No. Highly gifted children grow up to become highly gifted adults. However, on the way to adulthood, giftedness may appear to "hide out".
Gifted kids turn into gifted adults, it's something you live with for your entire life. When adults forget about their own atypical wiring, they open themselves up to social issues, and miss opportunities to continue growing.
Without understanding and support, gifted kids face an increased risk of anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem, along with social and academic problems. Currently, experts estimate that up to 1 in 50 gifted kids drop out of school, while many more fail to live up to their full academic potential.
Though the term suggests an advantage, being gifted is not always a gift. Being exceptionally bright, for some, can feel like a burden. Not only are gifted kids largely misunderstood, but many are also stuck in education systems that don't quite know how to teach them.
The research shows that while children are born with the potential to be gifted, the environment and nurture plays an important role in developing those innate abilities. In fact, researchers estimate conservatively that environmental influences can add 20-40 points on measured intelligence.
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.
It may depend where you live. While we like to think everyone is special, some people have extraordinary abilities — intellectual, artistic, social, or athletic. Many experts believe only 3 to 5 percent of the population is gifted, though some estimates reach 20 percent.
If you were a gifted child, chances are you've had some serious mental health struggles now that you're a gifted adult. Many of them may have stemmed from gift-specific traumas in your childhood, or even some that you're experiencing in your adult life.
ADHD AND GIFTEDNESS are sometimes described as having the same or similar characteristics. However, one diagnosis is considered a disability and one, a gift. Neither assumption is ideal in supporting the child identified with either ADHD, giftedness, or both, often referred to as twice exceptional or 2e.
Whilst not every gifted child is autistic, I often see a fraction of the signs and symptoms of autism in many profoundly gifted children.
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.
Since gifted people learn quickly in at least one area, those other areas that take a little longer can feel like failure, and be painfully wounding to their self esteem. Many gifted people have a fierce inner critic that may prevent them from trying new things for this reason.
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.
They can have trouble adapting socially.
Being gifted means having different psychosocial needs. Social development and social skills can occur differently in gifted students. Their social interaction with same-age peers may not align well during childhood and adolescence.
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.
Some studies showed that gifted children had lower anxiety scores than their non-gifted peers (15,16). For example, Guignard et al., (9) reported that gifted children display higher anxiety only when they did not have more perfectionism than their peers.
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.
It may be the case that a gifted child also struggles with attention difficulties. These can include selective attention in which they are able to focus on specific subjects of interest but struggle to follow classroom lessons.
Many gifted students have trouble keep their lives organized. Because of how quickly their brains work, they often become forgetful and distracted easily.
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.
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.
However, empirical research has not demonstrated that anxiety is a greater problem for gifted children than it is for children who are not gifted. In fact, there is empirical evidence that intellectually or academically gifted children experience lower levels of anxiety than their nongifted peers.
Being gifted runs in families. If your gifted child has brothers or sisters, there's a bigger chance that they might be gifted too. But they might not be gifted in the same way. For example, one gifted child might be advanced in music and their gifted sibling might be passionate about spiritual learning.
Many gifted children are strong-willed and, as gifted children perceive the world very differently than their parents, it often leads to confrontations.