To begin with, we are going to differentiate between having talent and being gifted, because as the expert Olga Carmona, an expert in Diagnosis and Psychopedagogical Care for Children with High Abilities, says, “all gifted people are precocious but not all precocious children are gifted”.
Giftedness is characterized by excellence in all areas of learning , while talented children excel in one discipline or several combined, but are nevertheless below average in all other areas. The World Health Organization establishes that the gifted child has an IQ of 130 or more. Based on these numbers, and always diagnosed by a specialist, we can speak of giftedness.
It is useful to know if our child has these abilities because, if so, it will surely be difficult for him to adapt to the ordinary system and he may end up having attitude problems that lead to something more serious as he grows older.
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Habitual patterns of behavior in gifted children
- Already as a baby, the gifted child draws attention for his ease of speaking , being able to pronounce his first word at 5 months. Although from two months it already emits different sounds.
- He continually demands attention and tends to have psychomotor development ahead of his time, raising his head before the month, for example.
- They are intense in their emotions : they are exaggeratedly impressed with sad, scary or happy movies or situations. Their reactions to frustration are also disproportionate, in the form of tantrums or demonstrating restlessness or unease. Apart from being emotionally hypersensitive, they are also sensitive: they will notice colors, shapes, noises more than the rest. Their senses seem to be more developed and the environment can disturb them as well as perceive it in a special way.
- They have an enormous energy to soak up their surroundings, they want to know everything, they are interested from a very young age in transcendental issues inappropriate for their age such as death, justice, equality, the beginning of everything … And if this curiosity is not Stimulates properly often channel their energy into excessive physical activity, sometimes resulting in a misdiagnosis of hyperactivity. Children with Attention Deficit Disorder have a hard time concentrating while a gifted person, while doing something that interests them, can stop the world they don’t care about. His capacity for abstraction is brutal.
- The memory it has is spectacular, it remembers very precise details of things, sounds, smells, places, both in the short and long term.
- He shows a preference for cognitive games such as puzzles or legos, and has a large vocabulary from a very young age . Speak very precisely.
- They are competitive and perfectionists. They will struggle in rigid school or family systems, as their sense of freedom and independence is innate.
- They are sometimes perceived as distracted, but this is simply because their brain receives too much information and becomes overloaded. You must separate the irrelevant from the important and process emotions and sensations all the time. That is why you can put your pants inside out or not attend a conversation as if you had your head elsewhere.
- Boredom at school is also a symptom, as their intellectual capacity demands more content and another type of pedagogy.
- Finally, we will say that you prefer the company of older children or adults, since you feel more comfortable than with their peers in age.
If you think that because of the behavior of your child he can be gifted, take him to a specialist to advise you, diagnose him and in case he turns out to be a child with high capacities, he can be given adequate training to avoid problems in his development.
What type of specialist will tell me if my child is gifted?