Is Raising An Exceptionally-Intelligent, "Gifted" Child Difficult?

In My Humble Opinion
21

And there we have an illustration of one of the difficulties of dealing with giftedness. Heaven forbid you dare talk about it.

My son was, in the words of the pediatric neurologist who evaluated him, “twice exceptional,” which I think is probably pretty common. In other words, he was intellectually gifted but also had deficits (not exactly Asperger’s, but similar; his fine and gross motor skills were delayed, as were his social skills). So that was pretty hard.

When he was so young that his precocity hadn’t really played out yet and I was kind of excited to see how spookily smart he could be, I read an article on raising gifted children - and boy am I glad I did, because it set me straight early on.

The gist of the article (and it was an academic paper, not some junk-journalism piece) was that one reason that gifted children present particular challenges to raise because they are constantly told how smart they are by people around them, which completely messes with their self-esteem. Things are easy early on and so they develop a false sense of “I’m smart, I can do anything without trying.”

That puts them off making an effort, and they don’t learn, the way most kids do, to suck it up and work hard at things that don’t come easily to them. Instead, on those rare occasions when they don’t succeed without effort, they freak out and avoid the situation.

Now, that’s obviously not all kids or all situations. But it sure happened to my kid. We’d be walking down the street when a classmate would see him, point to him, and tug on the hand of whoever they were with and shout excitedly, “See that kid? That’s him, the one I was telling you about, that is so SMART!”

It was understandable, if unfortunate, when kids did it, but adults did it too, which was horrifying.

We constantly told our son that eventually even smart people have to work hard. Ultimate the message got through - he worked damned hard in college to maintain a nearly perfect GPA even in courses he didn’t care for. (Sorry again, there’s that pesky bragging.) BUT IT WAS VERY, VERY HARD to get him to the point where he understood that; he goofed off a lot in high school. I think not getting into the most prestigious schools he applied to was a wake up call.

I posted an anti-brag thread about him a few months ago. He was an utter ditz about getting signed up for his GRE subject test and only barely managed to maneuver his way out of missing his opportunities altogether. Smart kids can be dumb, just like any kid.

22

What has been challenging is having one who is gifted in most areas but hit one where he really has a hard time. Our oldest was in gifted classes and magnet programs, and everything was easy for him until sophomore year. Classes that involved writing were very difficult for him, and it didn’t take long for him to just stop turning things in. We thought he was just being lazy, partly because that’s what he told us. He went on to college with a big scholarship, mostly because of his astronomical test scores, but crashed and burned. He went back to a liberal arts college with the highest level of support and just squeaked by. He couldn’t adjust to being in a small town after growing up in an urban area, so he enrolled in classes at the local community college. The results weren’t very good. He says if he can’t succeed this semester, when he carefully selected classes he thinks he can do well in, he’s done. Honestly, if I’d had that much difficulty I would have given up a lot earlier. I hit a wall in math around the same age he hit one in writing. Math is a hell of a lot easier to avoid in college, so my writing ability and ability to remember crap got me through. If someone wanted to torture me now, they’d force me to go back to school.

Younger son is a gifted writer and ok in math. His grades in high school weren’t impressive, and we weren’t sure how he’d do in college. He never liked school either. With 59 hours down, he has an A average. We never thought it would happen. It probably helps that his girl friend that he met there is an honors student, and she suggested that he make a schedule for himself. In high school, he got C’s and D’s when he wasn’t particularly interested in a class. Now he makes B’s.

23

And there we have an illustration of one of the difficulties of dealing with giftedness. Heaven forbid you dare talk about it.

My son was, in the words of the pediatric neurologist who evaluated him, “twice exceptional,” which I think is probably pretty common. In other words, he was intellectually gifted but also had deficits (not exactly Asperger’s, but similar; his fine and gross motor skills were delayed, as were his social skills). So that was pretty hard.

When he was so young that his precocity hadn’t really played out yet and I was kind of excited to see how spookily smart he could be, I read an article on raising gifted children - and boy am I glad I did, because it set me straight early on.

The gist of the article (and it was an academic paper, not some junk-journalism piece) was that one reason that gifted children present particular challenges to raise because they are constantly told how smart they are by people around them, which completely messes with their self-esteem. Things are easy early on and so they develop a false sense of “I’m smart, I can do anything without trying.”

