Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion What happens to children who are gifted with poor EF

As adults?

I know it's a silly question, in that it's obviously highly variable and dependent on lots of factors but I'm curious. The DD I had tested is doing well and probably achieving more highly than would be predicted by just her FSIQ of 138. But she's got a high WM (141) and is very organised and methodical.

In other environments though, I come across kids who are amazingly gifted but very disorganised and distractable. Their potential is obviously huge but I'm wondering what happens to them? They can't all be "absent minded professors". Presumably some find alternative paths to organisation etc whereas others end up with partners who help with the day-to-day stuff?

Any ideas? I'm genuinely curious.

Well now there are so many technological things available.

There's an app for that...really, there is.

Just think...calendars, alarms, timers, lists, maps, photos (my son takes photos of all sorts of stuff and then has information at his fingertips).

I was one of those children in elementary school. My EF developed substantially during adolescence, but I still have issues with organization and distraction to this day. I am a patent lawyer, so much of my work is done by myself (not too many group projects), and my office is tolerant of uneven production on a day-to-day basis as long as things are getting done on a month-to-month basis. Plus I have a paralegal who keeps track of due dates for me, although I have developed a calendar/reporting system that makes it relatively easy for me to report to my supervisor each week about what I have accomplished.

Generally, I have to make very small steps toward achievements, and I take a long time to solidify habits of organization. It has been about a year and a half since I resolved that this time I was going to develop a habit of flossing every day. It was not easy, but I have managed to successfully add that to my evening routine. It would be a disaster if I tried to add four or five habits at once - one at a time, and several months to solidify, before I try the next.

You talk about supportive partners, but my biggest challenge with my husband was to get him to stop "helping" me by moving my glasses or my other stuff. I have exactly one place where I put my glasses when they are not on my face, and most of my other belongings have a similar rigidly defined home (which may or may not make any sense). There was a certain amount of yelling before we managed to reconcile our policies about objects.

Following! This is my kid in a nutshell. I do believe he is an exact replica of my husband, who had a VERY hard time growing up, but in his 20s really blossomed and is now and incredible and incredibly well-functioning human being, working as a graphic artist at a major movie studio. He still has a LOT of what I would call sensory issues, but he manages them pretty well and is a wonderful father as well. I look to him for hope when I'm despairing at my son's behavior.

Based on observing this sort of adult in DH's family, my family and, errrrr, the mirror -

First, a fair number of them DO become absent minded professors. Or they take similar sorts of positions in corporate R&D departments.

Many also use their ideas and partner up with a few more organized folks (there's a reason they call those folks EXECUTIVEs) who help them found a business to develop it. Silicon Valley is awash in these folks, and I imagine there are other, similar regions of the country. It's interesting to note that start-ups without good EXECUTIVEs to move things along often flounder despite their brilliant ideas/products.

Second - EF does improve both because the mind develops and because the person escapes from settings where instant compliance with seemingly arbitrary rules puts such a heavy strain on whatever EF skills do exist.

I still recall being flummoxed on a daily basis for the entire year my elementary school teacher insisted kids had to have a color coded system for their subject notebooks. Why was red science? If we were going to have a color for science, surely it should be blue or green. Oh no, I left orange at home and now I don't have my social studies homework. Couldn't I just use one notebook with colored dividers. No, I suppose not... And on and on in my mind, every day. I wasted so much of what little EF I had on trying to follow the color rules (and the many other "organization rules") that I had little left for actual school work.

Anyway, in the inimitable words of Monty Python, "I got better," with better meaning both better EF and a better setting for what I was good at. Most of these kids will, too.

Sue

My husband's father is brilliant in certain ways (i.e. mechanically, visual spatial) but is very limited in EF. I know because we just had to go to his house and literally shovel full two large constrution dumpsters that we rented. Their house was so packed full of junk that it would have been impossible to even get a realtor out there to look at it. In forty years, he hasn't thrown anything away. We opened about 70 old paint cans that were piled up in the basement, hauled about 19 old broken down chairs out of the attic, etc. I believe he always planned to fix these chairs (a few at at time as he acquired them from passed-away relatives) but forgot they were there. He didn't care that we were throwing things out. The problem was that he is so poorly organized with such poor planning ability, things never made it out to the garbage can or to the goodwill. The good news is that he has stayed employed and made a reasonable living (fixing machines in a die casting plant), the bad news is that his money management is so poor that they are on the verge of retiring and filing backruptcy. Mother-in-law is just as bad, or worse. I believe that if he had married a highly organized wife (and vice versa with MIL marrying a highly organized husband), things could have gone better for them. The question is, how many people are willing to put up with it?

I thought I had my EF weaknesses covered - the kind of job where the software keeps track of my due dates for me, yearly reports and enough time on my own I the office to get to grips with the filing system without embarrassing myself (but oh, how I wish I had a paralegal for myself to keep me in order instead of just "bits" of several for diverse tasks). The important stuff in my house (medical stuff, clean laundry, clean dishes, healthy food under control. My DH on my page. But then DS started elementary school and the amount of colour coding off exercise books, folders, craft stuff, letters home etc. etc. drives me insane. Drives him even more insane, of course, particularly if he is again of of the few (or the only) kid who didn't do or doesn't have xyz. I remember I thought by middle school all this was easier because the separation of subjects made more sense, and the academic stuff began to actually count. Except for having to actually write down his homework, I am thinking DS8 isn't spending an ounce of energy on actual schoolwork.

Agreed. EF is related with HD. The US Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health offers this abstract.

Another article by the US Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health discusses findings relating incarceration with EF: Prison Brain?

I think suevv hit on a key issue about being able to choose your environment. If I understand the theory, so much of EF weakness (and ADD impacts) relate to the inability to pay proper attention to tasks which are not intrinsically motivating (which is of course what makes these gaps look so terribly volitional, but that's another rant).

Kids have so little ability to choose and shape their environment. As adults, many of us find jobs that draw on our strengths and minimize the destruction caused by our weaknesses. We find partners who can handle the tasks we can't. When we don't.... well, then you have blackcat's example - and, as a for instance, the vast number of other Americans who can't dig themselves out of unmanageable debt loads. I would speculate that gifted adults may have a distinct advantage over most low-EF people, in often having access to a much wider array of career choices and far more ability to mould our environments to meet our own particular needs.

Warning: soapbox..... This is also why I get so frustrated by teachers and family members who constantly dismiss DS's learning needs by insisting that "He MUST learn to get along in the real world." Well, actually, mostly, no. I am quite confident that the moment he is allowed to escape his public school box, he will put himself into a reality of his own choosing - and it will NOT involve spending all day every day trapped in a room with people with whom he has no shared interests, listening to a one-way drone of highly linear, repetitive, shallow and slow-moving information about things he knew years ago and don't interest him even vaguely. Your reality, lady, not his.

Unfortunately, if he spends all his time learning to cope with *their* reality, he will be utterly unprepared to take advantage of eventual opportunities to create his own - opportunities that require him to still be excited about learning, to see joy in math, to be able to persevere in hard problems and not collapse with anxiety and avoid everything that isn't easy.... All the stuff I beg and beg them to allow him to be able to do, but which I'm always told are special treatment that would keep him from "learning to get along in the real world."

BRAVO!!! Yes, yes, yes.