Many gifted children are highly sensitive individuals. 1 They may take things personally and become upset by words and deeds that other children may easily ignore or get over quickly. How can parents help their emotionally sensitive children cope with these intense emotions? Here are some suggestions that might help.
Because of their intellectual complexity, a gifted child can imagine a vast range of life scenarios that are unthinkable to the average child. They can and do feel with great intensity the emotions that are attached to each scenario and this can lead to them being overwhelmed by anxiety and fear.
High level of intensity
Gifted children respond to life with greater emotion than the average person. They tend to be very passionate about an area of interest to them and have the ability to sustain that passion for long periods of time. Sometimes their behavior can even seem obsessive compulsive.
These aspects may include heightened awareness, anxiety, perfectionism, stress, issues with peer relationships, and concerns with identity and fit. Parents, adults, and caregivers in their lives need to stay in tune with their specific child's needs, and help shape a strong framework for social-emotional health.
Gifted trauma stems from childhood issues with feeling like you don't belong anywhere because of your gift. Bullying, starving for mental stimulation, school mismatch, and other issues specific to the life experience of the gifted child may also contribute both to the main mental health issue and gift-specific trauma.
While gifted children may not be any more susceptible to mental health issues as other adolescents, there are certain aspects of giftedness that may influence or amplify a gifted child's experience of mental health issues.
They may also have behavior problems because of frustration or boredom. Very bright children can be unusually strong willed, negotiate like lawyers, or use sarcasm to make a point. Sometimes, gifted children are disruptive in classrooms because they don't want to do what they consider busywork.
Characterizations of gifted people often include representations of oversensitivity and outsized feelings. While not all gifted people experience extreme emotional states, a grain of truth remains in the oversized emotional processing in the gifted brain.
Advanced learning and understanding can lead to anxious thoughts. Gifted kids also may struggle socially and emotionally. 1 As a parent, it is important to understand the unique challenges gifted kids can experience.
Gifted adolescents have the cognitive capacity to understand the concepts of life, death and other issues, but that does not guarantee competent emotional and social awareness of the matters. They often feel different from their peers as their emotional maturity lags behind their cognitive abilities.
Gifted children, characterized often by heightened emotional sensitivity, are often highly empathetic, as well. In fact, their empathy may seem overly present in their experience of the world, as any parent whose child has burst into tears about a dead bug on the sidewalk can tell you.
Emotional Overexcitability as A Sign of Giftedness
These intense emotions, referred to as emotional overexcitability, are actually a sign of giftedness. What is this? Some gifted children actually experience emotions more intensely than others, so they have bigger emotional responses than expected.
They realize that they have a legitimate right to their own feelings as well as to their gifts. On that basis they develop empathy with the feelings of oth- ers. Their energies are free to develop their abilities for they recognize their positive as well as negative feelings as both normal and human.
Empathy for others is a common hallmark of many gifted children. They may have an unusual sensitivity for the emotional distress of their friends and an unusual ability to help them resolve their emotional conflicts.
Gifted children are challenging to parent in many ways. The more gifted the child, the more often it seems the more the parent is frustrated with the discrepancy of someone able to do school several levels above age level but unable to remember to take their finished work to school.
Gifted children may be more likely to experience existential depression, as their minds tend to be more attuned to contemplating the big life and death issues facing the world.
Nearly everyone struggles with making friends, but there are a few reasons gifted individuals may appear to struggle with friendships more than others. Gifted kids (and adults) often have different challenges than their typical learner peers.
Social interactions may lead to anxiety for many gifted children – especially those who tend to be shy. A fear of being evaluated, perfectionism, hypersensitivity, a tendency toward self-criticism, and even simply being singled out as gifted can all heighten stress and anxiety in young people.
nobody else seems to feel like this.” Emotionally intense gifted people often experience intense inner conflict, self-criticism, anxiety and feelings of inferiority. The medical community tends to see these conflicts as symptoms and labels gifted people neurotic.
Just as gifted children's thinking is more complex and has more depth than other children's, so too are their emotions more complex and more intense.” Gifted youth are often more aware of and affected by their surroundings.
Takeaway: Emotionally intelligent people cry. And they cry a lot more than other people. They cry because they feel bad, they cry because life is hard, they cry without knowing the reason.
Social shyness and awkwardness in new situations are very common with gifted children. Parents need to handle their child's difficulty in new situations by setting up interactions that will not be threatening and giving help when help is needed.
The most common mis-diagnoses are: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Oppositional Defiant Disorder (OD), Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), and Mood Disorders such as Cyclothymic Disorder, Dysthymic Disorder, Depression, and Bi-Polar Disorder.
Gifted children are more prone to depression, self-harm, overexcitability, and learning deficits. A gifted student might be so paralyzed by her own perfectionism, say, that she refuses to hand in any assignments.
About 70% of autistic people have an intellectual disability, which means they have an IQ lower than 70. The remaining 30% have intelligence that ranges from average to gifted. Autism and intelligence are two separate characteristics. A person can be autistic with any level of intelligence.