Gifted Teens
Gifted teenagers have special characteristics that make them exceptional in intellectual talents and abilities. This superior intelligence impacts your emotional and social development.
Adolescence is not easy for anyone, especially for the gifted. Sometimes their anguish and difficulties are greater than those of others. They feel different, are treated as different, and raise very high expectations in others. They often live under a lot of pressure and their reactions can affect their lives.
When is a child or teenager considered gifted?
For some schools of thought, it is the IQ that defines whether a child is gifted. These theorists consider that if this coefficient exceeds 130 points, there is a case of intellectual giftedness.
New theories about intelligence and the concept of multiple intelligences led to the emergence of several positions in this regard. While IQ is a useful indicator, it is not a fair sample of everything intelligence comprises.
The most modern conceptions characterize gifted people as people with “high intellectual capacities”. It is a much broader and more inclusive concept, which is defined as the existence of an exceptional potential to be developed.
Based on this idea, the indicators that define gifted children and adolescents go beyond IQ. They also include creativity, learning style, evolutionary development and other characteristics that make up the person.
These are children who are precocious in the learning process and in the interaction with their surroundings. They have an extraordinary memory, an ability to concentrate and develop language very early.
How Gifted Teens Live
These are some outstanding characteristics of these young people:
- This quality usually manifests itself from early childhood. Parents and teachers realize that children have high abilities from the earliest stages of growth.
- Often gifted people feel isolated and misunderstood by others. Your parents tend to worry about these situations. Thus, they are looking for suitable schools and professional advice to fulfill their role in the best possible way.
- When adolescence arrives, life becomes more complicated. Gifted teenagers are, above all, teenagers. In this way, they oscillate between the need to be like others and the demands of their special nature.
- These specially gifted children become reflective early on and have their own opinions about social and moral values. They know a lot and it is natural for them to manifest it. But this aspect makes them different and can generate rejection.
- As with everyone at this stage of life, gifted teenagers try to assert themselves as people.
- Gifted teenagers are concerned about their physical appearance and try, in every way, to become like others. They need to be part of groups with other teenagers and this is not easy, as they are aware that they are different and others reject them. So your life can become miserable.
Possible reactions from gifted teenagers
Adolescence causes insecurity in gifted adolescents. There are times when they feel like they belong in the adult world and prefer to spend more time with older people. In others, typical teenage anxiety invades them and they want to stay in this young world even though they have difficulty making friends.
Sometimes these young people spend a good deal of time navigating one world or another. So they can be defined by one of the two. At this point, the reactions of gifted teenagers can generally be of two types:
rebellion
There are gifted teenagers who rebel against everything, which also happens to normal teenagers. It’s their way of showing the world that they are like everyone else. However, the rebellion can go very far, reaching the point of wanting to abandon their studies.
It is an often-repeated reaction that can be risky. In their eagerness to rebel against authority and defy parental expectations, these teenagers can become drug or alcohol users.
Isolation
At the other extreme are gifted teenagers who isolate themselves. They dedicate themselves exclusively to studies and are always locked up with books or the computer. They do not have an active social life, do not receive friends and do not visit them.
Therefore, this behavior is also worrying. Adolescence is an especially important time in life for learning to live in society.
Parents are the teenager’s source of support, and dialogue and attention are essential. So sharing activities with your kids is the first step. However, if the situation is presenting itself as a problem, it is advisable to look for professionals who can guide the way forward.
