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

In My Humble Opinion
81

Heh. I did many performance reviews, and if thee was a halo effect based on education of school I sure missed it. We had four or five world leading experts in our department, and they all got criticized plenty. Our internal customers were not interested in degrees, they were interested in results.

The things I’m talking about is how fast someone can catch onto a new idea, how good are they at seeing holes in proposals, and how good are they at seeing the big picture and maybe bringing in knowledge from outside to solve a problem.
No one really cared about what school you went to after a year or so.
When I interview candidates, I never give them puzzles to solve but ask them to describe the field in depth, and to describe their research in depth. I’m very good at sorting for intelligence, and it has worked. Learned that from my boss, who hired based on intelligence. I knew nothing at all about the area I got hired into (which was new then) but it worked out fine. Ditto for many other people.

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But not ditto for plenty of others. I know that you believe yourself to be a great arbiter of intelligence, and I have no reason to doubt your ability since you strike me as a fair and reasonable person. But for lots of people, their rubric includes variables like race, gender, school pedigree, and socioeconomic markers. A person could be an absolute idiot using your criteria, but people with a certain mindset will peg him as a"stable genius" just because that’s what they wish to believe.

See the current inhabitant of the White House if you don’t think golden halos exist.

83

To expound further with a personal anecdote…

Several years ago, I was pulled in to observe the deliberations and discussions of a scientific advisory group my agency had assembled to provide recommendations regarding a specific topic area. The group was comprised of scientists who were highly accomplished in their respective fields. The chair of the group was especially accomplished. The chair is the only member of the group being paid by my agency, but we want him to be in charge of analyzing and synthesizing data and writing up the group’s conclusions. I will call him Dr. Brilliant for the purposes of this story.

So after attending a couple of meetings and reviewing the deliverables produced by Dr. Brilliant, I see red flags in how he is handling the data. I mention my concerns to him privately and he dismisses me. At the next meeting, I express my concerns in front of everyone. Again I am dismissed. I look at my boss and he says nothing. I go to my boss afterwards and tell him that I think we need to have a meeting with the chair, and he tells me we should take a “wait and see” approach. Let’s see what the draft final report looks like.

We get the draft report, and it is as terrible as I feared it would be. But my boss doesn’t seem to be concerned.

Now, I don’t blame my boss for having trust in Dr. Brilliant. He is a world-renowned expert and a big muckity-muck at his university. He runs his own research lab. He has reams of published white papers out the wazoo. I have none of these credentials, so where do I get off criticizing him? My boss doesn’t tell me any of this, but I know that is what he is thinking. And I don’t blame him. I would be thinking the same thing if I were in his shoes.

But I persist. My voice starts getting louder at meetings. I start firing off emails to my boss and his boss laying out my reasoning. Finally, a couple of the scientists on the panel reach out to me, curious why I am so strident in my position. I walk them through my reasoning and the light bulbs come on for them. Suddenly I have allies! And they start raising their voices too. My boss suddenly takes notice of this and the fact they are vouching for me. It is only when this happens does he realize that he has been backing the wrong horse.

Now fast forward to today, and you will hear my boss singing my praises. He tells people that I am brilliant and “scary smart”. Of course this is nice to hear, but it amuses me. He has forgotten that long period of time when he didn’t put a whole lot of weight in my ideas. It was only when old white men started vouching for me that he took notice of my abilities.

I am not saying I know for a fact that I would have had an easier time if I had been a white guy. But I think it would be foolish to presume that my boss didn’t grant Dr. Brilliant a golden halo just because he had all the right credentials.

My experience has helped me to appreciate the value of persistence and self-confidence. A person can be full of creative and understanding, but if they are timid or easily cowed by opposition, then those qualities will not be appreciated. I know that I can come across as obnoxious and arrogant sometimes, but I don’t have any fucks to give about this. Some people do care, though. They will refrain for expressing dissenting views for fear of hurting people’s feelings or coming across badly.

