Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Are gifted kids really that special?

This is such an interesting and important topic! In sum, yes, gifted kids are special - in the sense that they have needs that are different from the majority of the population with regard to cognitive abilities and social and emotional needs.

I write as "the poster child for underachievement" as declared repeatedly by my PG DH. From where he sits, he sees me as "one of the most uneducated people" he knows who graduated from an Ivy with an undergraduate and 2 graduate degrees. I do agree with him. What is really nuts - to me - is that I didn't really get what he meant until I started to go through the wringer with my PG child at school.

None of my story is intended to be a 'woe is me' thing. It's just been fascinating to me to see the kind of educational damage that can be done by completely, "benigning" ignoring the needs of a gifted child. And I'm not even PG! I grew up thinking that school was for instantly sizing up a teacher, figuring out what made her/him tick and then to spend all of my time playing the game. It became a game for me to see how little I could do to achieve the highest grades. When I tell you that I read NOT ONE novel that was assigned for school - even through graduate school - I am dead serious. Not one. But I graduated at the top of my class. I never learned to work at anything until my first job in my second professional career - and only because I used to take on the most complex cases.

As far as the emotional needs of gifted children, I see where you are coming from OP. Understanding about the needs of gifted children doesn't excuse their behavior. It just makes it easier to help them to develop an understanding of their behavior and it gives the adults in their lives a good roadmap, or just some guidance, on how to best assist them. I had the benefit of not even knowing that my DS7 was PG until he was 6 years old. I didn't understand that he was that different with regard to cognitive/emotional needs because he was my first child and he reminds me of me when I was a kid. (Although I may not be of the same intellectual ability as my son, he and I are completely alike in the overexcitabilities/emotional intensity department.) This "not knowing" perspective was beneficial because I didn't spend my time measuring up my child to other children. I was just motoring along trying to let him reveal himself to me and trying to meet his needs as I could. (I find a lot of parents in my neck of the woods spend so much time comparing their children to others and so much time trying to find "enhancing" or "enriching" activities for their babies and toddlers that they don't even see or respond to what is right in front of them.) I continue to use the same parenting approach with my DS and other children but now I have the very awesome benefit of being educated on the needs of highly gifted + kids.

As I continue to learn about the emotional needs of gifted kids, I repeatedly have "a-ha!" days. Oh - I wasn't a crazy freak at 8 years old when I could REALLY empathize with a teacher's illness or when I made the school janitor, at 6 years old, a lovely going away card because I was always so deeply touched by the way he smiled and genuinely cared for the children in our school. I remember spending a lot of time watching this particular janitor - he was meticulous and was one of the warmest humans I knew at the school. He barely spoke English and had a very large family that he was supporting. I remember kids teased me mercilessly because of this rather subdued paternal affection I had for this janitor. It would have been a truly remarkable thing for me if someone had just NORMALIZED my intensities for me. I spent my entire childhood, adolescence and a good part of my young adulthood trying to figure out what was wrong with me when it was just plain and simple gifted sensitivities. (Of course, it is more than that. But I believe I wouldn't have had such a hard time growing up if I had some understanding about intensities and if some adult in my life could have oriented me - even just a little bit.)

I don't understand families who desperately want to have their children labeled as gifted. I recall when my DS7 was a toddler and he was delayed in some aspects of his development. I never spent a moment thinking, "I wish" he could do this or that. I just always tried to and currently try to see him as he is and meet him where he is at. Maybe that's the benefit of all the years of therapy I've had. Maybe I'm just a good mommy :-). But as others have noted, the eager beaver parents are ruining things for the kids who truly have special needs.

Finally, I do meet some self-hating gifties. To some extent, I used to be one of them. There was a point in my life, where I scoffed and bristled at the usage of the term "gifted". It's not a great term, sure. But because of the lack of understanding of what gifted really is and the unresponsive and distorted programs that exist, I believe that there are some gifted adults who have internalized some of the tiger parents' quiet and angry resentment. It's vitally important to protect and try to grow true gifted programs and services for gifted children.

When last I looked, (and admittedly, it's been a while) rates of affective disorder and particular schizoid disorders are, in fact elevated substantially at one end of the bell curve.

But in the big picture sense, no, mental health and socioemotional dysfunction is no more common among those who are HG+ than it is among those who are NT.

But it is somewhat different, based on a completely reasonable extrapolation of that information (which was from multiple studies, though none of them very high quality)-- so if you looked at the Terman data, for example, if you just look for "mental health" problems, no more common. If it's broken out further, though, some patterns emerge.

Existential depression seems quite common, for example, leading me to believe that some of those problems are likely genetic (and maybe linked to high IQ) and that others, particularly those in the anxiety and affective areas, might be situational.

Some of them are linked to task-avoidant/socially-prescribed perfectionism, for example-- that particular TYPE of perfectionism seems rare in those who are not HG+ in some domain.

That's not to say that disordered eating, procrastination, and existential depression can't be happening in someone who doesn't HAVE socially-prescribed perfectionism, but it is a wicked strong correlation in those who DO.

Again--the cure for this is internal and it's external. Sufficiently challenging and supportive circumstances are the cure for those who are HG. Underperformance in circumstances that require THAT of HG+ persons is an expressway to existential angst.

Start by re-reading the 9th.

I Googled a little--it looks like there's some evidence for higher rates of depression and suicide among gifted people whose gifts lie in the creative realms, specifically writing and visual arts (so--my DD). There may also be higher rates of eating disorders, although there we have some issues with controlling for the fact that wealthier, more educated families are more able to afford residential inpatient care for EDs. There's some interesting new stuff on EDs, btw--they're finding some evidence for genes playing a role.

I don't know if anyone's ever studied the "existential depression" thing with a for-real study. It comes up a lot. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, since I've seen it in both of my children.

I don't place much stock in the Terman data, myself. It's interesting, but it's just too old to be applicable to today's children.

I don't think there's really a lot out there on any of this. I personally think the GT community has strayed into fetishizing anecdata and that yes, there is a bit of creeping "specialism" at work. A lot of kids from all walks of life and all IQ bands have mental health concerns or are emotionally sensitive or have SPD or are anxious.

I do think there may be *particular* concerns or problems or social issues that are more common to gifted children, such as concern for justice, perfectionism, overcorrecting others, and underachievement in response to social pressure. It's useful to be aware of these common issues.

The Constitution clearly spells out both negative (those which require inaction to protect) and positive rights (those which require action, or in your terminology, services owed to the people). The 5th, 6th, 7th and 14th Amendments all describe positive rights.

I just did and I didn't see one word in there referring to education as a right. Your interpretation of the 9th must read a lot into it.

Yes, my interpretation DID read a lot into it, but that's by design. The framers (and Madison in particular) intentionally put that one in to say that just because the Constitution doesn't say you have a right guaranteed by law, doesn't mean you don't. It opens up the door to all sorts of unenumerated rights, like privacy and property.

Exactly-- any connection to mental health dysfunction is probably linked via mechanism to those common areas of poor fit (with respect to more typical educational or social settings).

But it's not easy to study that sort of thing.

The right to an education is written into state constitutions (Old Dad, remember that the federal government doesn't have the last word on rights). For example, the California Constitution is pretty specific: