6 ms·

The curse of being a gifted child

107 points by MikeCapone 16y ago

dazzawazza 16y ago
My father was in on way academic. With no qualifications to his name he spent most of his life as a manual labourer and slowly worked his way up to be a Head Green Keeper at a municipal golf course via grave digger and truck driver. While at the golf course he hired a PHd Physicist to cut grass and do odd jobs. It wasn't his choice. As a state enterprise he was obliged to hire a certain number of 'disabled' people. Over a few years this wretched physicist slowly revealed how he was pushed through school and university early and was woo'ed to the city of london to do financial modelling and how by the age of 25 with mountains of cash his brain literally shut down. He was rebooted in hospital diagnosed with depression and put on to the incapacity benefit list and a charity helped him into work via the local authorities. He told my father that his greatest pleasure was seeing the stripes on the golf course after he'd freshly cut the fairway. He envied my father because he had worked his way from nothing to something where as he had the whole world at his feet, there was nothing to work for, it just came. After two years at the golf course he stopped turning up for work, he stopped turning up for anything, he'd committed suicide. This greatly effected me as a child who achieved academic success with (seemingly) little or no effort. A little bit of struggle makes any prize more valuable. My ever pragmatic Dad said "he cut the grass straight and didn't piss in the tractor cab, he was a good man".
mrlyc 16y ago
I wasn't gifted but I was quite bright, having the third highest IQ out of the fifty or so pupils in the two fifth grade classes. I was doing very well at school but my teacher didn't like me for some reason so he kept accusing me of cheating. He told the entire class on many occasions not to have anything to do with me. From that, I learned to dumb myself down and not do so well at school.
zmmz 16y ago
Above all, I believe that gifted children need good parenting. It seems to be a common theme with young achievers that they burn out quickly and become disillusioned or full of reject. It's always disturbing to see 12 year old pop stars on TV whose parents have chosen to keep the kids out of school, 14 year old college freshmen and other "prodigies". I could not be happier that my parents did not let me skip grades. There was a kid in my class who was three years younger than everybody else in the grade in high school and needless to say he could not associate with us at all, and it's not like we didn't try. Sure, I could have finished studies a little earlier, but the defining moments of my teenage years are those spent with my friends, not what the rest of society would deem as worthy achievements.
JimboOmega 16y ago
I was labeled gifted, but I also seriously lacked coordination. My handwriting was and is truly awful, and any "project" that involved construction came out a mess, no matter how much time I put into it. Sometime around middle school I was diagnosed with ADHD. As a result, I grew up with the message that I was "smart but lazy" and "if only you would apply yourself then..." Teachers always assumed I did a rush job on everything (which before I got ADHD medication was often true). Parents saw grades that were good but not what I was capable of. That sort of message can haunt you. On a related note, Gladwell (in one of his books, I forget which) wrote about how people who were picked to be great successes based on childhood IQ scores wound up all over the map; but very few were great successes (most wound up as moderately successful professionals, IIRC)
- yters 16y ago
  I think expecting gifted kids to be successful, and putting a bunch of effort into such, is a mismatch. It's pretty well known that perseverance (perhaps being a jerk too) is much more important than high IQ for becoming rich and powerful. High IQ is much better for coming up with deep ideas, being creative, etc. Not characteristics that necessarily correspond with our standard definition of success.
piguy314 16y ago
Socio-economic status is more strongly correlated with life success than IQ.
andrewl 16y ago
My giftedness worked against me in one way, in that I often understood things so quickly that I never learned to figure anything out. Especially in grade school, if I didn't get something by just reading it once, I had no idea what to do. I got panicky, as I felt like my powers were vanishing. I don't think I even knew that I was supposed to take concepts apart, or try different approaches. I didn't know there were strategies to figuring things out. And I had no confidence in my ability to do so. This article about highly-intelligent who lack confidence in their abilities may be of interest: http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/ http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/
- esun 16y ago
  It comes as a shock when you actually have to work at something, doesn't it. Now I know how to work. I wish I could do university again.
amichail 16y ago
This sort of labeling is harmful because it is at best a diversion. Focus on what's important -- financial independence.
- yters 16y ago
  Yeah, and otherwise eschewing standard definitions of success if it doesn't fit my interests.
wallflower 16y ago
> Terman found his answers in his longitudinal study on gifted children called Genetic Studies of Genius which had five volumes The children in this study were called “Termites”. The volumes reviewed the follow-ups Terman did throughout their lives. The fifth volume was a 35 year follow-up... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Terman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Terman
- tokenadult 16y ago
  A better book than any of the books from the Terman study about the Termites is Joel Shurkin's Terman's Kids: The Groundbreaking Study of How the Gifted Grow Up (Boston: Little, Brown, 1992). (ISBN 978-0316788908) http://articles.latimes.com/1992-05-31/books/bk-1247_1_lewis-terman/2 http://articles.latimes.com/1992-05-31/books/bk-1247_1_lewis... Joel Shurkin worked for the Stanford News Service as a science writer, and was the first independent researcher to have access to the Terman Study files.
rubidium 16y ago
