While gifted children are capable of reading, speaking, and even reasoning above grade level, those abilities can be challenging in a number of ways. 2 For instance, gifted children can be argumentative. Adults might even remark that these children are little lawyers.
Gifted children often set very high standards for themselves and get frustrated when they can't meet them. This can sometimes result in tantrums and other difficult behaviour. It's great for your child to work towards high standards. But your child needs to understand that they can't have high standards for everything.
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.
Yes, it can be. Some gifted children are mistakenly suspected of having ADHD, autism, or another condition with behavioral elements. Along with other gifted characteristics, many gifted children have sensory sensitivities.
In addition to pressures from academic and family expectations, students who are gifted may struggle in school because of social issues. Some of the issues these students can face in school include: Embarrassment for being different or standing out. Bullying from peers due to their intelligence or differences.
Gifted kids are often stereotyped as being exceptionally focused and organized, but this isn't always the case. Many gifted kids struggle with inattention and disorganization, in part because they're abstract thinkers and in part because they have many diverse interests competing for their attention.
For example, studies have found that higher IQ is associated with more and earlier drug use. Studies have also found that higher IQ is associated with more mental illness, including depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder.
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.
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.
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.
Every stage of parenting has its challenges, but one poll reveals what age most parents feel they struggled with the most.
It's no wonder then that research finds that the hardest years of parenting are the tween, (or middle school if you're in the USA) years. They may be less physically exhausting than the early years, but emotionally they are so much more exhausting.
Gifted students may be at a higher risk for anxiety than their non-gifted peers in general (7). It is reported that they are among the risk group and likely to be vulnerable to anxiety (8). Their cognitive maturity and increased awareness were said to promote existential questions and associated anticipatory anxiety.
Faces that are perceived as highly intelligent are rather prolonged with a broader distance between the eyes, a larger nose, a slight upturn to the corners of the mouth, and a sharper, pointing, less rounded chin.
Busy Brains
Gifted kids seem to be able to function quite well with less sleep than their age mates, but they can sometimes have a difficult time getting to sleep. Many kids describe it as being unable to shut off their brains.
Researchers find that brain development peaks years later for children with the highest IQs. Smart children have a different rhythm in their heads — a seesaw pattern of growth that lags years behind other young people — say government scientists who mapped the brains of hundreds of children.
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.
While other forms of burnout might be tied to the workplace, or the emotional labor involved in care-taker roles, gifted child burnout is often tied to an educational system that the child finds repetitive, unrewarding, without autonomy, unfair, or not aligned with their values.
Kids designated as gifted have long been thought to be more at risk of emotional issues, and to carry some of them into adult life, because of various factors: the National Association for Gifted Children, for instance, identifies "heightened awareness, anxiety, perfectionism, stress, issues with peer relationships, ...
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.
Giftedness falls into one or more of the following areas: intellectual, academic, creative, artistic and leadership.
Common Characteristics of Gifted Children:
Strong sense of curiosity. Enthusiastic about unique interests and topics. Quirky or mature sense of humor. Creative problem solving and imaginative expression.
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.
Most parents of gifted children won't be surprised that research supports what they can see for themselves: gifted children are highly sensitive to their environment and react with heightened emotional and behavioral responses, more so than do children of average intelligence.