How to Recognize a gifted child?

A gifted child has a different way of understanding and processing reality. Their high intellectual abilities can lead them to be misunderstood by the world around them. A child with high academic performance or who is early from being able to acquire several and various knowledge can often be considered to be a gifted child. However, it is not always so.

The superdote includes gifts and talents that need to be properly educated so that they can deploy their full potential, for their own benefit and society as a whole, but also to be happy children. At this point, parents play a crucial role in recognizing whether our child is a gifted child.

What does it mean to be a gifted child?

When it comes to high intellectual abilities, as it is increasingly common to call gifted children; this concept includes overeating, talent, and intellectual precocity.

To simplify the concept and make it more understandable, it is established that a gifted child is that has an intelligence ratio equal to or greater than 130.

Being a gifted child means enjoying a much higher exceptionality in all areas and skills of intelligence. A child with good school performance, or very talented in the arts or sports, or very precocious in learning to speak, is not necessarily a gifted person.

Did you know that? Emotional Intelligence in Children

How do we recognize if we have a gifted son?

For many parents, it’s hard to have a child that’s different from others. It is a challenge to understand that it is a child who, as much as we try, will not respond or behave according to the pattern established by the average of children his or her age.

In fact, a gifted child may also have a very difficult childhood, because he perceives much more information and stimuli than he can manage. The world around you can be incomprehensible, slow, and even hostile to your capabilities.

Parents are instrumental in ensuring the development and happiness of a gifted child. To do this, it is possible to detect some fundamental characteristics in the home.

Intellectual precocity

A gifted child will acquire early intellectual or psychomotor milestones. They are very demanding babies and are overstimulated easily.

They raise their heads in the first month of life, vocalize two sounds different from the 45 days of birth, and say their first words before the year… They also speak before the age of two or write before the rest of their companions.

They are children who handle a precise, rich, and very wide vocabulary for their age. They have a prodigious memory, both in the short and long term. He learns very quickly and is curious to learn more.

Emotional and sensory hypersensitivity

A gifted child is very emotionally and sensorily intense. Emotional intensity baffles parents, who don’t know how to understand excess emotionality in their reactions.

He is a child with a low tolerance for frustration and usually bursts into tantrums or huge tantrums. It reacts exaggeratedly to a sad or scary film. It has a high and intense ability to be empathic with others. It is not uncommon for them to suffer from depression and anxiety.

Sensory hypersensitivity is little known and even less understood. They are children who are upset by the label of clothes, the loud sounds, the intense lights…

Highly creative

A gifted child is very creative because he perceives reality differently. It’s very imaginative. As sensory perception is greater than in other people, it comes up with many things and many solutions to the problems it encounters.

These children will question authority and rules if they are not argued and make no sense to them. They will be very skilled at giving a solution, but even more so by asking questions that will leave their parents unanswered. They are concerned about existential issues at a very young age such as life, death, the existence of God, or love.

They have a predilection for cognitive, puzzle-type games or puzzles. They also opt for construction games that impose increasingly complex challenges on them.

Psychomotor hypersensitivity

They are children who are constantly moving. They have surplus energy and are hard to run out. They are enthusiastic and need to be in physical or cognitive activity. Commonly, they are mistakenly given a diagnosis of Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) because boredom leads them to put the excess energy into being in motion.

However, they are far from having attention problems. On the contrary, they have a high concentration capacity when they perform a task of their interest. On the other hand, they can be very distracted if they are not interested.

Find out: How to Treat a Child with ADHD?

Evolutionary Disincry

This term is used by psychologists to describe an uneven evolution in development. Children with high capacity may be concerned about existential issues and, in turn, react, with a huge tantrum at the loss of a toy.

It also happens that the gifted child wants to do things that he has thought and imagined, but he cannot do them because his level of motorism is not allowed because of his age. So we are before children who have an intellectual evolution that does not correspond to their development on other levels, such as emotional or motorism. This generates great frustration and helplessness.

How to educate a gifted child?

The education system cannot always meet the demands of these children, who are seen as a burden or a problem. This can lead to failure, both on a personal and academic level.

Educating a gifted child is not easy, as they have a complex temperament: they are distracted, self-critical, perfectionist, and competitive, with a great sense of independence. Therefore, they need the family and school not to be overly rigid and open to stimulating their development.

To find out if your child has high capabilities, you need a full expert assessment. This should include intellectual quotient, creativity, life history, and emotional state.

Beyond what the outcome of the evaluation says, he appreciates the enormous potential of a gifted child. Far from being a problem, but quite the opposite: it is a blessing.

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