Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums THINKING BIG About Gifted Education Synopsis of Jan Davidson's keynote speech - TAGT

I hope that I am not derailing this too much and I do realize that this quote is old, but it brought to mind something.

I often see here and elsewhere the struggles with finding an appropriate social fit for a child who needs dramatic acceleration with the note that the child is still younger in terms of maturity than his/her intellectual peers.

Do most of you with HG+ kids find that they are mentally/emotionally their chronological age while intellectually much older?

I do have one who is 2e who I'd say is, in terms of maturity, about where I'd expect an 11.5 y/o to be. I don't know if that's due to the 2e aspect or being the youngest child in the family, asynchronisity, or something else.

On the other hand, my older dd is emotionally much older than her age. She will be starting 10th grade a bit before her 14th bd in the fall, which is young, but not radical to the extent that some of you mention. However, she seems much more mature than her grade mates even though many of them are around 18 months or more older. People usually assume that she is 16 or so not b/c she looks old but b/c she seems older when you talk to her.

She is also very mature in terms of making decision about class selections and pretty much everything. I don't think that I was as mature or centered even when I was in college. Am I the only one with a HG+ kid like this?

I went to a gifted talk on acceleration last year and the speaker said that in many cases the emotional/social age is in-between chronological and intellectual age, usually closer to intellectual age. Definitely the case in our household.

I think it varies a lot, and that adult-impression is not necessarily the same as kid-impression. I think my DD is well-placed socially with her 18-months-older classmates; DD ascribes some of her social issues as being age-related (but I think they aren't necessarily). Her cousin (at least as gifted, and entirely possibly more so), OTOH, IMHO acts younger than her age.

Just to clarify what I said: with my son (two grade skips), the differences didn't become a big deal until 8th grade. At that point, the kids in his class were mostly a lot more developed than him and interested in things (like girls) in a way that hadn't hit him yet in the way it had hit them. The boys' voices had all changed and his hadn't. That kind of stuff.I'm really thinking about primarily physiological reasons for a lack of connection at times (though there are others, depending on the kid).

I think hormones dictate another story for middle school years. When I skipped in elementary school, girls usually didn't puberty until middle school and those hormones bring about all kinds of issues. Now girls are entering puberty sooner. (part of that is attributed to non-traditional family -- since being around a biological father inhibits early puberty in an offspring) though they are finding early puberty around the planet. So you have a kid skipping a couple of years in elementary school being thrown in with girls that are entering or in the "boy crazy" stage.

Talking about chronological and social ages really are varaiable around middle school.

DD9 is definitely closer to her intellectual age when it comes to maturity than her chronological age. She has always been this way. I would say she is about 2-3 years "older" maturity wise than her actual age.
DD4 though seems to be closer to her chronological age than her older sister. But that maybe due to her being the youngest.

I think it's very common for HG and above kids to be more mature than chronological age. I think it's common for way gifted kids with ADHD to be somewhere in between chronological and intellectual.

What fascinates me is the way that the 2E kids are between. Some say the most subtle things that reflect levels way beyond most adults, and then turn around act in age-typical ways. I don't think maturity level can be 'averaged.' It's like taking the average between my income and Bill Gate's. You get a number but what does it mean?

So I get more meaning by splitting 'maturity' into a lot of different subconcepts and figuring out if the kid in question is strong, challenged, or variable in each subconcept.

My DD10 is in school and all related activities with kids 15 mos. to 2+ years older than her and she is every bit on their level mentally, emotionally,and even physically (e.g., not the shortest, in the same vague area of puberty since there is such a wide variety with this, athletically). She has always been a very responsible, thoughtful, rule-following kiddo who has interests of all kinds much more in line with her intellectual peers and probably could have survived in the wilderness on her own when she was five because she was just that responsible and trustworthy. She has one year of middle school under her belt and we've had absolutely no issues that people sometimes worry about.

With DS8 I would tend more towards somewhere between actual and intellectual age except that he has been grade skipped and everyone thinks we've redshirted him because of his intellectual, physical, and - they say - emotional maturity. So, virtually everyone around him thinks he's two years older than he actually is, and the people he hangs with are all two grades up. Not one of these kids (who all go to a different school) or their parents know he's as old as he is because he just seems older. And really, the more intellectually appropriate his environment is the more mature he acts.

I have two PG kids, one is more mature than their age, the other is less mature than their age - that presents a real issue wrt accelleration.

I had a discussion fairly recently with a man in Mensa and I asked this very question- how can we gifteds change society? One thing he brought up is that the only successful gifteds are the ones who know how to 'dumb-down'. Makes sense to me. He told me that mags and papers write stories in 5th-8th grade level. I was shocked! Another thing this made me remember is an article I once read. It discussed successful advertising and why it is successful- said that people do not want logical, they want appealing, either to their baser emotions or to their idea of celebrity. Trouble with us gifteds is that we like logical best and use logic predominantly. If the other 70-80% of the population does not, we have no 'connection' with them and therefore our thoughts are not their thoughts. They do not care about the things we think are vital.

The way I see it is- if we are to be successful in this effort we must figure out what IS important to them and slant our wishes in that direction. A problem I see many times is that it is all about one-upman-ship. 'My ___ is better than yours' mentality. I cannot stoop to those types of levels; I'm too moral for that.

I think starting out as a business is a great idea because business is their language. We need to get together and form a coalition or something and start our own charter schools, etc... If our profits exceed others we may get some attention.

Davidson Academy needs a duplicate in every major city, perhaps.