From the article "A gifted child is just one who has advanced beyond his or her peers; it takes drive, application, perseverance and insight to turn that potential into exceptional adult success." It's worth saying that again. "A gifted child is just one who has advanced beyond his or her peers". It's not a big deal so don't make a big deal about it. Praise shouldn't be the response to gifted-ness, but rather asking him/her "What do you want to do?" Learning that the best motivation is internal, not external, is an essential need in our early educational system.
RoyG 16y ago
I grew up with this as well. My 'solution' was to chart my own course. While i've never (yet) achieved huge success in the traditional manner, I continue to learn, grow and push myself. The problem, as I see it, comes from the expectations of parents, teachers, etc. While they may mean well, their guidance tends to be too conventional. They want to fit you into the System, just in a slightly different role.
Gianteye 16y ago
It's significant that a large portion of gifted kids come from households where they're the smartest by far. My mother designs curriculum for gifted education, and over the years I've seen that part of the difficulty in raising a gifted child to being a healthy, successful adult is knowing what to do with them. Richard Feynman was building complex electronic booby traps in his room when he was seven. Before turning ten he had nearly burned down his house with a homemade transformer in his ad hoc laboratory. Most parents would see him as a problem that needed to be fixed, or be so confused that he'd end up being ignored. Many parents can't see the world from the perspective of a gifted child, realizing how slow school seems, how frustrating their peers might be. Many parents wouldn't consider sending their kid to math camp, or Robot One, or having them apprentice for an electronics engineer. Since the adults wouldn't consider it fun, it doesn't occur to them, unless they're very close with their child, that their kid might love a month doing advanced math, or learning physics early. I believe that gifted kids are fragile. They need strong reinforcement at home telling them to do what makes them happy, whether the other kids dream of being scientists, or a cellists, or a astrophysicists, or not. Since smart kids are also very aware of themselves, they're also very sensitive to the expectations of their parents and teachers. A lifetime of being told how exceptional you are can lead to severe depression if you wind up simply average. Someone with those kind of expectations lumped on them can even become very successful and still spend the remainder of their life lamenting the potential they had, judging themselves for not becoming a first chair, first rate, phd everything.
- gwern 16y ago
  > It's significant that a large portion of gifted kids come from households where they're the smartest by far. I'd also point out that it's also predictable and will continue to be true for a very strong reason: reversion to the mean. It's not going to change, which makes measures like designing a good curriculum or at least having camps and programs all the more important.
bmr 16y ago
One curse of gifted children is that their work life is significantly more "regular" than their academic achievements. Even if they become doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. there will be plenty of people with the exact same title - many of whom were not similarly gifted. I imagine there's quite a bit of worry that they should be doing something greater.
iuguy 16y ago
If there's one thing I can suggest to any prospective or current parent, it's that if you child is smart, clever or exceptional in any field, just love them. Love them with all your heart and soul. I was a 'gifted' kid, and by many standards people would say that I had a good childhood, but I didn't. My childhood was a mixture of pressure, bullying and failure (i.e. getting A's instead of A*'s). My parents did the best they could, but as Philip Larkin said, "They fuck you up, your parents do". So please. If you have a 'gifted' or 'talented' child, let them know that you love them no matter what, that they don't always have to come first, and that happiness is more important that intelligence.
- regehr 16y ago
  It's probably best to love the mediocre and stupid children as well.
  - iuguy 16y ago
    I couldn't agree more.
Eliezer 16y ago
I think I turned out reasonably well, I was known to be a child prodigy, and my parents never pressured me in any way to outperform. (To such a degree that my maternal grandmother was the one who bought me the Childcraft books that formed a large part of my childhood.) Not sure that was optimal, but it's a data point.
todayiamme 16y ago
How do you know if someone is truly gifted when they are in that gray area? In some cases it's clearly visible, but how do we judge? What parameters are observed? Precocity? Attention to detail? Creativity? What are the parameters behind something like this?
- qjz 16y ago
  I'm the parent of "gifted" children, and found that the tests these days are pretty objective, focusing on identifying traits in order to optimize the curriculum for all students. In spite of different capabilities, kids in an age group are emotional peers, and keeping them together is an important goal. Therefore, it's important not to view the process as stigmatizing or as a popularity contest. Different kids have different needs, and parents who desperately want their children to be labeled as "gifted" risk ignoring the true nature of their children, possibly doing more harm than good. I've found it expedient to treat "giftedness" as another learning disorder, or at the very least, a special need, which helps to keep my parental ego out of the equation. For example, one of the key traits for identifying the gifted kids is the ability to learn without repetition. They absorb and retain information instantly, and often become bored or restless if they aren't continually challenged. You might be surprised to learn that among the gifted children are often kids with behavioral problems or full-blown ADHD. But it makes sense when you realize that the symptoms can flare up while the teacher is repeating lessons for students who need it, leaving the others to their own devices. Some gifted kids are well-rounded, while others display traits that make them gifted in specific areas (excellent pattern-recognition and large vocabularies can be indicators). A good program will identify these traits and tailor an approach that works best for the individual. It may sound complicated, but I've seen it handled effectively in my children's public school, so it's definitely attainable.
