How To Recognize Over-gifted Children

In order to recognize an over-gifted child, you have to turn to a specialist. However, it is possible to recognize important signals that allow the parents to develop the child in his potential.

Gifted children are different and perceive the world around them differently. Due to their intellectual giftedness, they are sometimes not understood by the world around them.

A child with high academic achievements or who learns particularly quickly is often thought to be gifted. But this is not always the case.

The giftedness contains gifts and talents that must be properly developed and promoted so that the children can develop their full potential. In this way, they and society benefit from their gift and they become happy children.

As parents, we therefore play a crucial role in recognizing whether our child is gifted.

What does giftedness mean in children?

When one speaks of high intellectual aptitude, the concept includes giftedness, talent, and intellectual precocity.

To make this concept a little easier to understand, one speaks of giftedness when the child’s IQ is 130 or higher.

Being a gifted child means that you score much higher in all areas and abilities of intelligence. A child who does well at school, has a special talent for arts or sports, or is a very early speaker is not necessarily gifted.

How do I know if my child is gifted?

Many parents find it difficult to have a child who is different. It is a challenge to understand a child who does not behave according to the usual pattern of behavior for his age.

The over-gifted childhood can even be a difficult time, as the child receives much more information and stimuli than they can process. The world around him can seem incomprehensible, slow, and even hostile to his talents.

Parents are fundamental to enabling the development and well-being of an gifted child. In addition, it is possible to recognize some characteristic features at home.

Intellectual precocity

A gifted child reaches intellectual or psychomotor milestones at an early age. They are very exhausting babies who easily over-stimulate themselves.

They lift their heads in the first month of life, utter two different sounds within the first 45 days, speak their first word before they are a year old … They speak and write in the same way earlier than their comrades.

They have rich, precise vocabulary for their age and excellent short and long term memories. They learn very quickly and are extremely inquisitive.

Emotional and sensory hypersensitivity

Over-gifted children are very intense both emotionally and sensually. This emotional intensity can worry parents because they do not understand why the child is so extremely sensitive.

It is a child who has a low tolerance for frustration and is prone to enormous fits of anger. They also react exaggerated to a sad or scary movie.

Furthermore, they have a high degree of empathy with others. It is not uncommon for them to suffer from depression and feelings of anxiety.

Sensory hypersensitivity is little known and even less understood. The children feel disturbed by clothes labels, loud noises or intense light …

Highly creative children

Gifted children are very creative because they understand the world in different ways. You have a great imagination. Because their sensory perception is higher than that of other people, they often find solutions to problems that others have not thought of.

These children question authority and rules when they don’t make sense to them or are not properly presented. They can find solutions very quickly, but they also ask questions that their parents often cannot answer.

From an early age they are preoccupied with existential problems such as life, death, the existence of God or love.

They love cognitive games, such as puzzles or construction games, where they have to cope with ever greater challenges.

Hypersensitivity and psychomotor skills

These children are constantly on the move. They have a lot of energy and you just can’t calm them down. They are very enthusiastic and need either physical or cognitive activity.

Often times, they are mistakenly diagnosed with attention deficit / hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) because they are so bored and have to use up the excess energy through exercise.

However, they have no attention deficit at all. On the contrary, they are capable of paying close attention when they are doing a task that interests them. Otherwise, they can be distracted very quickly.

Dyssynchrony in development

This term is used by psychologists to describe a different type of development in these children.

Gifted children can deal with existential issues on the one hand, but at the same time react with an excessive fit of anger if they lose a toy.

A gifted child may also want to do things that they have thought about and imagined. However, his motor development does not yet allow this activity. 

So you notice that the intellectual development of these children does not match the development in other areas, such as the emotional or motoric. This causes them a lot of frustration and inability.

How do you raise a gifted child?

The educational system does not have the capacity to meet the demands of these children, who they see as a burden or a problem. This can lead to children failing on both a personal and academic level.

It is not that easy to raise a gifted child because they have a difficult temperament. They are easily distracted, self-criticizing, perfectionists, and eager to compete while making great sense of their own freedom.

Therefore it is necessary that both school and family show a certain degree of flexibility and are open to stimulate their development.

In order to determine giftedness in children, a complete examination by experts is required . IQ, creativity, life story and emotional state are checked.

Apart from the results, it is important that you appreciate the great potential of giftedness. It’s not a problem, on the contrary: it’s a blessing.