Gifted adults relate best to others who share their interests. Gifted adults may have a small circle of friends or sometimes only one, but the relationships are meaningful. Gifted adults are independent thinkers who do not just automatically accept the decisions of their supervisors.
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.
Gifted people are insatiably curious. They tend to be highly interested in the world around them. They ask questions to understand more and even ask questions of answers. You're most likely a gifted person if you deeply engage in the world around you and want to understand concepts and the way things work.
Giftedness seems like a blessing but may be a burden. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
rather, it may be a sign of curiosity, and wants to understand in-depth. Social age may refer to a person's abilities to engage or process interpersonal exchanges that are typical for their age group. Gifted people tend to be seen as childlike, immature, and at the same time wise beyond their years.
Giftedness Is Different Than Typical
Both gifted children and adults often have atypical ideas or ways of doing things. They tend to be highly passionate, very intense and extremely sensitive. At TheraThrive, we offer specialized counseling support for gifted children, teens, adults, couples, and families.
Gifted adults differ intellectually from others and are more sophisticated, more global thinkers who have the capacity to generalize and to see the complex relationships in the world. Gifted adults have a heightened capacity to appreciate the beauty and the wonderment in our universe.
There is no generally agreed definition of giftedness for either children or adults, but most school placement decisions and most longitudinal studies over the course of individual lives have followed people with IQs in the top 2.5 percent of the population—that is, IQs above 130.
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.
Ideally, gifted students require three components to maximize their potential: a safe and flexible learning environment, proper academic rigor, and dual focus on social-emotional learning.
You may have also heard that smart children talk a lot — it's a common “gifted” trait. While early reading can point to a high probability that a child is smart, some very smart children don't talk early or talk much.
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.
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.
As a gifted adult, you are not the only one who struggles with romantic relationships in our fast-moving world. Being intense and sensitive, however, means you are more likely to face the following challenges. “Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet.
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.
Negative Characteristics of a Gifted Child
Pretentious, shows off, or evokes their classmates: They may humiliate the people around them and show off because they can grasp things very quickly.
A gifted child can lose interest because she is not challenged or motivated. Gifted children can be difficult to match with an appropriate class because, although they are cognitively ahead, they may be socially younger than their age peers, which can result in behavior problems.