  - todayiamme 16y ago
    Your answer helped me realize that being gifted is just a part of the equation. A child's emotional, physical and other needs are important too. It's as if there is a distortion in the lens with which people view such kids, resigning them to one-dimensional caricatures, while losing out the essence of who they are. Thank you for that.
chesser 16y ago
Everything in this article applies to non-"gifted" children as well. They also get enormously pressured to get better grades, are overscheduled, forced into music lessons, come from broken homes, have crappy parents, get picked on for any number of reasons, are sensitive, etc., etc. You could just as easily write a narrative about Joe Average, who didn't have things come easily to him, who struggled, who was never told "you can accomplish anything!", whose parents said, "yeah, we don't expect great things from him", who envied all the gifted kids and their opportunities and their parents who believed in them. The biggest problem with being gifted is the sense of entitlement that comes with it. That you shouldn't have to suffer like the rest of the plebeians because you are special, or that all your problems are the result of your special curse. It's just another part of the general case of "mismatch between reality and your unrealistic expectations". At some point everyone is faced with the challenge of throwing off the yokes of other people's expectations and conditioning and finding their own way.
corin_ 16y ago
I found being a bright child had as many problems as benefits, but none due to pressure from parents or myself. School work seemed insanely easy, to the point that I made no effort and still did well. At my (private) school in the UK, twice a term we were given report cards, and for each subject we were given A1-E5 (letters for attainment, numbers for effort). In nearly every subject I would get A5. In my GCSEs I did no revision, was up until 6am before every exam, and still aced them. At that point I realised how bored I was. Since the age of 7 I had assumed I would end up studying music at university (for a few years aged 13-15 I changed that plan to be a CS degree), but at 16 I decided to drop out of school because I couldn't face another two insanely boring years before getting into real education. The four years since then have been amazing, I got into an amazing company that sent me around the world until I got tired of travelling too much, and that has let me pretty much change my job description whenever I fancied doing something new. I'd love to go to university some day and get the degree in music that I've wanted since I was 7, but I'm not in any rush. The biggest thing for me was that I was never taught to learn anything through school. Luckily I was musical, which taught me great discipline (recordings and concert tours aged 10-13), and atheltic (was once a really good footballer, though in the last few years I've become very lazy and put on an awful lot of weight). That, combined with making my way in the business world, has taught me what may friends had to learn in school: how to actually work on something and improve at it.
- Tycho 16y ago
  I'm always curious how this 'make no effort and still get As' thing works. At what point does the information enter your head? -before you ever cover it in class? -when the teacher explains it once? -when the teacher re-explains it? -when you do your homework assignments? -when you casually read over the notes just before the exam? -when you read the exam questions and infer what they need to know? I'm genuinely curious. I've always personally suspected that peoples biggest problem (me included) is not paying attention in class, or being unable to do so, or the teaching moving too fast for them. I figure if you're really attentive enough, revision wouldn't be so necessary. Watching advanced lecture courses on YouTube where I can rewind any confusing parts and refer to other sources if need be, has been a more efficient learning process for me.
neilk 16y ago
Having been formerly labeled a gifted child, I'm not sure they really exist. I'm not sure the child has something different -- rather s/he does something different. I was definitely very intelligent by IQ tests, but it seems to me that what I really had as a child was focus. Arbitrary tasks -- ones that I set for myself, as well as the ones the world does -- were met with the total commitment that adults usually reserve for wartime. So of course I advanced more quickly. As for why I had such focus, that's complicated and probably varies from person to person. But did anyone else feel that way?
robertk 16y ago
I went to a private liberal arts college at 11 and completed a BS in math, physics, and computer science at 16. However, I also wrote for the student newspaper, competed on speech team, and went to the local high school's prom with my high school friends. This, I think, kept me grounded. Yet when I went off to graduate school in pure mathematics, I was frozen. Whereas in my undergraduate years, I effortlessly comprehended the analysis and group theory flung at me, I learned in my first-year of graduate school that had been child's play. Study and work was now required. I failed again and again and it was painful (graduate students are not supposed to get B's). Everything had come instantly to me in the past, so that almost no study was necessary. Things did not work this way in grad school, and I've been learning the work ethic for the past three years. Yet my idiot brain still can't help but think "Noam Elkies' discovery about supersingular elliptic curves got him a doctorate when he was 20! Drin'feld proved the GL_2 case of the Langlands conjectures for the function field case when he 19, for chrissakes. What are you doing, dumbass?" I'm still not sure how I turned out, or am turning out. I am a TA and have a high rating on ratemyprofessors.com, so at least my students like me. I'm learning salsa and hold weekly classic movie nights for my group of friends. Just for shits and giggles, when one of my best friends from high school (who is a manager at Wendy's) suggested "you should be good at more than just academics, you should be good with girls, man," I dove into the world of game (not the tricks part, the improving yourself as a man and "naturally" charismatic being portion). Hilariously, that same friend now thinks of me less as a "genius" and more as a "womanizer"! I am not and will never be as intelligent as the ideal my parents and childhood friends and teachers half-jokingly imposed when suggesting I will win four Nobel prizes before the age of 20. For those following a similar path, neither will you. So the trick is to take the cliche advice, stop agonizing over credentials and success, and just live life; learn some salsa, fall in love, do a startup, and backpack through Europe.