So I think rock stars in my field are not necessarily folks with the most creativity and understanding. They tend to have above-average measures of these traits, to be sure. But they tend to also have a lot of self-confidence and fearlessness.

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I agree. I know about the research which proves this. I’ve been the beneficiary of the school pedigree one.
BTW I hired very few people who looked like me. That’s how it goes in Silicon Valley. And I’m not saying I’m immune from these factors, no one is.

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If you can’t make friends, sit through a class, do a tedious job or turn in your homework you’re not “gifted”.

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“Gifted” is a term of art. Part of the problem is that there are a lot of different artists. But I don’t know of any educator who agrees with this quote.

It’s pretty common, as I said earlier, for gifted kids to be well-adjusted: to know how to do hard work, to be disciplined, to complete tedious tasks, etc. But there are plenty of kids who are gifted and who lack these skills. I once taught a kid who could, at eight, add three-digit numbers in his head almost faster than I as an adult can; but he also couldn’t keep his body still for God or money. There are kids whose knowledge of astronomy is nearly encyclopedic and who burst into tears at the tiniest stressor. Kids who can’t focus long enough to write a complete sentence but who can read and understand books many grade levels above theirs.

Being academically gifted doesn’t, and shouldn’t, include mental/behavioral stability in its definition.

The side conversation about subjective identification of intelligence in adults is interesting, but there are some pretty hefty differences between that and IDing giftedness in kids. There’s a difference, that is, unless you’ve filled out a six-page form rating the intelligence of your bosss on a nine-point scale in something like 77 different subcategories sorted into 9 different categories, ranging from artistic/creative giftedness to linguistic giftedness to mathematical giftedness to leadership giftedness. And if you HAVE done that, say more.

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In one hand  you have a gifted auto mechanic. Do they get to sit through English class reading Chilton manuals rather than Gatsby? Do they get to skip homework because it's beneath them or they're bored? The gifted auto mechanic gets told that sitting still and doing your homework is just what you have to do to pass. If you don't do it you'll fail. Eventually they have enough of the BS, fail out and go to work.
In the other hand you have a precocious kid that learns a few big words and how to use them. They read a lot because they have trouble making friends, and tend to memorize unusual information. The good news is that they develop a pseudo-mature style of talking that's impressive to adults. They get a lot of positive feedback when talking to teachers and hone their skills to sound more academic. They use these traits to hide all of their faults. Their teachers defend them, their parents defend them. Every adult around them bends over backwards for them.

This is called “separate but equal”

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I think I misstated what I meant; I do what you’re talking about- improve processes and innovate, and solve problems that weren’t even perceived to be problems.

What I’m talking about is going to your manager and saying that you want more responsibility or *access *to more challenging systems/business units/processes than your current job allows you to have- it is possible to pretty much mine out the vein of stuff that you can personally affect if you’re somewhere long enough, which is what has happened to me in a couple of jobs in the past.

In those two jobs, the response has always been to assign more of the same work, rather than take the lid off the bottle of that I can access. In the other three, the answer has been to take the lid off and let me work on bigger stuff than I could before.

And maybe “non-gifted” managers wasn’t quite correct either; I should have probably said “not-bright”, as they weren’t stupid, but they didn’t get it either, when I was trying to ask for *better *stuff to do, not *more *stuff to do. They literally didn’t comprehend what I was getting at, and interpreted it to mean that I was literally bored as in sitting around twiddling my thumbs. Which wasn’t the case- I was plenty busy. So they loaded me down with more of the same, thinking they were solving my problem, rather than adding to it.

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Thanks for the clarification, bump.
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Could it have been because in those 2 jobs, your manager didn’t think you were the best to handle the bigger challenges? This probably comes across as insulting, I know, but the number one reason a manager might not go out of their way to “take the lid off” for a certain employee is the perception (rightly or wrongly) that the employee isn’t strong enough or deserving enough.