That puts them off making an effort, and they don’t learn, the way most kids do, to suck it up and work hard at things that don’t come easily to them. Instead, on those rare occasions when they don’t succeed without effort, they freak out and avoid the situation.

Now, that’s obviously not all kids or all situations. But it sure happened to my kid. We’d be walking down the street when a classmate would see him, point to him, and tug on the hand of whoever they were with and shout excitedly, “See that kid? That’s him, the one I was telling you about, that is so SMART!”

It was understandable, if unfortunate, when kids did it, but adults did it too, which was horrifying.

We constantly told our son that eventually even smart people have to work hard. Ultimate the message got through - he worked damned hard in college to maintain a nearly perfect GPA even in courses he didn’t care for. (Sorry again, there’s that pesky bragging.) BUT IT WAS VERY, VERY HARD to get him to the point where he understood that; he goofed off a lot in high school. I think not getting into the most prestigious schools he applied to was a wake up call.

I posted an anti-brag thread about him a few months ago. He was an utter ditz about getting signed up for his GRE subject test and only barely managed to maneuver his way out of missing his opportunities altogether. Smart kids can be dumb, just like any kid.

24

Yeah - I (sneakbrag sneakbrag sneakbrag) was incredibly brilliant at every kind of analysis, to the point that I got into middle school before I learned that I couldn’t intentionally memorize anything. I mean, sure, I would have to guess on questions asking for historical dates and such, but that was usually so small a part of the grade that nothing much was made of it. And then I got to a social studies class that (for some reason) heavily weighted the ability to memorize countries and capitals. I could not do it, despite trying everything - recitation, listening to tapes of myself reciting, endless writing - nothing worked. Got a D in the class, which kicked me out of the gifted program n the spot. This was quite a shock - though everything else after that continued to be As and Bs with the occasional C, so I got over it.

Then, in college, I got into a calculus class that, for some reason, was taught as nothing but memorization and pattern matching. I got every single question wrong on every assignment, quiz, and test. I am not exaggerating - every single one. (Except for one chapter where we did actual math, where I got everything right - only to go back to getting everything wrong again in the chapters following.) At the end of the semester my grade was in the single digits, to the degree I didn’t even bother attending the final. Given that normally math was my best subject, this gave me such a shock that I took half a year to recover - I was in such a stupor that my next semester’s grades were three Fs and a D. And of course not having passed calculus had implications for my STEM degree.

None of this made my parents particularly thrilled either, as you may imagine.

25

Raising a child can be difficult. Full stop. That is the baseline.

Raising a special needs child is exceptionally difficult.

Raising a gifted child is difficult.

I sorta have one of each.

26

My Dad didn’t find it particularly difficult, but to him I was normal. The techniques which worked for him and his siblings worked well with me. On that side of the family, the two “slowest” people of my generation have engineering degrees; it’s a family where if you say that a relative is normal without further detail, you get funny looks and then “normal how? Medically, socially…?” Medically yeah, we’re normal. But we’re also used to considering that thinking sideways to other people is perfectly fine; it’s something we do, like other families are tall, or good dancers, or whatever. Since we think sideways, we need to learn how to translate our sideways thinking to explanations others will understand, that for us is a routine part of child-rearing.

My mother’s problems with raising me had more to do with her being a social narcissist and a solipsist than with me being gifted. She would have been a horror show for any child of hers who wasn’t a blonde, blue-eyed boy. Middlebro isn’t particularly gifted, but he’s also neither blonde nor blue-eyed and she rejected both of us.

27
  1. Even college, if you go to the right college.

My kids used to watch Dennis the Menace reruns. One episode had a mistake in test results classifying Dennis as a genius. Everyone freaked out, and acted as if he knew everything. At the end of the show the mistake was discovered and everyone was relieved.
Exactly the wrong way to do it.

At my house, both as a child and a parent, a high IQ doesn’t mean you don’t take out the garbage.

28

IME that’s usually done by teachers who do not understand their subject. Since they do not understand it, they cannot recognize a correct response unless it is exactly identical to what they’ve got as a reference. Teachers who understand the subject matter love it if a student comes up with an unexpected yet correct answer. It took me a long time to understand that’s where it seems to be coming from.

