5 Characteristics Of Gifted Children

Having a gifted or gifted child at home or at school is a challenge. Stimulating your potential and promoting your relationships is the best help we can give you.

The World Health Organization estimates that 2% of children are gifted or highly capable. Thus, we can see that in every family (in its broadest sense), in every school, in every community, there are children with these exceptional abilities.

Gifted children are not always detected by the educational system or by specialists in psychology or psychopedagogy, and even less do they receive the attention they need to stimulate and boost their potential. If they are also girls or come from social sectors with poverty rates, they are even more difficult to identify.

There are also many myths and false beliefs around this condition that make them go unnoticed, make them invisible, or worse yet, they are diagnosed with disorders that they do not suffer from, such as attention deficit (with or without hyperactivity), bipolar disorder or Asperger’s syndrome. .

How to spot gifted children?

Most specialists agree that to know if a child is gifted, you have to wait until they reach 5 or 6 years of age. However, there are also those who consider that it is possible to detect some early signs of high capacity between 2 and 4 years.

It is also common to confuse high academic performance with being a gifted child. Although a gifted child is understood as highly intelligent, it is a different intelligence. A gifted child may have mediocre grades, but not really bad.

The main characteristics of a gifted child are often misunderstood. For clinical psychologist Linda Kreger Silverman, founder of the Center for the Development of Giftedness in Denver, United States, gifted children have qualities such as:

• They give very clever (and very convincing) explanations for not doing homework or for not wanting to go to school.
• They have a high ability to create witty stories or jokes, or puns.

• They question and cross-examine with ingenuity, putting their parents or teachers in trouble.
• They show conscientious dedication to an activity that they are passionate about.
• They do common things in unusual ways.
• They are aware of what is unjust and have the courage to defend the defenseless.
• They are able to remain calm in moments of chaos.

Fundamental characteristic: overexcitability

The overexcitability of gifted children in various aspects of their development is often unknown, often leading to misdiagnoses.

In this sense, an article published in The Communicator magazine talks about the following types of overexcitability that gifted children would experience:

1. Psychomotor overexcitability

The gifted child gets bored and fidgets. He seems to have attention problems and has episodes of hyperactivity. Your verbal or physical agitation makes you think you have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

When the child is motivated by a task, or immersed in something that attracts and fascinates him, it leads to levels of concentration that are not expected for his age. He forgets everything around him.

You can also get frustrated when you can’t get what you want to do, and it’s an emotion that we must help you manage.

2. Intellectual overexcitability

Gifted children have voracious curiosity. As sometimes they pour all their energy into a single topic, they become obsessed with what attracts them.

This unique interest in topics and voracious curiosity can cause them to have difficulty relating to their peers, which is why they may be mistaken for Asperger’s disorder.

3. Emotional over-excitability

Parents often describe a gifted child as “very intense and extreme” or “exploding easily. “

• Their intense emotionality will be one of their great resources as an adult, but in childhood it can be confused with suffering from bipolar disorder, when they are far from being psychotic.
• Their sensitivity makes them cry for a character in a movie or worry about social injustice, violence, or environmental problems. They have a social conscience.

4. Sensory overexcitability

They are extremely annoyed by clothing labels, noise from class, odors, or excessive volume. These sensations are so invasive that they cannot think of anything else.

Generally, neither parents nor teachers understand this extreme sensitivity. They are judged as maniacs, when in reality it is something that they are not able to bear.

5. Overexcitability of the imagination

Gifted children seem to “live in their world.” They have an enormous facility for inventing, fantasizing and creating imaginary situations and companions to escape the boredom that, for example, school generates for them.

In this flight of the imagination, they can confuse reality with fiction. They often draw, write or imagine stories in order to abstract from a reality that is unattractive and stimulating to them.

What to do if we have a gifted child?

For many stimuli that are given to children during pregnancy or early, a child with high capacity is not formed. Gifted children are born, they inherit their potentialities from their family burden.

If we detect that a child has characteristics to be considered “gifted”, the first thing we must overcome is our own fear and prejudices. Indeed, the child is different. Help him manage and harness his potential.

Discovering and enhancing these differences is a great challenge, which often involves facing family members, teachers and psychologists accustomed to “the normal”. You have to educate him for happiness, not for perfection, like every child.

There is no point in isolating a gifted child or pretending to link him only with similar children. Furthermore, in few countries there are specialized educational institutions for this type of children.

Ideally, help you navigate traditional school, connect, while offering you additional options to boost your potential.