You’re assuming they didn’t comprehend what you were getting at, but it’s likely they did understand and just wanted you stop pestering them. If they were actually punishing you by giving you this work and playing dumb about it, then what does that say about their intelligence? And what does it say about yours, if they fooled you?

If an employee came to me asking for “better stuff” to do–and all this “better stuff” was not what this person was hired to do–my patience would wear thin. Just being honest. I’m not saying I would give them a bunch of tedious busywork to encourage them to look for another job, but I would be very tempted to do that. Especially if I thought the employee wasn’t pulling his weight around the office, and especially if I suspected he/she thought I was less intelligent than them.

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it can last a life time. I understand intellectually i am smarter than most other people. I was reading on a high school level in 3rd grade and college level not long after but also have a learning disability that causes me to have really bad handwriting and I don’t memorize well so many teachers treated me and told me i was stupid. I still feel like the stupid little girl getting chewed out because I could not write legibly fast enough fr the spelling teacher no can i memorize the multiplication table to spit out the answer as quickly as the teacher wanted.

I get frustrated when people don’t understand things that are painfully simple to me because if stupid me can do this task why can’t everyone else.

As far as the original question, My parents and sibling are extremely smart as well. My mother is the fastest reader I have ever seen and my dad has an amazing memory for geography even at age 88.

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I agree with you there; I’ve never understood how the “exceptionally gifted” kids were to make friends if they weren’t exposed to a wider pool of their peers. Also, I think that the teachers are underestimating their ability and interest in relating to their normal counterparts. We’ve had a couple of girls from Academy (which is what that program is called) join my daughter’s soccer team and that group has become really tight. One of the moms said it was the first time in two years her daughter was excited to go to school, because she had friends she could count on to talk to her.

It’s all anecdotal, but I’d suspect that in the area of academics, those kids might experience challenges relating to their peers. However, their bodies are all going through the same shit at the same time typically and, gifted or not, isolating kids from other kids doesn’t seem like it’d set anybody up for success socially.

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Neither I nor any of my kids were/are gifted, but I’ve seen a few gifted kids and their parents over the years.

LHOD’s point is well made above but does not go quite far enough IMHO.

The simple fact is that being significantly different, not fitting in with the crowd, is a socioemotional stressor and a cognitively gifted child with average socioemotional skill sets may find those average socioemotional skills as insufficient to deal with that level of stress. (That’s why pull outs make sense.)

Also a younger cognitively gifted child can come up with more to worry about, but still has the younger child’s socioemotional maturity in dealing with those worries.

A cognitively gifted child likely needs above average socioemotional skill sets; and as said, there is no reason to expect them to have it.

Yes, it can be difficult to support any child with typical socioemotional skills who feels very different than their peers, especially if they have any tendency towards anxiety.
LHOD, anecdotally I’ve observed something early on with gifted kids and I wonder if you’ve seen anything similar.

Besides being advanced in pretty much all developmental streams the earliest sign I’ve had predictive of future giftedness has been advance humor development. There are, to the best of my knowledge, no official humor developmental milestones, but all familiar with kids still know what they are, from peekaboo to underwear on the head to potty humor to the structure of jokes with nonsense punchlines, so on. I’ve seen a strong correlation of advanced humor milestones with future giftedness anecdotally (and conversely delayed humor milestones with future needs for school supports) independent of other factors.

Does that jibe with anything you’ve seen?

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If I were a manager and an employee asked for more responsibilities, my immediate concern would be the potential conflict this might cause with the other employees. Like, if all the special projects are typically assigned to folks who paid their dues by doing years of unglamorous grunt work, and someone who hasn’t paid dues asks to be a given a special project, I am probably not going to be eager to oblige them. Not because I doubt their abilities necessarily, but because I wouldn’t want to piss people off by giving special treatment to the newbie.

