The Gifted Child's Struggle

"The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this:
A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive.
To him...
a touch is a blow,
a sound is a noise,
a misfortune is a tragedy,
a joy is an ecstasy,
a friend is a lover,
a lover is a god,
and failure is death.
Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create - - - so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating."
-Pearl Buck-



Obviously, children who are gifted are going to surprise you early in their development by such characteristics as talking early with a vocabulary well beyond their age-peers, learning to read before kindergarten, understanding addition and subtraction by early in kindergarten, intense curiosity, reduced need for sleep and increased energy level. Not all gifted children develop the same or show all of these characteristics. See www.brainy-child.com for a more comprehensive list of early signs of giftedness.

My focus today is on ways giftedness can create problems and conflicts; being gifted can also mean difficulty socializing with age peers, thinking styles that don't always mesh well with the demands from the environment, even children who see themselves as little adults, challenging teachers and parents.

I remember being in the second grade with Mrs. Hefty. At the time I was very interested in learning about all of the creatures living outdoors; insects, reptiles, amphibians, mammals, birds. I remember struggling to stay still and pay attention to the boring once upon a time stories the teacher read during reading circle, and wondering why we couldn't be outside experiencing life and learning about what was real. If the teachers are so smart, I remember thinking, why don't they give the answers while the students ask the questions. I got in trouble a lot. "Mrs. Mason, Bradley doesn't sit still during reading circle, he wanders away, he asks off-topic questions, and SOMEBODY put a live snake in the top drawer of my desk," her notes and requests for conferences read.

Then next year I was placed in a very large classroom with about 40 students and two teachers, one for language arts, one for math and science. We were separated into two groups, the Turtles and the Roadrunners. Can you believe it? Oh, and I was a turtle. I felt indignant. Well, guess what, by the middle of third grade things still weren't going very well. I was moved to a very structured classroom with an older teacher, Mrs. Rosenthal. BORING! No room to wiggle or explore at all.

Fortunately, I came up with a solution. My great aunt recognized my intense interest in nature's creatures, sending me field guides so I could identify and learn the living habits belonging to many of nature's inhabitants; insects, butterflies especially (Yeah, I was a butterfly chaser), amphibians and reptiles, birds. I still wasn't reading well, but in the structured classroom with the desks lined up, I was able to open one of my prized books and hide it behind the kid in front of me while the teacher droned on. When she caught me and took away the book, I had a backup ready in my backpack for the moment she became more interested in the academic material and quit attending carefully to the students in front of her.

So I learned to read. Suddenly, like crazy, I was reading everything. I read 146 books and won the book reading contest. I taped numbers on the spines of my books, organized them on shelves, made 3 x 5 index cards with notes about them like in the library. I was first runner up in the spelling bee for grades 1-5, misspelling aardvark. I took the leading role in the school play, rewriting some of the lines to make them more poetic. I wasn't a turtle anymore!

In fourth grade my parents moved from Detroit to El Paso. I learned to speak Spanish very quickly. My teacher had some kind of breakdown and was replaced. The last time I saw her was when she dragged my friend Michael out of the class by his hair, came back into the room, everybody was talking not listening and she yelled "Shit," right before the principal came in and led her away. The new teacher let me read ahead and do research as soon as I quickly finished my boring worksheets, so I was very good for her. We had a deal. I began doing the UIL competitions and getting to talk more with kids who had interests and analytical minds like me, which was a relief. I had a hard time understanding why some of my age-peers had the interests and conversation topics that I could not find interesting or worthy.

As time went on, I had teachers that I did both well and poorly for in terms of behavior and attitude. The grades and academic work were never a problem again. For the teachers who seemed to like and understand me, who challenged me with more difficult and advanced projects, I was a helpful and grateful student. For other teachers, it seemed my divergent thinking style, my questing of the status quo, was seen as a threat and an aberration, something to be disciplined out of me and not allowed in the classroom. These teachers did not like me, I did not like them, we made each other uncomfortable the whole school year long.

I started high school at Klein High, recognized statewide for academic excellence. I had already taken advanced science and math classes customary for the HS freshman year in middle school. In the middle of my freshman year we moved to Boerne, a small mostly agricultural and ranching community. I was in classes with sophomores and juniors, some smart kids I could identify with. They all graduated and my senior year. I took Home Economics Cooperative Education and Honors English IV, leaving about 11am to go work and make money to fuel my hot rod habit.

