What is Gifted? How to recognize the signs of a gifted child

Welcome to the Vanguard Gifted Academy educational blog. I'm Elizabeth Blaetz, the head of school at Vanguard Gifted Academy. One of the biggest questions I get is How do I know my kid is gifted? 

Giftedness is asynchronous development. That's not fancy. That's not fun. That's not what everybody wants to be, but that's what giftedness is. 

Asynchronous development is when a child, intellectually, is at a whole different level than he is developmentally. Developmentally asynchronous children ask questions all the time, and as they go through this process, they also have feelings about these things that they don't understand. 

These children are thinking at a level that's totally different from their same-age peers. The thing is, they're still developmentally five or six or seven, and so they're stuck between two worlds. They still have the emotional aspects of a five or six or seven year old, but they are looking at the world like a 13, 14, or 15 year old. 

Therefore, this conflict within them is challenging, and that is where it's hard for parents to understand their child. How can a child be so mature at one moment and then be throwing a temper tantrum on the floor the next? And so, as a parent, as a teacher, you have to give them the leeway to really be who they are and understand both of them. 

Ideally, gifted children should be around people who can be with them intellectually as well as enjoy activities suited to their age. Here is a teaching example of this asynchronous development and a gifted child:

I was teaching second grade and I gave a writing assignment to my class. One boy got out his pencil and started writing, and his writing was amazing! So, I stopped by where he was working and said, “Hey, Greg, what do you have?” 

He just pointed to his paper. So, I said, “Okay.”

I started reading aloud what he wrote, and pretty soon he started turning red. His eyes swelled up and he started to cry. I looked at him and said, “Greg, what's the matter?”

He said, “That's not what I had in my brain. It's not what I wanted on the paper.” And he cried and he ripped up his paper and he threw it on the floor. 

My heart was breaking because this is a challenge that gifted children have. Their brains are so full of amazing things, but they can't get their ideas on the paper. 

So I stopped him and I said, “Wait a minute. Nobody can write all the things that are in their brain. Nobody, not even me.”

To which he replied, “Yes, you can.”

I said, “Okay, I’ll tell you what. I'll give you one minute. I'll be your scribe for one minute.” 

He looked at me with excitement because everything he was thinking was going to get on that page in one minute because Mrs. Blaetz was writing it down. He started talking, and I started writing, and he was talking about dinosaurs, and he had all the big names and all kinds of stuff about the history of dinosaurs and facts that were just totally blowing my mind. 

I was writing as fast as I could, and the buzzer went off, and our minute was up. I said, “Okay, read what I wrote.”

He started reading and pretty soon he was looking at me like I just messed up. And I said, “What's the matter?” 

He said, “You didn't write everything I said.”

I said, “I can't write that fast either!”

And with that, his shoulders relaxed, his smile came back, and we could go on with the day because he understood that his expectations couldn't be fulfilled, not even by the teacher. That’s just one example of that asynchronous development that needs to be understood by the child and by the people around him.

A wonderful resource I want to share with you is Linda Silverman’s Gifted Development Center.  Linda is an amazing psychologist who really has a good perception of giftedness, and she has a website that we'll post in the references below for you. You can go to the website and learn that giftedness is defined in a lot of different ways. The attributes I talked about today, along with many other attributes, are listed there. It is a great place for you to go and learn more about giftedness. 

Raising a gifted child can be exhilarating and exhausting. There are many of us out here that understand that. On this educational blog, we are really looking for your insights and your questions so we can help you. That's what we're here for!

This community is so important for people who have gifted children in their lives, especially parents who need support. So please share with us more about your gifted child as we continue with further blog posts about giftedness. 

Elizabeth Blaetz
Head of School
Vanguard Gifted Academy

References:

Linda Silverman Ph.D. https://www.gifteddevelopment.com/staff/linda-silverman