What is Gifted Child Counseling?
As you may have noticed, parenting and gifted child counseling can have unique challenges. Their interests and emotions can be very intense. They may at a young age develop worries about things that normally only adults worry about- before they are developmentally ready to cope and before they are old enough to take independent actions to address their concerns. Gifted children in counseling may also struggle with social skills, and their age-peers may not be able to relate to topics your gifted child is eager to discuss.
Let’s dive a little deeper into what kinds of issues often come up during counseling for gifted children.
Asynchronous Development in Gifted Children
This refers to a tendency in gifted people to develop unevenly within and across domains of functioning. They may have an incredible long term memory, yet struggle with short term memory, doing homework but forgetting to turn it in, forgetting chores, assignments. This can create frustrated high expectations based on a high overall IQ, when performance lags, it may be assumed to represent a lack of will, concern, character, or discipline. The gifted person may initiate and maintain adult level academic conversations yet lag behind age-peers in social and emotional development, such as poor perspective taking, rigid, controlling behavior, or quickly getting frustrated and having meltdowns. I have seen very young gifted children whose fine motor skills lagged behind what they could see as possible in their brain. They attempt to build a complex tower, knock it down by accident lacking the needed fine motor control, and a huge meltdown ensues! Some gifted children fail to pick up on the expected adult-child boundaries, correcting adults and talking back, even giving adults orders, which is very unexpected!
Twice Exceptional or 2E
This is also common in the gifted population, and similar to asynchronous but more extreme. This could be a person who is gifted and also has ADHD, ODD, Autism, dyslexia, a mood disorder, or other often missed disorder. Why is the disorder often missed? Because the gifted person is smart enough to hide their difficulty, sometimes called masking. A dyslexic gifted child may not know they are dyslexic, and be smart enough to test in the average range on standardized reading tests. Nobody sees how much harder they are working than everyone else to read and comprehend schoolwork. One time, I worked with a generally pleasant 3rd grader who could recite pretty much any and everything to do with Greek mythology. Great parents. Terrible fighting with Mom after school over homework. What looked like oppositional and defiant behavior was really a child overtaxed with the burden of struggling through words all day because of dyslexia. In this case, each condition masked the other. Dyslexia prevented the school staff from recognizing giftedness, the gifted ability masked or hid the dyslexia. Got the testing requested, qualified as both dyslexic and gifted, adjusted educational programming, happy kid and parents again.
Hypersensitivities in Gifted Child Counseling
This refers to any of several domains a gifted person can be at once both very caught up in and and sometimes overwhelmed by. Thought to be a product of heightened sensory processing and louder neural inputs into the brain.
Imaginational- Very busy fantasy life. May have a bed full of stuffed animals, all with names, used to play out imagined scenarios and interactions. May tend to get lost in their own world, Walter Witty. May blur fantasy with reality.
Sensual- Heightened sensitivity or or appreciation of sensory experiences; bright lights, textures, smells, tags in clothes, noise.
Intellectual- Intensely curious, deep moral thinking, relentless pursuit of truth and problem solving.
Psychomotor- Driven to be active, trouble staying still, fast talker.
Emotional- Deeply empathetic, strong emotional attachments, profound emotional expression, intense response to joy, sadness, injustice.
These hypersensitivities can lead to highly developed abilities that also interfere with less preferred tasks.
Factors Interfering with Correct Gifted Identification
Schools often employ a behavioral survey, sometimes called “leadership skills,” as part of an evaluation of giftedness. Not all gifted people are always nice and easy to get along with, They may argue, complain, refuse assignments they see is beneath them, become irritated due to boredom. They are not all teacher pleasers, which can prevent them from being correctly identified and served. Twice exceptional conditions can commonly prevent identification, as can differences in culture or language that can make the assessment tools invalid and unfair. Some gifted people are bored underachievers, appearing unmotivated and disorganized. Others may value social success over academic success, hiding how smart they are to fit in and avoid stigma. “Not a nerd.”
Lastly, gifted people can have very busy minds, having trouble turning it off and going to sleep. Some gifted people just don’t need very much sleep. Did you know that as IQ increases so do tendencies to worry and be anxious? The more you can think and imagine what could go wrong, the more you have to worry about!
Counseling gifted people may involve teaching emotional recognition and management skills for the bright and intense, social skills intsruction, CBT and skills to negotiate heightened awareness of adult problems and injustices. A good reward system can help with motivation to complete mundane rote tasks. Consultation with school and home can help create accommodations such as noise cancelling headphones for loud environments.