This is a great post about how people misunderstand what “gifted kid” actually means. This post goes well with The Downside to Being a Gifted Child article as well.
What Being a Gifted Kid Actually Means
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In my experience ‘gifted’ kids have a higher propensity to be neurodivergent, not neurotypical. It’s just that their neurodivergence happens to be one that steers them into the sort of things that look like being gifted in early education. The majority of kids I knew in gifted kids programmes growing up turned out to have some sort of neurodivergence and most of the neurodivergent adults I know were in a gifted kids programme.
I had to go back on that sentence too. Not sure why the author used neuroAtypical rather than the more common neurodiverse.
Neurodivergence is merely the fact of functioning neurologically in a different manner to the average; so all gifted children are in fact neurodivergent by definition. The term often gets used to refer to autism, true; but that’s like saying that a bonfire and a candle flame are the same because they’re both fire. A lot of gifted kids do turn out to be on the autism spectrum; I certainly did. But a lot don’t. This doesn’t mean that they’re not neurodivergent – it simply means that their particular neurodivergence isn’t on the autism spectrum.
And yes: one of the great problems of being gifted is the fact that you aren’t taught certain useful life skills because you simply don’t need them at the time that others do. I never learned good study habits pre-university, because I had no trouble reading, absorbing and comprehending basic data and therefore had no need to put myself through extensive studying. It would have been helpful if I’d been pushed to reach the point where I ran hard up against that need while young; but since doing so would have pushed my knowledge years above those around me, it wasn’t something my public school teachers ever did for me. So I got to university level sans those skills.
Then there was my discalculia. I was looked down upon as lazy by my maths teachers, because I was obviously a towering genius – so in their mind, my troubles with maths had to come down to being intellectually lazy on the back of being so naturally capable at everything else. Laziness had nothing to do with it, of course – I went on to complete 5 professional qualifications across four professions, and lazy people don’t do that. So laziness was never the issue. The issue was that due to generalized brilliance, I was assumed to be without learning difficulties – and that was incorrect.
All of which showcases why the approach to gifted children as people not needing special aid in schooling is just plain wrong. We do; because without it, our preternatural understanding will prevent us from learning valuable life skills like good study habits, and will see issues we aren’t aware of not being picked up on. I wasn’t identified as autistic until I was 30, because my intellectual brilliance discouraged my educators from considering the possibility; and I’ve no doubt that I’ve paid a steep price for that. My discalculia wasn’t picked up on until after that; and that’s had its cost, too. I often wonder how much more I might have been able to accomplish if these things had been caught and addressed earlier in my life.
Thats a lot of self-jerking, but that sounds like something that would happen. People tend to create lots of expectations and assumptions.
I woudnt know much about this scenario, though, on the account of not being “gifted”, beyond just early internal reading ability. Even that is doubtful. For all your complaints, it must still be nice to be cognitively better wired. Good for you.
Lol.