Gifted children experience the world from a totally different perspective than do average children. Not only do these children and adolescents have advanced abilities but also, they have boundless creativity, feel greater depths in emotions, show greater degrees of empathy and compassion, and often prefer older children as playmates. Thus, giftedness is more than IQ.
Giftedness can be defined as cognition (high cognitive ability, reasoning ability, precocious development creative ability), conation (passion to master, rage to learn, high motivation), and emotion (intense emotional experiences, sensitivity, perceptiveness, empathy, and compassion).
Intellectually, gifted children think with greater complexity, ask more complex questions from an early age, reason out problems they have not been taught, have an affinity for patterns, love words, make unusual connections among ideas, show curiosity, and can invent new concepts. Not all gifted children show all these aspects, but often show at least several.
Gifted children experience an intense passion to learn all there is about a tonic of interest. They will stick with a problem until they master it and can show creative and unusual ways of solving problems. Gifted children experience satisfaction from working hard on material that is challenging and mastering it. That is why many gifted children chafe to advance quickly, wanting to feed the stimulation needs of their very active minds. High motivation does not mean, however, that gifted children are necessarily motivated to do schoolwork, especially work that is not challenging and that they have no curiosity about.
Gifted children feel emotions more deeply, more intensely and with greater reactivity, Thus, they can be very sensitive in their own feelings and have those feelings easily hurt. They also are tuned into the emotions of others and can have both emotional empathy (feeling the feelings of others) and cognitive empathy (taking on the perspectives of others). This can lead them to feel pain at others’ suffering and to have a desire to end this suffering by acts of compassion and altruism.
Gifted children are often advanced socially. They seek out older children who might be able to share their more complex play ideas, understanding of the nuances of rules and passion for strategy. Also, younger gifted children who understand the nuances of friendship may yearn for a friend who can understand their needs for friendship on a deeper level.
Asynchronous development occurs with many gifted children, that is, they can differ within and among areas of development. Thus, mental age may be well advanced over physical age or emotional age. This can lead to problems when people expect gifted children to act older because they supposedly “know better.” Cognitively they do know what is expected but applying that to their lives can be more difficult when emotional development is not as advanced. Asynchrony also occurs within specific developmental areas. Thus, the child who can be emotionally mature and understand someone’s feelings one day, may have a meltdown on another when they are overwhelmed or more in need of attention themselves.
Gifted children may also be twice exceptional: gifted with a disability. This combination of experienced interactions with the world can bring both exceptional ability and exceptional difficulty in many areas. These 2e children show much more asynchrony in cognitive abilities (great ideas, poorer executive functions), motivation (passion for interests but poorer follow through on completion, less ability to do unchallenging work than other gifted children), emotional regulation (greater empathy, sensitivity but less ability to regulate emotions), and social abilities (greater desire for mental age peers who share interests but less ability to get along with peers, less ability to understand social complexity). Understanding these unique characteristics is key to parenting, teaching, and counseling gifted children. For more information on how to do this, consult the other resources listed on this website, including my new book, Different Minds: Gifted Children with ADHD, ASD, and Other Dual Exceptionalities.