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.
When the conditions listed above do not exist, gifted adults will also suffer greatly. They will most likely experience high levels of stress, anxiety, agitation, depression and depletion. Major bouts of depression and suicidal thoughts and feelings are also not uncommon.
The Gifted Child's Struggle
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.
Some of the challenges faced by gifted and talented students are teachers' stigma, negative peer attitudes, difficulty understanding others, problems related to perfectionism, as well as impatience and intolerance. Thus, there is a dire need to cater the social and emotional issues of these students.
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.
Many gifted children may exceed the academic ability of their peers, but lack other basic skills. For instance, a student may be able to multiply, divide, and tell time early on, but struggle to tie their shoes, ride a bike, or remember to bring their backpack to school.
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.
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.
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.
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.
IQ and other tests for giftedness are optimal around age 5.
Many gifted children are highly sensitive individuals. 1 They may take things personally and become upset by words and deeds that other children may easily ignore or get over quickly.
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?
Through their particular abilities, they were often confronted with extra emotional challenges, such as over-anxious and pushy parents, teacher put-downs, social trip-wires, boredom and bullying in school and conflicting life choices.
Gifted children can feel odd or different from other students leading to low self-esteem. They can become frustrated with the developmental differences between themselves and their peers and develop unrealistic expectations of others, leading to conflict. They can hide their talents, underachieve, or withdraw.
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.
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.
Gifted adults often struggle with similar concerns. Heightened sensitivities, introversion, off-beat interests, and a desire for in-depth conversation are not the makings of a party animal. Insecurity, low self-esteem and emotional scars also may be residue from outlier status or possible bullying during childhood.
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.
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.
Some say that gifted children are more prone to depression and suicide because of their heightened sensitivities, perfectionism, introversion, overachieving behaviors, existential concerns, and feeling like they don't fit in.