What is Gifted Kid Burnout? Gifted kid burnout happens when someone starts to feel that their value is based on their achievement and they can no longer keep up with the demands.
Gifted kid burnout occurs when a child labeled as "gifted" begins to underachieve and grow exhausted as a result of long-term stress and unrealistic expectations.
I want to emphasize that giftedness is one form of neurodiversity, and it is not exclusive. Many people have giftedness as one part of their neurodiversity experience, and they may also have other kinds of diagnoses, for example ADHD.
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.
A Starting Place
Using a standard IQ test with a score of 100 as the "norm," those children who earn 130 or above are considered gifted; 145 is profoundly gifted. In other instances, assessment may be based on a combination of intelligence test scores, creativity, and ability to focus on a task.
Giftedness falls into one or more of the following areas: intellectual, academic, creative, artistic and leadership.
Most people use terms like “bright,” “gifted,” “exceptional,” “remarkable,” and “talented” interchangeably, but when a psychologist uses the term “gifted,” we're usually talking about something that is statistically quite rare. About 3 to 5 out of every 100 children could be considered gifted.
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.
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.
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.
Social development and skills: gifted and talented children
Gifted children can think faster and/or more deeply than other children their age. So they're often good at imagining what it's like to be in somebody else's situation. Sometimes these qualities mean your gifted and talented child gets along well with others.
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.
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.
Help your child build their emotional vocabulary to name and tame unpleasant feelings. Talk to them about common issues like perfectionism, anxiety, and depression. Making this time to check in with your child can build a bridge of communication, and will help you better monitor their burnout as well.
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.
Our gifted children often take in more information – more sensory inputs – at a given moment to draw creative conclusions. This can cause the brain to feel “overloaded” and, as such, make it more difficult for a child to tolerate certain sensory stimulation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, ...
Not every child displays intensity in all five, but it is understandable that gifted children who tend to have vivid imaginations, overanalyze, or over-empathize may be more likely to experience anxiety. In particular, OEs that lend themselves to catastrophic thinking may increase a child's risk of anxiety disorder.
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.
Multipotentiality is a fancy way of saying “good at many things.” It's a defining trait of gifted kids, and you've probably seen it in action. A student writes beautifully, masters a musical instrument, excels in math, and gets picked first in PE.
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).