- Almaviva 16y ago
  Where would you start out these days in the "world of game"? I also got an undergrad degree in math essentially without trying and have had some rough periods making it to adulthood without any work ethic but I think I've recovered and have built up a pretty successful programming career. However, I have absolutely no ability to attract women and have experienced nothing but rejection for the last couple of years, and I may be beyond what game can fix. My problem is social awkwardness and it's the kind that runs all the way down - with people I am very comfortable with I am still very quiet, inarticulate, and don't have much ability to do conversational improvisation. Being in extremely good physical shape didn't make a difference and I've done Salsa too, where I'm literally always the last person women pick when they're all asked to partner up. I've done a year on internet personals with only rejection, and the same with speed dating - typical results would be me checking off 15/25 girls as yes and getting zero matches. I'm extremely non-picky with women. Everyone I meet likes me, but for sexual interest? Forget it. I'd love to be exactly the person I want, and socialize with women the way I would with men (i.e. just not giving a shit and saying what I want to) but this obviously isn't working for me! So gaming the evo-psychology system seems to be one of the few possibilities left.
robertk 16y ago
A child that learns ideas young might not understand them as deeply as a similarly-intelligent adult that learns them when he is 20. Although the vast majority of such adults will not understand the ideas as well as the child, the simple fact that there are many more adults studying such things than gifted children means the pioneers and important researchers in the field are statistically unlikely to be prodigies.
DaniFong 16y ago
A while back, I wrote an essay on the subject... http://daniellefong.com/2008/05/15/advice-to-the-bright-and-young/ http://daniellefong.com/2008/05/15/advice-to-the-bright-and-...
jkin 16y ago
People just need to know the techniques of pressure management. When I was raised, my parents taught me always to be humble. There are always people better, smarter than you. I got my PhD from UCLA and happened to know this guy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao He was a full professor at 24 and teaching people much older than him and he was the winner of fields medal. So, if u have too much pressure, think twice that somewhere, someone is more intelligent. And I am sure just like all other records, someday, someone will break it.
michaelchisari 16y ago
"Gifted", like the word "Genius", pales in importance to hard work and tenacity. Give me one child with average IQ and a lasting obsession with one or more subjects, and another child with a "gifted" IQ and a bad work ethic and fleeting interests, and we'll see who's more accomplished at 40.
JonathanFields 16y ago
Stanford psych professor Carol Dweck has research and written extensively on how your adoption of either a "growth" mindset - achievement is largely work-based - or "fixed" mindset - achievement is largely gift-based - is largely determinative of the long-term success of those to whom things seem to come without effort younger in life. https://www.stanford.edu/dept/psychology/cgi-bin/drupalm/cdweck https://www.stanford.edu/dept/psychology/cgi-bin/drupalm/cdw... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck
- MikeCapone 16y ago
  I wrote something about this a few years ago: http://michaelgr.com/2007/04/15/fixed-mindset-vs-growth-mindset-which-one-are-you/ http://michaelgr.com/2007/04/15/fixed-mindset-vs-growth-mind... I think it's a very important concept to teach children.
elblanco 16y ago
One wonders, what exactly makes a person "superhuman"? What if you're just 5% better than the mean? 10%? Does the label "human" encompass all of the variations? Does an IQ in the top 1-2% of a nation make somebody "superhuman"? (I originally wrote an overly long post full of personal anecdotes recalling the pain of being smart and different, but thought these questions added more).
- eru 16y ago
  IQ may not be even real, after all. Just a statistical artefact.
sokoloff 16y ago
For 36 years, Dr. Freeman has studied a group of 210 British children - some gifted, most not. In her new book, Gifted Lives, she concluded that, of the 20 identified as gifted, only six went on to adult lives that matched the potential of their early promise (one is a successful opera singer; another runs a hedge fund.) I would think that 6 out of 20 is statistically significantly higher than any control group of their peers. Sure, that means 14 of 20 didn't, but how many of the 190 not identified as gifted went on to similar levels of achievement? For parity, the answer would be 57. I'd wager the actual answer is no more than 1, with the most likely answer being 0. It's not that being labelled as gifted as a pre-teen is some kind of express ticket punch to fame, fortune and Easy Street. How could it be? You've only spent 8 maybe 9 years not soiling yourself at that point. There will be strife and challenge along the way, and not everyone will rise above those challenges, for a variety of internal or external reasons. I'd still prefer to be in the 20 rather than the 190. (Background: in a US program run by Johns Hopkins(SMPY-CTY), I was so identified @11, and while, in the subsequent 28 years, I may not have become an opera singer or run a hedge fund, I've done OK. I'll also observe that some of my past was very easy, other portions were fairly difficult. I could have achieved more, but I could also have acheived way, way less.)

