In addition to pressures from academic and family expectations, students who are gifted may struggle in school because of social issues. Some of the issues these students can face in school include: Embarrassment for being different or standing out. Bullying from peers due to their intelligence or differences.
Because giftedness is a form of asynchronous development, gifted children often struggle to reconcile their advanced intellectual abilities with their age-appropriate motor and social skills, resulting in frustration and self-doubt.
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.
Low self-esteem
Underachievement becomes a factor for these students when their self-identity becomes too intricately wound up in their academic performance. Students tend to underachieve when they do not believe that they are capable of living up to expectations set by themselves and others.
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 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 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 kids often have advanced intellectual skills that allow them to perform at high levels and solve complex problems. But this intelligence is not always accompanied by high social and emotional skills. Socially and emotionally, gifted kids often develop at the same rate or even slower than their peers.
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.
Heightened Sensory Processing
Their “hyper-awareness” of the world around them may increase their physical discomfort to loud noises, scratchy fabrics, or pungent smells, creating anxiety around certain physical stimuli.
Gifted individuals tend to be emotionally sensitive and empathic, making the normal rough and tumble of the playground stressful for them. Because they often feel they are held to higher standards than their peers, they can find it difficult to accept criticism (anything short of perfection is felt as failure).
At its core, giftedness is a brain-based difference that contributes to our vibrant and neurodiverse world. This neurological difference means that profoundly gifted students experience a different intellectual, academic, and social-emotional development trajectory than neurotypical individuals.
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.
Many gifted children are strong-willed and, as gifted children perceive the world very differently than their parents, it often leads to confrontations.
Low social self-esteem is not just a problem for gifted children, but it can manifest differently and more intensely in them.
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.
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.
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.
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, ...
Research reflects that giftedness does “run in families”: for a gifted child, their genetically-related relatives — siblings and/or parents — are likely to also be gifted, though there are plenty of exceptions.
A gifted child's IQ will fall within these ranges: Mildly gifted: 115 to 130. Moderately gifted: 130 to 145. Highly gifted: 145 to 160.