Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion "I don't want to be smart. I want to be normal."

We went through this as well with our eldest. With GT kids often being so involved in so many activities, they often get over tired making the emotion magnified. While I'm not suggesting that the whole problem can be solved with this,getting proper sleep helped the frequency and some of the intensity of the emotion subside with ours anyway.

Getting enough sleep is critical.

I base this off of my experience when I was younger.

Not enough sleep = really bad idea.

Is she in ongoing therapy?

Having peers is important, and the isolation that our children my feel due to the lack of peers for sure is hard on them. I think it is good that your daughter opens up to you. This gives you an opening to talk to her, support her. My son also has a lot of friends, but they are social friends, not academic peers. My 11 year old just realized that he will have to wait till college to find his academic peers. He actually asked me to confirm this yesterday, and asked if there are other options. Well, not where we live. So I mentioned summer camps and online classes as a way to find peers earlier. But until yesterday, I did not even realize he has been feeling the void and has been thinking about this. He hides his feelings and emotions so well that it scared me sometimes.

My eldest DS is a 2nd semester college Freshman this year. We too thought he'd find his peer group once he hit college. Once he hit Middle School it got a wee bit better each year and continues to, however, even as a Freshman in college he's often surrounded with people of his own age who don't have the sense of maturity, responsibility, or course load which makes for them having a difficult time to relate to our DS. Like I said, it continues to get better, however, it never is completely solved.

So what's the solution? A few years back I started working with him on what I call "Making your own world" In short, he can't depend on others to make his world or make him feel a part of a peer group, instead, he needs to work on seeking out and surrounding HIMSELF with those of like mind, maturity, responsibility, and emotional sensitivity. It stands to reason that when you're one of few you have to expect to work to seek others of similar mindset out, it seldom happens on it's own.

The thing of it is--she has peers, or at least, she's in the ballpark, for sure. It's much, much better than it was before she moved to the GT school. It may be that she is just conflating depression with giftedness, or it may be that she still feels different even from those peers, or...? We are still trying to find a workable therapist situation.

One thing I am trying to figure out is how to discuss depression with her. I think she feels alone, frustrated, and bewildered--I get a sense of "Why me?" I'm trying to let her know that other people do also feel this way, without making it sound too dire or hopeless.

When my now-11 year old said something similar to me -- he actually said he wanted to be average -- I focused on the "we are who we are" side of things. He's also unusually tall (5'8" at 11), so I joked that the only way to make him average would be to cut off his feet at his ankles and that clearly wasn't going to happen. And I wasn't going to cut out part of his brilliant mind to be average, either.

I have a book called "Smart Boys" and I plan to show my kid when he starts wanting to discuss smartness. It's a very broad coverage of giftedness, gifted research, how gifted kids from fifty years ago turned out (I know, just use your own family's stories), but it's got some good talking points. Some of the brightest people fifty years ago, everybody thought they were going to be world leaders, grew up to be middle management. That's worth discussing. A lot of people make comments in front of smart kids about them changing the world some day, you know. The book shows that research changed the way people thought about gifted people in just the last century, people used to say "early ripe, early rot", or else that smart kids would burn out early. A researcher named Terman had to prove that gifted people weren't only pasty stereotypes by studying tanned, outdoor, California gifted children. In other words the book has compiled all the trivia factoids about what people think about giftedness. I will be sharing this book with my son. There's a similar book anout gifted girls I plan to buy for my daughter.

Hmm. Her school may be guilty of this. They like to call them "gifted leaders," which I think is bollocks. I never say this sort of thing to her.

That book sounds very interesting (esp the one about gifted girls--I am going to hunt for it).

I heard the same kind of thing when I was a kid (about how one should try to be president, etc.) but had the impression it was due to the cultural influence of "The Little Engine That Could" and the like. Which I ultimately decided was very unrealistic and even unkind--we can't all be whatever we choose if we just try hard enough, and to tell kids they can is basically saying that if they don't succeed at reaching whatever goal they choose, they just aren't trying. I think it's healthier to discuss how everyone has strengths and weaknesses, and you should do your best with what you have without becoming a driven, bitter, disappointed grownup. Or at least try