I regarded my last two years of high school as a waste of time. I did learn how to make cars go fast and how to party and not get caught, I was tutored by the adults at the restaurant I worked in. I graduated third in my class.

I started college adrift with no sense of purpose. I had received no advice or guidance about declaring a major or choosing a vocation. It was a difficult and senseless period of time, I was in college because that was the next step but my goals were vague and unelaborated. My grades were mediocre. I switched schools to SWT because I had friends there and the girls were pretty when I visited.

I was very lucky because I found two professors in the psychology department who took an interest in me, challenging me with advanced classes and the opportunity to work with them outside of classes on research design. Our projects were difficult, interesting, and socially relevant. My grades became A's. I got my name on work that was published, got to present work at some large conferences, travelling with my professors. They encouraged me to go to graduate school and wrote outstanding letters of recommendation.

I graduated with a Bachelor's degree in English and Psychology. One of my English professors offered me a job and a stipend of 600.00 per month to pursue a Master's degree in Creative Writing. I felt pressure to get out of the restaurant business and get a real job making real money, so I took the first professional job I was offered, personnel consulting for commissions pay when applicants are placed into high-tech jobs. I was a headhunter, and I hated it. Adrift again, I think the only thing that steered my back to a path of purpose, productivity, and engagement with life was my memories of those teachers who clearly saw me as good, valuable, someone who could make contributions at a level of surprise, creativity, and excellence. Thanks Mrs. Billie Hoffman, Dr. Archer, Dr. Ogletree. You didn't know it at the time, but you made all the difference.

The reason I share this life story with you is to illustrate the importance of a positive attitude, a nurturing and encouraging relationship, and a willingness to accept differences and accommodate for the student who is different. I wanted to convey the impact both of the harm caused by mismatched inflexible social and academic environments and a rejecting teacher or parent attitude and of the soul-sustaining impact of a few parents or teachers who can look past the shortcomings and light a fire to the potential of a student by encouraging not dousing their aptitudes and interests.

Oftentimes gifted children excel intellectually with broad leaps in vocabulary, academics, and abstractions, but socially and emotionally remain at chronological age level development or even lag behind (called asynchronous development). These children can appear defiant, self-centered, manipulative, morally inept, they can be seen as making bad choices on purpose, lazy, and disrespectful of authority. What follows is a list of some of the types of problems that can arise.

Social/Emotional Issues:

-Hard to fit in and find friends

-Problems intensified by the same characteristics that make them gifted

-Asynchronous development

-Anxiety; intense concerns about death, sex, the future, adult level of prediction and comprehension coupled with child level of emotional coping and wisdom

-Physical development may lag behind the minds ability to envision an outcome, resulting in extreme frustration made worse by perfectionism


Advanced Verbal Reasoning:

-Debate, argument, manipulative little lawyer

-Insecurity arises in children allowed to manipulate their parents

-Advanced sense of humor can result in rejection by peers due to their lack of appreciation

-Tendency to seek adults or older peers for discussion leaves them out of synch with age-peers


Perfectionism and Emotional Sensitivity

-Fear of failure and refusal to try

-May require full details before venturing a reply making them appear shy

-May stay at the periphery of a group trying to analyze all of the details for meaning before engaging and appear withdrawn

-Comments and criticism taken VERY personally

-May become preoccupied with issues of social injustice; war, starvation, bullying, if overloaded by this type of information can create "existential depression" or an apocalyptic worldview

Conclusion

The gifted child will feel different. They may see themselves as little adults, noticing adults who are not as smart as they are, believing if they are not treated as adults it is grossly unfair. They may appear bossy, rude, and demanding. They may be perfectionists in some areas and disorganized slobs in other areas. They may have trouble sleeping because they are so busy thinking. Try expressing understanding of their perspective, offer respect and choices, give reasons but don't debate about rules and adult expectations.

Group them with like minds, don't downplay their feelings, help them create an emotional scale and learn how to manage their feelings. Gifted children often need special help like counseling just like children with disabilities can, gifted children also often have problems with ADHD, OCD, anxiety, and dysgraphia. The literature is full of famous people who made brilliant contributions but were deemed a failure in school. Obviously, the gifts and talents of these people such as Einstein and Edison were overlooked while they were ostracized and rejected for their differences.

