Gifted Children: An unsubstantiated psychological assessment

[Tabouli]

Elkins:
> I was always under the impression that "underachiever" meant
"somebody who has prioritized their values very differently than I 
have, and in a way that makes me feel upset and threatened<

Elkins (later post):
> So someone is an "underachiever" if he has failed to reach the goals
> that he has set for himself?  That seems a quite reasonable definition
> to me.<

I think this is the crux of the problem, and what I was alluding to with my earlier comments on gifted children being picked out as being Destined For Greatness.  The tension between the definition of achievement and "fulfilment of potential" that well-meaning but flummoxed educators/parents impose on the child, and the child's own aspirations and perceptions and personality.

You see, the poor child is at a bit of a disadvantage here.  Even the most gifted of children doesn't have access to much information about what happens in the adult world where s/he is predicted to be such a success.  In fact, I also suspect that most (not all, but most) of the educators trying to help the child typically don't know much about how someone really ends up becoming a Nobel prize winning nuclear physicist or brilliant world-changing political leader or whatever.  Who does?  They just pick out some roles which to them indicate overwhelming "success" and "intelligence" in their society as examples of the glories the child could achieve, without being able to give the child a realistic idea of what has to happen in between.  Encourage the child to Think Big.

So OK, let's say the child looks around and tries to figure out where s/he wants to apply this genius s/he apparently possesses.  What is the child likely to find?  Information on extremely famous and celebrated people in the child's fields of interest, yes, the Nobel prize winners, the rich and famous, the people that changed the course of history.  These people then become the child's definition of "success".  Anything less becomes, in the child's eyes, "underachieving".

(I'm not saying this happens in every case, but I've certainly seen it.  I also went to a seminar on this very subject at Melbourne University a year or two ago, which presented research on IQ and self-esteem and noted that while children of above average IQ generally had above average self-esteem, there was a dramatic drop in self-esteem among children of very high IQ, and the research suggested that this was because these children were using a different basis for measuring their achievements).

The problem being that while gifted children may be 1 in 5000, people who go on to become incredibly successful and influential are far, far, fewer.  It takes more than giftedness, it take effort, it takes resourcefulness, it takes being in the right place at the right time.  The chances of the child actually attaining so stratospheric a level of "success" are, in fact, pretty small.  Perhaps the mid-teen crisis I mentioned earlier is the point at which the child recognises that the path to greatness ain't quite as smooth and guaranteed as s/he was led to believe.  I mean, take Nobel prize winning research.  These days, you'd probably need to spend at least 5-10 years at university before being in a position to do anything Great.  That's a long time in an education system you've to date found boring and frustrating.  And so on.

OK, so gifted children aren't stupid (:D).  They figure this out soon enough.  But what do they do then?

Elkins, quoting me:
>> At this point, there seems to be a split.  Some gifted children 
>> bite the bullet and grudgingly apply themselves to working within 
>> the system.  And excel. Others seem to hit a point of
>> disillusionment with the whole education process and more or less 
>> resign from it.  
>
>And then there are those of us who bite the bullet, learn the trick 
of actually working for things, grudgingly accept the fact that 
sometimes you really do have to work within the system, and then in 
the end leave it anyway, because we eventually come to the 
realization that what the system has to offer wasn't actually what we 
wanted in the first place.<
>
>Others tend to think that we have failed to "excel."

OK, I did put that too simplistically.  What I should have said was around puberty or shortly afterward there seems to be a paradigm shift, and what happens at this point is crucial.  For external observers, a common (though not universal) manifestation of this paradigm shift is that the child suddenly ceases to "achieve" in the domains where s/he was previously achieving effortlessly.

What's going on in the child's head is less easy to determine.  Don't know what research has been done here, but I'd guess what's happening in there is harder to access.  Qualitative research, maybe?  I wonder how willing or even able your typical gifted child would really be to explain to an interviewer what has caused the change.  I'll bet they get the school counsellors out in force when Junior Genius suddenly slumps, but how many gifted teenagers would really be prepared to tell them why?  They may not know themselves, not really (probably more EQ than IQ, this sort of insight?).  I dunno.  Just can't be bothered any more, it seems pointless.  After years of being held up as superior to other people they often, alas, have difficulty respecting other people who are almost certainly "inferior" to them (one gifted guy I know was going to a much-needed psychiatrist but was convinced he had far more intelligence and insight than said psychiatrist and therefore treated his sessions like an intellectual power game.  No idea what the psychiatrist made of this).

I'd guess what's actually going on is that the child has begun to question the imposed definition of "achievement" (often triggered by the sudden onset of Effort Required).  Some decide to keep playing the game, for a range of reasons, some decide they've had enough and rebel, resign, or drastically change direction, to the chagrin of the imposers.  Some, as Elkins mentioned, keep playing the game until they can get some measure of independence and then chuck it in.

So then what happens?

My anecdotal impression is that when you've spent the first 12-16 years of your life being proclaimed a genius superior to other mortals, it's pretty hard to let go of.  By then it's already become a central pillar of most gifted children's self-esteem, especially seeing they usually have social difficulties which erode their self-esteem in other areas.  I suspect many of the gifted children who keep playing the game do so for this very reason: with minimal effort, the education system will keep providing self-esteem stroking evidence of their superiority, on which they become very dependent.  The path is rockier for those who rebel with conviction.

