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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Gifted, talented and creative adults face unique challenges, problems and difficulties while living their lives because of their high intelligence, overexcitabilities and multiple abilities. Gifted, Talented & Creative Adults need: multiple sources of stimulation for their curiosity, talents and abilities.
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.
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.
Gifted children can be argumentative and/or manipulative. Even though a child might be able to present a logical or convincing argument, they still need boundaries and discipline around their behaviour else they learn that these undesirable behaviours get them what they want.
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.
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.
Gifted children face challenges that their peers at school do not, and these challenges can lead to them exhibiting undesirable behaviors in the classroom. Common gifted children behavior problems include aggression, refusal to take school work seriously, social withdrawal, anxiety, truancy and more.
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (adhd)
Traits such as intensity, impatience, sensitivity, and high energy are common in children with ADHD, as well as in gifted children.
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.
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.
Strong Determination
Gifted children tend to be very strong-willed and determined. They may become very frustrated when they are prevented from doing something that they want to do.
Gifted children can often lack age appropriate social skills; sometimes their interests are different from those of their peers; they may either feel themselves to be different or be made to feel different.
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, ...
Giftedness falls into one or more of the following areas: intellectual, academic, creative, artistic and leadership. A student may be intellectually (cognitively) gifted if he or she uses advanced vocabulary, readily comprehends new ideas, thinks about information in complex ways, or likes to solve puzzles or problems.
They have emotional challenges.
Gifted children and adults have an intense inner world. They are hypervigilant to their environment and have a keen awareness of what others are doing, thinking, and feeling. As a result, they can pick up on things that others might miss and make connections more easily.
Good career goals for gifted children with harnessed perfectionism include the medical field, technology creation, aviation or aerospace, engineering, architecture, and the legal profession. All these fields and many more call for attention to detail and high reliance on self-direction.
Those who are considered “gifted” are especially likely to experience depression, particularly existential depression, a type of depression that centers around thoughts about life, death, and meaninglessness as the name might suggest.
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.