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Yeah, the bottom line here is that there are number reasons why a manager might not give an employee “better stuff” to do. Failure to understand what that “better stuff” is would not be high up on that list of reasons.

At a certain point, managers stop seeing projects as good and bad. All they care about whether it’s going to be done well and on time. They tend to assign the most challenging work to employees they are confident will turn around the results they want with as little supervisory direction possible. If they are not confident in that employee, it really doesn’t matter how much seniority the employee has or how smart they are. The work won’t come to them.

A employee stuck with boring assignments when there is potential for more interesting work should try asking their manager how they can better position themselves for those assignments. Maybe they’ll be told to put in more time paying their dues, or maybe they’ll be told they need to show a better performance record for the workload they currently have.

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The way it helps is (a) any human being finds it easier to connect to someone who has similar interests, (b) connecting with people who don’t have similar interests can be done, but requires emotional and social maturity which many of these academically-gifted kids don’t have at that age, and (c) connecting with anyone allows practice of social skills that can then be generalized to other people.

I had a very poor social life as a child, despite my mom trying really hard to make social opportunities for me at every opportunity. It wasn’t for lack of people to socialize with (and my mom is super extroverted so she was very good at making such opportunities), but we just had nothing to talk about. The things I thought were interesting weren’t for them, and vice versa.

It wasn’t until I was in a gifted school, and was around peers who were interested in the same kinds of things I was, that I got actual friends. And actual friends let me practice the social skills I needed so that I could make friends with people who didn’t necessarily share my interests, though I didn’t get very competent in that until I was an adult. But if I’d never been able to go to a gifted school, I think I would have been crippled socially because I would just never have been able to develop the skills for having friends. (Now, to be fair, if I had been hermetically sealed from other people who weren’t academics, then that would probably also have had a poor effect.)

Now, of course this depends strongly on the kid! Many of my intellectual peers were just fine at making friends with people who weren’t academically gifted. But I wasn’t.

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Probably not; I was already punching above my job title/description (business analyst) and managing the IT work for an entire business unit, and had done some fairly impressive technical stuff prior to that. I think a lot of why I didn’t get more interesting/better work was more of a combination of them not really having a lot more interesting work to give me outright (they’d have had to go to bat for me and gin up some kind of unorthodox position/authority for me), and because to some extent, what I was asking for encroached on their jobs and their bosses’ jobs.

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That is exactly right. Louisiana isn’t known for its education system but it does have a great Gifted and Talented program that started when I was in 4th grade plus a boarding school especially for Gifted and Talented students. I was the only one that qualified in the whole Parish (county equivalent) at first which meant that I had my own teachers (plural) plus all of the funding for my Special Education including two computers just for me (in the early 80’s).

That doesn’t go over well in a rural school district and it was incredibly isolating when I got pulled out of regular classes to go to a play, historical dig or whatever else they came up with and no one else did.

I am dealing with the same thing with my future stepdaughter. She is as smart as they come but incredibly rude to everyone with few social skills. She cries when she gets less than 100% on any test. She wants to go to Yale which may happen but I keep telling her that they don’t just want people with book smarts and don’t know how to treat others.

It is true it isn’t fun being the gifted child because the expectations are so high but it also isn’t fun being the parent of such a child. My mother often writes about it in her books. Her best piece of advise is not to overly praise their academic achievements because those are a given. Instead, reinforce behaviors and skills that aren’t their key strengths.

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But MIT does. :smiley: (Just recruiting for my alma mater.)

I used to live in Louisiana, and I hear you. (Though I wasn’t a parent then.) However I grew up in NY, in an area where academics was respected, and I had fun. My daughter grew up in a town where academics was respected also, and she had a reasonably good time. Less so when we moved to California.
I agree about not overly praising academic achievements, but you do need to praise them some. My mother did, and I felt good about it, my wife’s mother thought it built false pride, and my wife has never had the kind of self confidence I did.