107 points by MikeCapone 16y ago

My father was in on way academic. With no qualifications to his name he spent most of his life as a manual labourer and slowly worked his way up to be a Head Green Keeper at a municipal golf course via grave digger and truck driver. While at the golf course he hired a PHd Physicist to cut grass and do odd jobs. It wasn't his choice. As a state enterprise he was obliged to hire a certain number of 'disabled' people. Over a few years this wretched physicist slowly revealed how he was pushed through school and university early and was woo'ed to the city of london to do financial modelling and how by the age of 25 with mountains of cash his brain literally shut down. He was rebooted in hospital diagnosed with depression and put on to the incapacity benefit list and a charity helped him into work via the local authorities. He told my father that his greatest pleasure was seeing the stripes on the golf course after he'd freshly cut the fairway. He envied my father because he had worked his way from nothing to something where as he had the whole world at his feet, there was nothing to work for, it just came. After two years at the golf course he stopped turning up for work, he stopped turning up for anything, he'd committed suicide. This greatly effected me as a child who achieved academic success with (seemingly) little or no effort. A little bit of struggle makes any prize more valuable. My ever pragmatic Dad said "he cut the grass straight and didn't piss in the tractor cab, he was a good man".

mrlyc 16y ago

I wasn't gifted but I was quite bright, having the third highest IQ out of the fifty or so pupils in the two fifth grade classes. I was doing very well at school but my teacher didn't like me for some reason so he kept accusing me of cheating. He told the entire class on many occasions not to have anything to do with me. From that, I learned to dumb myself down and not do so well at school.

zmmz 16y ago

Above all, I believe that gifted children need good parenting. It seems to be a common theme with young achievers that they burn out quickly and become disillusioned or full of reject. It's always disturbing to see 12 year old pop stars on TV whose parents have chosen to keep the kids out of school, 14 year old college freshmen and other "prodigies". I could not be happier that my parents did not let me skip grades. There was a kid in my class who was three years younger than everybody else in the grade in high school and needless to say he could not associate with us at all, and it's not like we didn't try. Sure, I could have finished studies a little earlier, but the defining moments of my teenage years are those spent with my friends, not what the rest of society would deem as worthy achievements.

JimboOmega 16y ago

I was labeled gifted, but I also seriously lacked coordination. My handwriting was and is truly awful, and any "project" that involved construction came out a mess, no matter how much time I put into it. Sometime around middle school I was diagnosed with ADHD. As a result, I grew up with the message that I was "smart but lazy" and "if only you would apply yourself then..." Teachers always assumed I did a rush job on everything (which before I got ADHD medication was often true). Parents saw grades that were good but not what I was capable of. That sort of message can haunt you. On a related note, Gladwell (in one of his books, I forget which) wrote about how people who were picked to be great successes based on childhood IQ scores wound up all over the map; but very few were great successes (most wound up as moderately successful professionals, IIRC)

yters 16y ago
I think expecting gifted kids to be successful, and putting a bunch of effort into such, is a mismatch. It's pretty well known that perseverance (perhaps being a jerk too) is much more important than high IQ for becoming rich and powerful. High IQ is much better for coming up with deep ideas, being creative, etc. Not characteristics that necessarily correspond with our standard definition of success.

piguy314 16y ago

Socio-economic status is more strongly correlated with life success than IQ.

andrewl 16y ago

My giftedness worked against me in one way, in that I often understood things so quickly that I never learned to figure anything out. Especially in grade school, if I didn't get something by just reading it once, I had no idea what to do. I got panicky, as I felt like my powers were vanishing. I don't think I even knew that I was supposed to take concepts apart, or try different approaches. I didn't know there were strategies to figuring things out. And I had no confidence in my ability to do so. This article about highly-intelligent who lack confidence in their abilities may be of interest: http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/ http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/

esun 16y ago
It comes as a shock when you actually have to work at something, doesn't it. Now I know how to work. I wish I could do university again.

amichail 16y ago

This sort of labeling is harmful because it is at best a diversion. Focus on what's important -- financial independence.

yters 16y ago
Yeah, and otherwise eschewing standard definitions of success if it doesn't fit my interests.

wallflower 16y ago

> Terman found his answers in his longitudinal study on gifted children called Genetic Studies of Genius which had five volumes The children in this study were called “Termites”. The volumes reviewed the follow-ups Terman did throughout their lives. The fifth volume was a 35 year follow-up... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Terman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Terman

tokenadult 16y ago
A better book than any of the books from the Terman study about the Termites is Joel Shurkin's Terman's Kids: The Groundbreaking Study of How the Gifted Grow Up (Boston: Little, Brown, 1992). (ISBN 978-0316788908) http://articles.latimes.com/1992-05-31/books/bk-1247_1_lewis-terman/2 http://articles.latimes.com/1992-05-31/books/bk-1247_1_lewis... Joel Shurkin worked for the Stanford News Service as a science writer, and was the first independent researcher to have access to the Terman Study files.

rubidium 16y ago

From the article "A gifted child is just one who has advanced beyond his or her peers; it takes drive, application, perseverance and insight to turn that potential into exceptional adult success." It's worth saying that again. "A gifted child is just one who has advanced beyond his or her peers". It's not a big deal so don't make a big deal about it. Praise shouldn't be the response to gifted-ness, but rather asking him/her "What do you want to do?" Learning that the best motivation is internal, not external, is an essential need in our early educational system.

