpful framework for selecting meaningful books, games, and toys for our gifted children.

• Mirrors – opportunities for gifted children to see themselves reflected. Many gifted children experience asynchronous development, perfectionism, emotional intensity, or niche interests that can feel isolating. Gifts that honor their identities, passions, cultures, feelings, and ways of being send the message: “You are seen. You are valued. You belong.”
• Windows – opportunities to understand perspectives different from their own. Gifted children may develop advanced cognitive understanding long before their social understanding fully catches up. Windows help them grow empathy, flexibility, and appreciation for the rich diversity of human experiences.
• Sliding glass doors – opportunities to step into new possibilities. Gifted children are often natural visionaries and big dreamers. Sliding glass doors invite them to enter new roles - scientist, storyteller, engineer, activist, designer - and imagine who they might become.

Gift-giving is a chance to nurture curiosity, confidence, empathy, and growth. When we choose toys and learning materials that offer mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors, we support gifted children not only as thinkers, but as whole human beings.

Below, you’ll find gift ideas for each age group that go beyond entertainment. These toys, books, and games invite children to dig deeper, create, question, build, imagine, connect with others, and see themselves reflected in new and affirming ways.

Birth - Age 4

Ages 5 - 12

Ages 12+