Giftedness

What is Giftedness?

Children who are gifted have the potential to perform at levels significantly beyond what might be expected for their age.

Children can be intellectually or creatively gifted. They might be physically gifted or gifted in some area of their social emotional development.

Symptoms of Giftedness

Some common signs of giftedness in children include:

Early language development. Many gifted children are speaking in short sentences at an age where the average child is just beginning to link words into pairs.
Early development of a rich vocabulary, love of words, capacity to create complete sentences.
Early motor development. Many intellectually gifted children learn to walk and run earlier than their peers.
Ability to grasp mathematical concepts at an early age
Have an exceptional memory. Some gifted children can recite songs and TV commercials before age 2.
Rapid pace of learning. Gifted young children may seem to acquire knowledge effortlessly. Often they can generalise the knowledge to new situations in unexpected ways.
The ability to ask reflective and probing questions by age 3.
Early development of classifying and investigating skills.
They may prefer the company of older children and adults to that of their peers.
They like to learn new things, are willing to examine the unusual, and are highly inquisitive.

Management of Giftedness

At Think Psychological Services, we will undertake an objective assessment of a child’s profile of cognitive strengths and weaknesses that can allow for early planning.

It is not uncommon for gifted children to have hidden learning disabilities that go undiscovered because they can easily compensate for them in the early years. As they get older, it becomes tougher for them to excel which can lead to behaviour problems and depression.

Gifted children may appear to do fine on their own, however, without appropriate challenges they can become bored. Without being challenged early on, they may find it hard to cope with work challenges as they get harder.