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.
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.
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.
This is because many high+ gifted people do not realize they are high+ gifted, and thinking others should more or less experience the world as they do, they expect others to be as precise and holistic as they are.
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.
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.
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.
In her work with more than 6,500 gifted children, she has found that there is a correlation between giftedness and sensitivity, with highly gifted individuals often exhibiting the traits of a sensitive person.
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.
About 3 to 5 out of every 100 children could be considered gifted.
Autism and giftedness can go hand in hand. Twice-exceptional kids have great ability, but they also face certain challenges. Giftedness and autism share some qualities, like intellectual excitability and sensory differences. Some kids have these qualities because they're both gifted and autistic.
Gifted students have abilities that exceed those of their typical peers. They learn faster, are inquisitive, curious, and are able to quickly understand complex concepts. However, some gifted students have behavioral problems that correspond with ADHD, so much so that they are diagnosed with the disorder.
All gifted children may be viewed as smart, but not all smart children are gifted. To put it briefly, a smart child can answer a question correctly. However, a gifted child grasps the question deeply and goes beyond the answer, one step beyond the question because of their perfectionism.
Likewise, two people of very average or low intelligence may have a brilliant child. In biology, this phenomenon is called a mutation. Another cause of giftedness is environmental, the belief that you can make a child gifted by exposing him or her to a variety of enriching experiences, beginning at an early age.
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.
Social shyness and awkwardness in new situations are very common with gifted children. Parents need to handle their child's difficulty in new situations by setting up interactions that will not be threatening and giving help when help is needed.
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.
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.
Why are gifted adults more susceptible to depression? Simply put, gifted adults are more likely to struggle with depression at some point in their life because they were once gifted adolescents. Children are labeled as “gifted” when they're still very young by the administrators of their school.
Mildly gifted: 115 to 129. Moderately gifted: 130 to 144. ighly gifted: 145 to 159. Exceptionally gifted: 160 +
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.
Common Characteristics of Gifted Children:
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.
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.