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, 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.
Long attention span: Gifted kids frequently have a longer attention span than their age peers. On the other hand, they might have issues with attention and focus. Those children are called twice-exceptional or 2e kids. Sensitivity: Both emotional and tactile sensitivity are common among gifted children.
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 children often are asked “If you're so good at doing that, why can't you do this?” Gifted children with ADHD often show heightened intensity and sensitivity, but they are set up to fail in a system that only recognizes and expects intellectual proclivity without consideration of their emotional needs.
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 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.
Raising a profoundly gifted child is no different. However, the types of challenges may be. Generally, these children require more intellectual stimulation, even as infants, than other children do, but most families are able to respond adequately to this need in babyhood and the toddler years.
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.
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, ...
They tend to be especially perceptive in picking up on environmental cues, so they may be more sensitive to issues in the world and judgments from others. They also often feel overloaded and overwhelmed by information. Gifted students can be very hard on themselves as they strive for high standards.
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.
The parents reported that gifted children have higher energy levels than their peers (29). The unique characteristics of giftedness may prone them to anxiety.
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.
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.
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. Absorbs information quickly with few repetitions needed.
Gifted kids are not naturally more defiant than typical learners. However, when they are, it's a sight to see (preferably from the duck-and-cover position).
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.
The giftedness may be so strong that the child performs well, masking the difficulty created by the ADHD. Conversely, the attention disorder may be so strong that the child underperforms, masking their giftedness.
Does ADHD affect IQ? A popular misconception is that all children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are naturally smarter and have a higher IQ than children without ADHD. However, there is no correlation between this condition and intelligence.
The child may be both gifted and have ADHD, which presents as an inconsistent (or even average) performance across school subjects. It can be difficult to correctly address a common situation like this even for experienced teachers.