29

that was me … I passed classes I only showed up for once a week because the teachers knew I knew the subject better than what they were teaching …

I was reading UCLA world history textbooks in the 6th grade and for mt 7th-grade ss class I wrote a report on popular courtesans in the roman empire … and how they influenced decisions … needless to say, I passed and a conversation with mom who barley passed school at all … and she shrugged and said he’s smarter than me what am I supposed to do … it wasn’t the first or last time she’d have such meetings either

30

I think all you really need to do is keep them motivated, and give then opportunities for self realization. I’m ASD, so all my life, I just treated all kids as they were gifted. Give them plenty to pick, and they’ll set their own limit. When my son was 6, I made a set of Chinese flash cards and he learned 50 characters in a day. That’s not gifted, even dull Chinese children do that. It’s motivation and opportunity.

Teach them by example that being smart is fun.

31

My father was a smart motivated guy from whom I inherited many faults and few virtues. :o According to my mother, he was jealous of me. :eek:

I took a California standard test in 3rd grade. My mother got an excited call: “Your son got the highest score we’ve ever seen in this school district. I’m not supposed to tell you that, and Whatever you do, Don’t tell Septie!” My mother told me as soon as she hung up the phone. :smack:

I don’t know if it mattered. I already knew my 3rd-grade teacher was an ignoramus, e.g. when she pointed to a Mercator-projection map and said that Greenland should be called a continent, and Australia an island.

32

It would have been nice if someone had told me I was a gifted child. When the school gave me an IQ test in first grade and told my mother I scored 148(!), her response was “Oh, she must have guessed lucky.” She refused to let them double promote me, and insisted I wasn’t that smart.

To paraphrase Torey Hayden: We realize a child with an IQ of 52. is exceptional. We don’t realize that a child with an IQ of 148 is just as exceptional.

33

Fistbump.

34

There’s very little correlation between IQ and holding a high-paying job.

35

There appears to be a moderate correlation between IQ and job performance. But we should not generalize too much from this.
I’m not a psychologist, but I’m guessing that IQ correlates with job performance/success only to a certain point, after which there are diminishing returns. Like, I would not expect someone with an IQ of 80 to be the IT department head. Maybe the owner of the company, but not the person who had to demonstrate some modicum of talent to be hired and to rise through the ranks.

But I would not expect to find much difference professionally between the employee who has an IQ of 110 and the one with an IQ of 140, all other things about them being equal. I mean, the managers in my workplace are all pretty smart. But I would not say any of them are intellectual stand-outs. Some have great vision and have wonderful ideas and can sell those ideas very effectively. But in general they only have to be good at enduring the stress of cat-herding, which does not require a high IQ. It has been my experience that brainiacs tend to stay among the rank and file. These folks may be more indispensible than their less cerebral coworkers and thus have salaries that reflect this value. But the latter are probably more inclined to go into management. So it’s all a wash.

36

One of the things I eventually learned is that being highly intelligent may help you solve crossword puzzles or impress people with your abstract thought processes but it is not linked to being functional, sane, kind, a good parent, happy, or solvent. It’s not worthless, but it isn’t worth as much as we think it is.

I learned to value other qualities.

37

Do you truly think that someone with an IQ of under 100 - the lower half of intelligence - has equal occupational prospects as someone in the upper half? I don’t see how that would work. Not only would the more intelligent folk be able to perform more intellectually demanding jobs, but they could also do manual able should they wish.

38

I think that characters in TV shows and movies like Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory and Young Sheldon and Will Hunting in Good Will Hunting are somewhere between highly improbable and ridiculously improbable. I don’t know if anyone with the life story that approximates that of Sheldon Cooper has ever existed, but I can’t think of anyone like that. We’re supposed to believe that someone who grew up in a family that made no attempt to push a child forward in academic achievement (and who lived in an area where the schools weren’t particularly good or particularly willing to push children forward) would have them (when he’s 9 years old) discover that he was so intelligent that he would be allowed to skip four years of school. He then graduated from high school at 11, from college at 14, and got a Ph.D. at 16.

Stuff like that just doesn’t happen to kids who grew up in families who didn’t push the child forward themselves. It also doesn’t happen to kids at second-rate high schools which don’t make any attempt to encourage people to skip grades. A child who tried to persuade such a school to let them skip grades would be more likely to be laughed at than encouraged. The best that such a family and school would allow the child to do is to get good grades in school, graduate from high school at 18, go to a good college and graduate at 22, and go to a good graduate school to get a Ph.D. Even that would take a child that’s not just smart but also willing to ignore those people in his family, fellow students, and teachers that don’t like people who think they can be something none of the rest of them can be.

