Gifted Parents: The Impact of Giftedness on Parenting Cultures in the United States, 1920-1960 Probolus, Kimberly Giftedness Intelligence Merit Inequality Parenting I would like to thank the anonymous reviewer for their excellent feedback on the manuscript, as well as the editors for their thoughtful engagement with this piece. Questions and suggestions at the 2019 ESHHS conference strengthened an earlier version of this paper and contributed greatly to the final product. Conversations with colleagues —especially Jamie Cohen-Cole, Alana Staiti, Peggy Kidwell, Dan Horowitz, Chloe Ahmann, Jenna Gibson, and Jen Nash— helped me at various stages of the paper. Finally, thanks to the librarians at the George Washington University and the archivists at Harvard University Archives. orcid.org/0000-0002-1509-616X. Division of Medicine and Science, National Museum of American History, Washington, DC. kprobolus@email.gwu.edu This paper explores how discourses of giftedness informed attitudes towards parenting in the United States from 1920 to 1960. Using psychologists’ studies of giftedness, media coverage of the topic, and guidebooks for parents of gifted children, I argue that giftedness emerged in the 1910s, and by the 1920s addressed a newly limited definition of intelligence and problems in urban public education, coinciding with the popularity of the culture and personality school. Scholarly debates about giftedness traveled from the academy to the wider public through the media and guidebooks for parents. Media coverage brought awareness of the problem of the neglected gifted student, and guidebooks offered parents practical suggestions about how to raise gifted children. I show that the discourse contributed to racial segregation in American schools and classrooms by using merit to determine access to educational opportunity. Experts’ advice about giftedness also altered expectations about childrearing and encouraged parents to become more involved in their child’s educational development. This argument puts the history of psychology in conversation with histories of parenting, and it evidences how the discourse on giftedness impacted institutional inequality both through merit-based gifted and talented programs and by impacting ideologies of parenting. Thus, I provide a more comprehensive account of how and why giftedness profoundly shaped both the school and the home. This article considers the cultural work the discourse accomplished; it gave the public the impression that disparities in educational achievement between individuals and groups could be explained by the parenting a child received, putting significant pressure on all parents to make educational achievement a top priority for their child. 2022-05-18T09:48:59Z 2022-05-18T09:48:59Z 2020-12-31 info:eu-repo/semantics/article Probolus, K. «Gifted Parents». Dynamis: Acta Hispanica Ad Medicinae Scientiarumque Historiam Illustrandam, Vol. 40, Núm. 2, octubre de 2021, p. 325-47 [http://dx.doi.org/10.30827/dynamis.v40i2.17969] http://hdl.handle.net/10481/74872 10.30827/dynamis.v40i2.17969 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/es/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 3.0 España Universidad de Granada