Helping Your Gifted Child Fit In

Giftedness itself is still an unclear, controversial concept. In children, we tend to think of giftedness as an immediately apparent superior cognitive ability that manifests through remarkable achievements in the classroom — excellent academic performance that is further supported with IQ tests and high scores on regular ability tests.

Giftedness can manifest as the child who excels academically, of course, and that child with the amazing math abilities or shocking way with words is often gifted. But we need to keep in mind that the boredom gifted children encounter in a regular, mixed-ability classroom with a regular, boring curriculum can also manifest as under-performance and misbehavior. As such, a child is not always tested for giftedness, and indeed may be incorrectly diagnosed as a problem child suffering from conditions like ADHD. 

Not all gifted children will show remarkable achievements either, regardless of talent — and this is particularly an issue for those growing up in poverty or in information-poor households. 

So, some gifted children are correctly identified as gifted, and supported in their personal growth, while others are not. Regardless of which category an individual child falls into, giftedness itself is going to affect much more than the child's academic performance.

The very fact that gifted children and adults are in the minority means that they are going to be outsiders. Just how much of an outsider they'll be depends largely on the degree of giftedness.

Hollingworth (1926) found that “socially optimal intelligence” ranges from IQ 125-155. These individuals were generally found to be emotionally healthy, out-going individuals that had no trouble finding same-age friends or winning the appreciation of teachers.

If your child has a higher IQ than that, he or she is likely to encounter trouble socially and less likely to find true intellectual peers, something that is so important to a person's well-being. If your child has an IQ of 135, for instance, she'll have an intelligence level that occurs once in a hundred people. If your child has an IQ of 158, it's much harder to find someone else with the same intelligence level — this occurs approximately once in 10,000 individuals.

So, what social problems might gifted children run into? Here are a few:

• No available age peers share the child's interests or even understand what he's talking about, leading the child to feel isolated and misunderstood.

• Teachers define the child as difficult to handle or a “trouble maker” because he's bored and acting out because of it, or because his deeper thinking, maybe manifested as questioning the materials presented in the classroom, is classified as disobedience. 

• If the giftedness was adequately identified and teachers and peers know about it, they may see the child as “stuck-up”, or someone with a superiority complex.

• If the child is constantly told how gifted they are, the dreaded “imposter syndrome” might develop. The child develops a real fear of failure because their self-worth depends on living up to pre-set expectations. “Any day now... they'll find out that I am not really that smart” — the child might think. This “imposter syndrome” actually leads to under-performance, because stress doesn't help us excel.

• The child learns to hide his real self to please others — peers and teachers — and is miserable because of it. Never being able to discuss their rich inner intellectual life, they feel trapped and lost.

Helping Your Gifted Child Feel Like A Part Of Society

Giftedness doesn't go away when a child becomes an adult, and gifted individuals — especially those outside that socially-optimal range — are bound to run into the same difficulties they faced as kids all their life.

The feelings we have in childhood tend to stay with us for a lifetime. If your gifted child feels isolated, alienated, and like a perpetual outsider who is rarely liked or accepted by anyone accept perhaps his family now, it's no surprise that that child may end up with mental health problems later in life.

How do you avoid this, though, and help your gifted child feel like they belong and are accepted? That's the tricky part. There are no clear-cut answers, and a lot of experimentation on your part and your child's will be needed. 

Access to true peers who understand the child's reasoning skills and share similar passions is one of the most powerful ways to ensure he or she feels understood, accepted, and a really a part of something. There are various ways to meet this need.

Finding True Peers

Parents and siblings are often within 10 IQ points of each other. If your child is gifted, you are likely to be too. If one of your children is gifted, another one may well be gifted too. Siblings can provide each other with exactly the kind of day-to-day support, love and understanding that kids need, particularly if they can't find this kind of relationship elsewhere.

If you already have several children who find true peers in each other, they have something great. If your child is an only and peers are hard to come by, you might just like to question if your family really is complete. Cousins and other relatives may also offer a lot.

Interest-based groups like ballet, snake breading, robot building, and so on are also wonderful places to look for real friends. If kids of similar ages are not available, don't think it's necessarily unhealthy for a gifted kid to have friends who are a lot older than him — he's probably looking for intellectual peers that understand him, and age is not really relevant for that.

Being academically challenged (AKA “working at an appropriate level”) is also very important to making a child feel good about himself and the world.

How can you ensure that your child is working at the right level? Finding the right level may take a significant amount of experimentation, and working with teachers that are willing and able to accommodate this is half the work. Those teachers are most likely to appear in gifted schools and gifted and talented programs, but you might also want to look closer to home. Kids in the highly gifted group have a tiny chance of their needs being met in school, and homeschooling can be a fantastic option in that case.

Homeschooling can ensure that the child has the freedom to work at the right level and explore her own interests and passions, means she's not surrounding by 30-odd kids who are making her feel weird, and gives the child more time to pursue friendships with intellectual peers outside of a school setting.

Every family will have to find their own answers, and the search for belonging may never be over. However, this is a crucial part of identity formation, so taking all the steps you can goes a long way.