RoyG 16y ago

I grew up with this as well. My 'solution' was to chart my own course. While i've never (yet) achieved huge success in the traditional manner, I continue to learn, grow and push myself. The problem, as I see it, comes from the expectations of parents, teachers, etc. While they may mean well, their guidance tends to be too conventional. They want to fit you into the System, just in a slightly different role.

Gianteye 16y ago

It's significant that a large portion of gifted kids come from households where they're the smartest by far. My mother designs curriculum for gifted education, and over the years I've seen that part of the difficulty in raising a gifted child to being a healthy, successful adult is knowing what to do with them. Richard Feynman was building complex electronic booby traps in his room when he was seven. Before turning ten he had nearly burned down his house with a homemade transformer in his ad hoc laboratory. Most parents would see him as a problem that needed to be fixed, or be so confused that he'd end up being ignored. Many parents can't see the world from the perspective of a gifted child, realizing how slow school seems, how frustrating their peers might be. Many parents wouldn't consider sending their kid to math camp, or Robot One, or having them apprentice for an electronics engineer. Since the adults wouldn't consider it fun, it doesn't occur to them, unless they're very close with their child, that their kid might love a month doing advanced math, or learning physics early. I believe that gifted kids are fragile. They need strong reinforcement at home telling them to do what makes them happy, whether the other kids dream of being scientists, or a cellists, or a astrophysicists, or not. Since smart kids are also very aware of themselves, they're also very sensitive to the expectations of their parents and teachers. A lifetime of being told how exceptional you are can lead to severe depression if you wind up simply average. Someone with those kind of expectations lumped on them can even become very successful and still spend the remainder of their life lamenting the potential they had, judging themselves for not becoming a first chair, first rate, phd everything.

gwern 16y ago
> It's significant that a large portion of gifted kids come from households where they're the smartest by far. I'd also point out that it's also predictable and will continue to be true for a very strong reason: reversion to the mean. It's not going to change, which makes measures like designing a good curriculum or at least having camps and programs all the more important.

bmr 16y ago

One curse of gifted children is that their work life is significantly more "regular" than their academic achievements. Even if they become doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. there will be plenty of people with the exact same title - many of whom were not similarly gifted. I imagine there's quite a bit of worry that they should be doing something greater.

iuguy 16y ago

If there's one thing I can suggest to any prospective or current parent, it's that if you child is smart, clever or exceptional in any field, just love them. Love them with all your heart and soul. I was a 'gifted' kid, and by many standards people would say that I had a good childhood, but I didn't. My childhood was a mixture of pressure, bullying and failure (i.e. getting A's instead of A*'s). My parents did the best they could, but as Philip Larkin said, "They fuck you up, your parents do". So please. If you have a 'gifted' or 'talented' child, let them know that you love them no matter what, that they don't always have to come first, and that happiness is more important that intelligence.

regehr 16y ago
It's probably best to love the mediocre and stupid children as well.
- iuguy 16y ago
  I couldn't agree more.

Eliezer 16y ago

I think I turned out reasonably well, I was known to be a child prodigy, and my parents never pressured me in any way to outperform. (To such a degree that my maternal grandmother was the one who bought me the Childcraft books that formed a large part of my childhood.) Not sure that was optimal, but it's a data point.

todayiamme 16y ago

How do you know if someone is truly gifted when they are in that gray area? In some cases it's clearly visible, but how do we judge? What parameters are observed? Precocity? Attention to detail? Creativity? What are the parameters behind something like this?

qjz 16y ago
I'm the parent of "gifted" children, and found that the tests these days are pretty objective, focusing on identifying traits in order to optimize the curriculum for all students. In spite of different capabilities, kids in an age group are emotional peers, and keeping them together is an important goal. Therefore, it's important not to view the process as stigmatizing or as a popularity contest. Different kids have different needs, and parents who desperately want their children to be labeled as "gifted" risk ignoring the true nature of their children, possibly doing more harm than good. I've found it expedient to treat "giftedness" as another learning disorder, or at the very least, a special need, which helps to keep my parental ego out of the equation. For example, one of the key traits for identifying the gifted kids is the ability to learn without repetition. They absorb and retain information instantly, and often become bored or restless if they aren't continually challenged. You might be surprised to learn that among the gifted children are often kids with behavioral problems or full-blown ADHD. But it makes sense when you realize that the symptoms can flare up while the teacher is repeating lessons for students who need it, leaving the others to their own devices. Some gifted kids are well-rounded, while others display traits that make them gifted in specific areas (excellent pattern-recognition and large vocabularies can be indicators). A good program will identify these traits and tailor an approach that works best for the individual. It may sound complicated, but I've seen it handled effectively in my children's public school, so it's definitely attainable.
- todayiamme 16y ago
  Your answer helped me realize that being gifted is just a part of the equation. A child's emotional, physical and other needs are important too. It's as if there is a distortion in the lens with which people view such kids, resigning them to one-dimensional caricatures, while losing out the essence of who they are. Thank you for that.

