Gifted children often struggle socially and emotionally. Social interactions are difficult and they don't always know how to behave or read cues from others.
Gifted children often struggle with social emotional skills. Social skills can be learned at any age. Parents need to stay in tune with their specific child's needs and help shape a strong framework for social-emotional health.
Gifted child problems with socializing often stem from their asynchrony and educational setting. Asynchrony, or uneven development, is often considered a core trait of giftedness. These students may be college age intellectually but still 12 in terms of their social skills.
Common Characteristics of Gifted Children:
Surprising emotional depth and sensitivity at a young age. Strong sense of curiosity. Enthusiastic about unique interests and topics. Quirky or mature sense of humor.
However, people who study and counsel gifted students say this is a potentially harmful misperception. These experts caution that while gifted children are not necessarily more at risk for low self-esteem than other children, their self-esteem issues are more likely to be overlooked.
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. These students may be college age intellectually but still 12 in terms of their social skills.
Making friends is often fraught for gifted children. They may find it difficult to find friends in a typical school environment or extracurricular activity. The more gifted they are, the more difficult it may be for them to find social connection with other children their age, and understandably so.
Gifted children often struggle socially and emotionally. Social interactions are difficult and they don't always know how to behave or read cues from others.
Signs of Giftedness in Children Include:
an insatiable curiosity, as demonstrated by endless questions and inquiries. ability to comprehend material several grade levels above their age peers. surprising emotional depth and sensitivity at a young age. enthusiastic about unique interests and topics.
Become more aware of the characteristics, needs and issues of gifted children. They need help in “being different.” The lack of empathy and rejection by others, including adults and peers, is commonplace for many of these children.
This is no surprise, due to the asynchronous development many gifted children experience, which causes them to develop at a different level socially than they do intellectually. This can cause kids to feel “different” from their peers, leading to low social self-esteem.
With their complex vocabulary, love of elaborate games, focus on rules and fairness, and emotional sensitivities, some gifted children find it difficult to make social connections with their same-age peers.
Gifted children may be under-stimulated or bored in typical social or education settings, [which] may result in behavior challenges like school refusal, tantrums, distractibility, or general acting out.
Children whose social identity is devalued or threatened become self-conscious and inhibited. Many gifted children also hide their talents to avoid the threat of exclusion by other children. This practice exacerbates their self-consciousness, their feeling of being outsiders, and their inhibitions.
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.
IQ and other tests for giftedness are optimal around age 5.
Giftedness is a form of neurodiversity; the pathways leading to it are enormously variable, and so are children's resulting learning needs.
Signs of Burnout in Gifted Students:
Student feels a sense of dread each day around going to school, clubs, or other activities. Student experiences more frequent anxiety or panic attacks. Student has change in sleeping and eating habits. Student feels overwhelmed or helpless by small setbacks.
I want to emphasize that giftedness is one form of neurodiversity, and it is not exclusive. Many people have giftedness as one part of their neurodiversity experience, and they may also have other kinds of diagnoses, for example ADHD.
Gifted adolescents select their closest friends from among their mental peers, but they can also participate in team sports, band, extra-curricular clubs, church and community activities, and social events in which they have opportunities to interact with students who have a wide range of abilities.
Giftedness can create problems and conflicts; being a gifted child can also mean difficulty socializing with age peers, thinking styles that don't always mesh well with the demands from the environment, even children who see themselves as little adults, challenging teachers and parents.
So when gifted children become gifted adults, they fear failure and are less likely to take risks. They may also maintain that sense of perfectionism, and as such, are never happy-- because who can be perfect, much less all the time?
The gifted child may be either introverted or extroverted. That said, research suggests that introversion occurs at a significantly higher rate among gifted individuals.