For a start, as we've discussed, the typical reaction of the parents and educators is horror.  What's happened to you?  You're *underachieving*!  Very stressful, because the child is actually dependent on said adults.  But also stressful because if the child rejects intellectual superiority as a valid measure of worth, what replaces it in their identity?  What do they have left?  If the child is lucky, s/he will find something else which isn't too self-destructive (computers, role-playing, art, I've known a few who made it to university and then flung themselves into the SCA, etc.).  If not, things can get very ugly indeed.  Crime.  Suicide.  Substance abuse.  Mental illness.  Often coupled, at least in my observation, with desperate clinging to the belief that they are, nonetheless, still superior beings, they're just not prepared to make the compromises lesser individuals make to claim the glory which could easily be theirs if they could just decide on the direction in which they want to apply their genius.  And plagued by a inner terror that perhaps they're actually *not* superior after all, perhaps they actually *wouldn't* achieve glory if they applied themselves (and hence they'd better not apply themselves just in case), and, often, a horror of growing older, as every passing year takes them further from the system which lauded them without the great achievements they had been told were awaiting them afterwards (except that they'd *rejected* that, hadn't they? But then, what do I have left?).  Deep, deep inner conflict, self-destructive behaviour, etc.etc.

OK, so perhaps in those last few points my sample size has dwindled to two specific male case studies.  And there do seem to be notable gender differences (thoughts, Shaun?).  But the similarities between the two case studies was disturbing, especially given how different the two men were in other ways.  And, given that both people in question are ex-boyfriends of mine and I am a sinister social scientist, I got a frighteningly in-depth psychological profile on both of them.  When I witnessed the first one (definitely profoundly gifted, and in more domains than academic achievement: also in sport, drawing, writing, languages, you name it) I thought he was a one-off.  It was the second one exhibiting exactly the same behaviour and thinking patterns that really alarmed me (on my own behalf as well - what is it with me and men like this?).  I then started thinking about the other purportedly "gifted" people I know and have known, my father, myself, my peers in the gifted class at school, various of my friends and acquaintances, and was disturbed to recognise elements of the same pattern cropping up over and over again.  The weird superior-inferior self-esteem profile.  The mid-teens crisis.  The conflicted feelings about their "underachieving" or, conversely, the desperate, desperate need to "achieve".

An example of an "achieving" gifted child was someone from my Honours Psych class.  Very very bright, very very insecure.  Used to have these odd conversations in which he would collect evidence of his superiority to others in everything from university marks and IQ scores to the expression in people's eyes.  I visited him once and he had put copies of his academic transcripts and university prizes all over his bedroom walls.  No prizes for guessing the central pillar of his self-esteem.  He came second, instead of first in the class that year, and was practically suicidal.  Another "achieving" gifted child I know was put on the Dean's list for top 20 Arts students and bounced around beaming radiantly for weeks, telling everyone three or four times, mentioning it in every conversation, and then went into crisis when she failed to get a first in one of her subjects the following year.  I myself am of this ilk.  My trick is being very messy and disorganised and leaving everything to the last minute so I *always* have an excuse for not being brilliant at everything, you see.  I don't deal with "failure" (i.e. not doing brilliantly) at all well.  I was lucky enough to *get* a special gifted education program, and I still have a lot of the tendencies I observed in my two exes.  (Fortunately, I've finally rebelled with conviction, and at an age where I'm no longer dependent on the people who disapprove).

How would people like these come out in the "gifted children" follow-up study stakes?  Probably fine.  So long as they're getting results they consider acceptable (i.e. extremely high) they come across as fine.  They're "achieving" in a socially applauded domain of endeavour.  But how healthy are they really?  (well, how healthy is anyone really, but anyway).  As healthy as can be hoped for?  I think there's a very important issue which, to the best of my knowledge, hasn't been explored enough and this is the child's *identity*.  Self-image.  It's the putting all your eggs in one basket problem.  If  you single a child out on the basis of IQ and everything that happens thenceforth revolves around being intellectually superior to others, the child is being taught that intellectual superiority is his or her defining feature.  That it's everything.  Their role is intellectual achievement, and if they don't get it, they are a failure as a person.  If they try to reject this role, they tend to be judged as failures and malingerers while they search for other roles, and if they don't find one they can adopt instead, the results can be horrible.

My thoughts (for what they're worth without extensive research into the area!) are that gifted children should be encouraged to *diversify*.  Given the opportunity to find roles other than "intellectually gifted" to play, preferably outside school, so that their self-esteem can be spread a little more widely.  Acting.  Dancing.  Drawing.  Sport.  Whatever.  Something that they and other people can define them by which isn't related to their high IQ.  As an example, I took up karate in my early twenties, and by jingo it was good for me.  A domain of endeavour where intellectual ability was not going to get me very far.  Where I might manage to be good, but would never be exceptional.  Where there would always be a lot of people Better Than Me, and I had to learn it was actually OK to be ordinary (Embarrassingly, I struggled with this after a lifetime of indoctrination, but my sinister social scientist went to work on my reactions and found them a very interesting addition to my musings on gifted children).

Now admittedly, the way the education system is set up makes this very difficult.  The way it works defines gifted children by their "giftedness" by default.  I think one of the advantages of putting gifted kids together, (though it still means defining them by their giftedness) is that at last each individual isn't being defined by everyone as The Smart Kid, and they get the chance to define themselves by other things.

OK, I'm bracing myself.  Hit me with the research and counter examples and completely different personal experiences...

Tabouli.


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