chesser 16y ago

Everything in this article applies to non-"gifted" children as well. They also get enormously pressured to get better grades, are overscheduled, forced into music lessons, come from broken homes, have crappy parents, get picked on for any number of reasons, are sensitive, etc., etc. You could just as easily write a narrative about Joe Average, who didn't have things come easily to him, who struggled, who was never told "you can accomplish anything!", whose parents said, "yeah, we don't expect great things from him", who envied all the gifted kids and their opportunities and their parents who believed in them. The biggest problem with being gifted is the sense of entitlement that comes with it. That you shouldn't have to suffer like the rest of the plebeians because you are special, or that all your problems are the result of your special curse. It's just another part of the general case of "mismatch between reality and your unrealistic expectations". At some point everyone is faced with the challenge of throwing off the yokes of other people's expectations and conditioning and finding their own way.

corin_ 16y ago

I found being a bright child had as many problems as benefits, but none due to pressure from parents or myself. School work seemed insanely easy, to the point that I made no effort and still did well. At my (private) school in the UK, twice a term we were given report cards, and for each subject we were given A1-E5 (letters for attainment, numbers for effort). In nearly every subject I would get A5. In my GCSEs I did no revision, was up until 6am before every exam, and still aced them. At that point I realised how bored I was. Since the age of 7 I had assumed I would end up studying music at university (for a few years aged 13-15 I changed that plan to be a CS degree), but at 16 I decided to drop out of school because I couldn't face another two insanely boring years before getting into real education. The four years since then have been amazing, I got into an amazing company that sent me around the world until I got tired of travelling too much, and that has let me pretty much change my job description whenever I fancied doing something new. I'd love to go to university some day and get the degree in music that I've wanted since I was 7, but I'm not in any rush. The biggest thing for me was that I was never taught to learn anything through school. Luckily I was musical, which taught me great discipline (recordings and concert tours aged 10-13), and atheltic (was once a really good footballer, though in the last few years I've become very lazy and put on an awful lot of weight). That, combined with making my way in the business world, has taught me what may friends had to learn in school: how to actually work on something and improve at it.

Tycho 16y ago
I'm always curious how this 'make no effort and still get As' thing works. At what point does the information enter your head? -before you ever cover it in class? -when the teacher explains it once? -when the teacher re-explains it? -when you do your homework assignments? -when you casually read over the notes just before the exam? -when you read the exam questions and infer what they need to know? I'm genuinely curious. I've always personally suspected that peoples biggest problem (me included) is not paying attention in class, or being unable to do so, or the teaching moving too fast for them. I figure if you're really attentive enough, revision wouldn't be so necessary. Watching advanced lecture courses on YouTube where I can rewind any confusing parts and refer to other sources if need be, has been a more efficient learning process for me.

neilk 16y ago

Having been formerly labeled a gifted child, I'm not sure they really exist. I'm not sure the child has something different -- rather s/he does something different. I was definitely very intelligent by IQ tests, but it seems to me that what I really had as a child was focus. Arbitrary tasks -- ones that I set for myself, as well as the ones the world does -- were met with the total commitment that adults usually reserve for wartime. So of course I advanced more quickly. As for why I had such focus, that's complicated and probably varies from person to person. But did anyone else feel that way?

robertk 16y ago

I went to a private liberal arts college at 11 and completed a BS in math, physics, and computer science at 16. However, I also wrote for the student newspaper, competed on speech team, and went to the local high school's prom with my high school friends. This, I think, kept me grounded. Yet when I went off to graduate school in pure mathematics, I was frozen. Whereas in my undergraduate years, I effortlessly comprehended the analysis and group theory flung at me, I learned in my first-year of graduate school that had been child's play. Study and work was now required. I failed again and again and it was painful (graduate students are not supposed to get B's). Everything had come instantly to me in the past, so that almost no study was necessary. Things did not work this way in grad school, and I've been learning the work ethic for the past three years. Yet my idiot brain still can't help but think "Noam Elkies' discovery about supersingular elliptic curves got him a doctorate when he was 20! Drin'feld proved the GL_2 case of the Langlands conjectures for the function field case when he 19, for chrissakes. What are you doing, dumbass?" I'm still not sure how I turned out, or am turning out. I am a TA and have a high rating on ratemyprofessors.com, so at least my students like me. I'm learning salsa and hold weekly classic movie nights for my group of friends. Just for shits and giggles, when one of my best friends from high school (who is a manager at Wendy's) suggested "you should be good at more than just academics, you should be good with girls, man," I dove into the world of game (not the tricks part, the improving yourself as a man and "naturally" charismatic being portion). Hilariously, that same friend now thinks of me less as a "genius" and more as a "womanizer"! I am not and will never be as intelligent as the ideal my parents and childhood friends and teachers half-jokingly imposed when suggesting I will win four Nobel prizes before the age of 20. For those following a similar path, neither will you. So the trick is to take the cliche advice, stop agonizing over credentials and success, and just live life; learn some salsa, fall in love, do a startup, and backpack through Europe.

