Common Characteristics of Gifted Children: Enthusiastic about unique interests and topics. Quirky or mature sense of humor. Creative problem solving and imaginative expression.
Gifted individuals have learning differences, including divergent thinking, quirky humor, and a penchant for complexity, that set them apart. Openness to experience is a key personality trait found in association with giftedness.
They are extremely curious about objects, ideas, situations, or events. They often display intellectual playfulness and like to fantasize and imagine. They can be less intellectually inhibited than their peers are in expressing opinions and ideas, and they often disagree spiritedly with others' statements.
Dambrowski identified five overexcitabilities that he believes are strongly connected to giftedness: intellectual, psychomotor, imaginative, sensual, and emotional.
Common Characteristics of Gifted Children:
Ability to comprehend material several grade levels above their age peers. Surprising emotional depth and sensitivity at a young age. Strong sense of curiosity. Enthusiastic about unique interests and topics.
Social development and skills: gifted and talented children
Gifted children can think faster and/or more deeply than other children their age. So they're often good at imagining what it's like to be in somebody else's situation. Sometimes these qualities mean your gifted and talented child gets along well with others.
Gifted persons are more likely to make sense out of their intellectual experiences than the average person. Another important difference is in the desire to know complex ideas. Average persons have less desire to know ideas for their own sake.
Gifted children are born with above-average natural abilities. Talented children have developed their natural abilities to a high level. Children can be gifted and/or talented in many areas, including sport, art, music, intellectual ability and more.
Social Skills
The problems gifted children sometimes face with socializing often stem from their asynchrony and educational setting. Asynchronous development, or uneven development, is often considered a core trait of giftedness.
Signs of Giftedness in Children Include:
an ability to learn and process complex information rapidly. a need to explore subjects in surprising depth. an insatiable curiosity, as demonstrated by endless questions and inquiries. ability to comprehend material several grade levels above their age peers.
The most common personality types among gifted adolescents were “intuitive” and “perceiving.” They were higher on the Introversion, Intuition, Thinking, and Perceiving dimensions of the personality scales of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) when compared to general high school students.
One of the most common characteristics of gifted students is their ability to learn things early and rapidly. Many gifted students have excellent memorization skills, which aids in their ability to connect previous knowledge with new information, thus accelerating their acquisition of new concepts.
Both giftedness and autism fall on a spectrum, so while there may be individuals who clearly fit into one box or another, some behaviors might be more ambiguous and require additional information, context, or professional opinions.
When do signs of giftedness appear? Signs of giftedness can appear as early as infancy and continue during the toddler and preschool years. Testing for giftedness and high IQ, however, usually takes place around age 5.
Genetics do play a large part in being gifted, definitely. It has been thought that the brain of a gifted person can actually process information faster. However, one's surroundings are equally important. Nature and nurture are at work as some traits are genetic and others are learned.
Research reflects that giftedness does “run in families”: for a gifted child, their genetically-related relatives — siblings and/or parents — are likely to also be gifted, though there are plenty of exceptions.
Even though the gifted are no more susceptible to mental illness than anyone else, some gifted children and teens struggle with overthinking, worry, or cautious alertness. Their nervous system seems wired for heightened reactivity. For some, obsessive thinking transitions into anxiety.
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.
Giftedness has an emotional as well as intellectual component. Intellectual complexity goes hand in hand with emotional depth. 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.
Negative Characteristics of a Gifted Child
Neglects some of their responsibilities: They may become overly focused on their current desires and ignore their seemingly simple responsibilities. Bullyrags or plays cruel jokes: They can quickly say anything that seems witty to them and make offensive jokes about people.
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.