And that’s just Sheldon Cooper. He, after all, had a strong happy family that was willing to accept his peculiarities and let him do what he wanted. On the other hand, we’re told that Will Hunting was abused by his family and by the foster parents he later lived with. Despite this, we’re to believe that at twenty he’s managed to teach himself enough mathematics that he can soon start doing brilliant original research. This is just ridiculous. Such a person is more likely to become a serial killer than someone who does something first-rate in any academic field, no matter how smart they really are.

39

I’ve always suspected there’s at least a weak inverse correlation between intelligence and happiness. I’m not a parent but I think I’d rather raise a happy child than a gifted one.

40

This might be an appropriate place to share an anecdote about a very gifted kid (now young adult) that I know, and the possible effect of a particular parenting style.

My son is wildly “smart” in terms of absorbing and integrating information, but lagged terribly in social and physical skills. So it was a tremendous joy and a relief when he became fast friends with another smart kid, “Frankie,” when he entered middle school.

Frankie and CairoSon were wonderful for each other; for the first time, each had a friend that could keep up with their excited explorations of both quantitative and verbal delights (one of my happiest memories is sharing bulbous bouffant with them; the three of us giggled insanely and for years afterward would suddenly intone “BehhLOOOOOOGAH WHALE!” and dissolve into laughter).

The differences between how CairoSon’s father and I were raising CairoSon, and how Frankie’s parents were raising him, were profound. We tried to celebrate our son’s abilities and be sure it was a source of self-esteem for him, but within perspective: I always said, “everyone is good at something; you’re good at being smart, which people really notice, and you have every right to be proud of your intelligence. But someone else might be good at writing music or being kind or something else not as visible to others.” We also didn’t push too hard, other than to keep saying that a day would come when he’d need to work hard to accomplish his goals even as a very smart person.

Frankie, on the other hand, had a Tiger Mom on steroids who was convinced that Frankie was not just gifted, but practically unique in the world. Amazingly, Frankie was a good kid. But sometimes stressed. He was writing a novel when he was about 13, and I remember asking him about it one day. He said, sadly, “well, my parents say I have to finish it soon, because it won’t be as amazing and marketable if I finish it when I’m older.”

Another time, I mentioned at a dinner party that a weird little factoid about some super prodigy was that his parents had been born at exactly the same moment. Turns out, so were Frankie’s parents. The degree to which they accepted this little bit of trivia as deeply meaningful was a little creepy.

Anyway, Frankie was a handful at school (as was CairoSon; bright kids ask too many smart-ass questions and may demand inordinate amounts of teacher time). We tried to defend our son to teachers while counseling CairoSon to be considerate of his teachers and classmates. Frankie’s parents yanked him out and home-schooled him.

Frankie ended up finishing (home-schooled) high school two years early; he got a terrific all-expenses-paid scholarship to a competitive university, and off he went.

Now it is six years later. CairoSon is about to graduate from college and seems to be doing great; he’s pretty well adjusted, happy with life, has attainable goals for grad school, and is generally on track.

Frankie? Well, Frankie is a lost soul. After graduating college he went to LSE for a year to study financial statistics (nothing like his interests as a kid, which were more in the areas of quantum physics and poetry) and has dropped out and moved home, feeling lost and unsure what he wants to do. The LSE program was more mathematically rigorous than he could handle, and it really threw him for a loop. (CairoSon, by contrast, proudly talks about how his girlfriend is more mathematically gifted than he is.)

CairoSon and Frankie have kind of drifted apart; they don’t talk much and CairoSon says Frankie is “weird, it’s scary, he’s kind of an incel.”

Frankie reached out to both me and my ex-husband for help recently, and while my advice was strictly via email, Frankie and the ex had a long Skype chat. My ex is very worried about Frankie. He is drifting, unrealistic about how and where he could have a career, and not on a clear path to anywhere.

An easy reading of this would be that CairoSon’s parenting, where he was encouraged to feel good about his smarts while at the same time maintaining perspective, worked better than Frankie’s parenting, where he was under constant pressure to be an amazing, unique genius.

As Chef Guy rightly points out, parenting ANY kid ain’t that easy, and I don’t think such a glib reading is fair. (Plus, CairoSon is far from perfect, believe me.)

Still, it makes you wonder. Poor Frankie. I can’t begin to describe what a fabulous, sensitive child he was. It breaks my heart to see what’s happening.