Almaviva 16y ago
Where would you start out these days in the "world of game"? I also got an undergrad degree in math essentially without trying and have had some rough periods making it to adulthood without any work ethic but I think I've recovered and have built up a pretty successful programming career. However, I have absolutely no ability to attract women and have experienced nothing but rejection for the last couple of years, and I may be beyond what game can fix. My problem is social awkwardness and it's the kind that runs all the way down - with people I am very comfortable with I am still very quiet, inarticulate, and don't have much ability to do conversational improvisation. Being in extremely good physical shape didn't make a difference and I've done Salsa too, where I'm literally always the last person women pick when they're all asked to partner up. I've done a year on internet personals with only rejection, and the same with speed dating - typical results would be me checking off 15/25 girls as yes and getting zero matches. I'm extremely non-picky with women. Everyone I meet likes me, but for sexual interest? Forget it. I'd love to be exactly the person I want, and socialize with women the way I would with men (i.e. just not giving a shit and saying what I want to) but this obviously isn't working for me! So gaming the evo-psychology system seems to be one of the few possibilities left.

robertk 16y ago

A child that learns ideas young might not understand them as deeply as a similarly-intelligent adult that learns them when he is 20. Although the vast majority of such adults will not understand the ideas as well as the child, the simple fact that there are many more adults studying such things than gifted children means the pioneers and important researchers in the field are statistically unlikely to be prodigies.

DaniFong 16y ago

A while back, I wrote an essay on the subject... http://daniellefong.com/2008/05/15/advice-to-the-bright-and-young/ http://daniellefong.com/2008/05/15/advice-to-the-bright-and-...

jkin 16y ago

People just need to know the techniques of pressure management. When I was raised, my parents taught me always to be humble. There are always people better, smarter than you. I got my PhD from UCLA and happened to know this guy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao He was a full professor at 24 and teaching people much older than him and he was the winner of fields medal. So, if u have too much pressure, think twice that somewhere, someone is more intelligent. And I am sure just like all other records, someday, someone will break it.

michaelchisari 16y ago

"Gifted", like the word "Genius", pales in importance to hard work and tenacity. Give me one child with average IQ and a lasting obsession with one or more subjects, and another child with a "gifted" IQ and a bad work ethic and fleeting interests, and we'll see who's more accomplished at 40.

JonathanFields 16y ago

Stanford psych professor Carol Dweck has research and written extensively on how your adoption of either a "growth" mindset - achievement is largely work-based - or "fixed" mindset - achievement is largely gift-based - is largely determinative of the long-term success of those to whom things seem to come without effort younger in life. https://www.stanford.edu/dept/psychology/cgi-bin/drupalm/cdweck https://www.stanford.edu/dept/psychology/cgi-bin/drupalm/cdw... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck

MikeCapone 16y ago
I wrote something about this a few years ago: http://michaelgr.com/2007/04/15/fixed-mindset-vs-growth-mindset-which-one-are-you/ http://michaelgr.com/2007/04/15/fixed-mindset-vs-growth-mind... I think it's a very important concept to teach children.

elblanco 16y ago

One wonders, what exactly makes a person "superhuman"? What if you're just 5% better than the mean? 10%? Does the label "human" encompass all of the variations? Does an IQ in the top 1-2% of a nation make somebody "superhuman"? (I originally wrote an overly long post full of personal anecdotes recalling the pain of being smart and different, but thought these questions added more).

eru 16y ago
IQ may not be even real, after all. Just a statistical artefact.

sokoloff 16y ago

For 36 years, Dr. Freeman has studied a group of 210 British children - some gifted, most not. In her new book, Gifted Lives, she concluded that, of the 20 identified as gifted, only six went on to adult lives that matched the potential of their early promise (one is a successful opera singer; another runs a hedge fund.) I would think that 6 out of 20 is statistically significantly higher than any control group of their peers. Sure, that means 14 of 20 didn't, but how many of the 190 not identified as gifted went on to similar levels of achievement? For parity, the answer would be 57. I'd wager the actual answer is no more than 1, with the most likely answer being 0. It's not that being labelled as gifted as a pre-teen is some kind of express ticket punch to fame, fortune and Easy Street. How could it be? You've only spent 8 maybe 9 years not soiling yourself at that point. There will be strife and challenge along the way, and not everyone will rise above those challenges, for a variety of internal or external reasons. I'd still prefer to be in the 20 rather than the 190. (Background: in a US program run by Johns Hopkins(SMPY-CTY), I was so identified @11, and while, in the subsequent 28 years, I may not have become an opera singer or run a hedge fund, I've done OK. I'll also observe that some of my past was very easy, other portions were fairly difficult. I could have achieved more, but I could also have acheived way, way less.)