It is still possible to identify a child as having problems due to a mental or behavioral disorder and overlook that the problems are secondary to or occur with giftedness and the ability to excel under the right conditions. I have often considered that giftedness in public education can present a handicapping condition created by a mismatch in environmental demands and an individual's unique profile of strengths and weaknesses.

Resources/helpful websites:

Giftedkids.about.com
www.ri.net/gifted_talented/character.html
www.brainy-child.com

There are also several Survival Guides for parents of gifted children available at sites such as amazon.

Did you know that Gifted and Talented education is covered by IDEA and special education?

Stages of Development and Successful Adult Response Styles

Stage 1: Responding to the environment with pleasure (Age 2)

Stage 2: Responding to the environment with success (Age 6)

Stage 3: Learning the skills for successful group participation (Age 9)

Stage 4: Investing in the group process (Age 12)

Stage 5: Applying individual and group skills in new situations (Age 16)

Assumptions of the Developmental Model: Self-esteem and personal identity must develop within a social context.It is the skills and attitudes of the adults and what they believe in that make the difference between successful and failed intervention.If a child fails to master what is socially/emotionally necessary at any given stage, global delays in all domains will become evident- language, cognition, motor skills, behavior, academic skills.

The last newsletter reviewed stages 1-3, here are 4 and 5:

Stage 4: Investing in the group process

Central Concern: getting approval from adults and peers, belonging

Motivation: developing personal qualities that are approved by others

Anxiety: conflict over dependence vs. independenceApproach to problems: to conform or not, responsibility to self

Authority source: others expectations and approval

Needs from adults: supportive, approves, facilitates

Effective strategies: positive feedback, interpretation

Activities and content themes: real-life experiences, successes with peers, recognition from adults and peers

Students in stage 4 need help from adults interpreting their feelings behind their behavior. They need help noticing the behaviors and poor choices that result in rejection. This can be a painful process as they confront the fact that their personal choices result sometimes in negative feedback from peers and adults. Adults need to provide limits and boundaries but it is important that students in this stage be involved in the decision making process.

This is the age of gaining insight into your own motivations behind your mistakes; they need to learn to guage the separate feelings and motivations of others and make adjustments in thier own behavior based on feedback and prediction.Failure to perceive acceptance from the group can result in withdrawal, isolation, anger, depression, and blaring defiance.

Stage 5: Applying individual and group skills to new situations"Who am I and what will I become?"

Central concern: being valued by others while being oneself

Motivation: justice, individual rights, freedom to choose, obligations of friendship

Anxiety: self-doubt, identity, multiple value systems and rolesApproach to problems: finding one's own solutions through experimentation

Authority source: others' expectations and approval, values of right and wrong

Adult needed: counselor, adviser, role model of desired attributes

Effective Strategies: analysis of salient events and qualities in both universal and personal context, exploration of values that guide conduct, interpretation, positive feedback and recognition

Activities and themes: behavior and communication styles in pluralistic society, regulation of people by institutions such as government, church, school, family, social groups, employers, sports.

My LPC supervisor, Michael Sliwa, having been in private practice for 23 years and weathered 4 teenagers, made the following comment to me, scary as it sounds. "When one of my kids proposes an action they want to try to me that I think may not work out for them very well, I say, "That sounds like a good idea, why don't you try that out and let me know how it works out for you.'" At this stage, peer influence typically becomes more important than parent influence.

When children in this stage think their parents are over-controlling and untrusting, and do not allow the teen to have input into rules and exceptions to rules, the teens often rebel and become defiant, refusing to perform household chores and participate in the family with helpful contributions. They keep their problems and distress to themselves and no longer request parental advice for problem solving. Often they seed advice from freinds or develop an "emotional parent," a coach or a teacher or another freind's parent, with whom they become close, seek, and often follow advice.

•Source:Wood, M., Davis, K., Swindle, F., Quirk, C.(1996) Developmental Therapy-Developmental Teaching: Fostering Social-Emotional Competence in Troubled Children and Youth, Third Edition. Austin, Tx: Pro-Ed.

Oppositional-defiant behavior can also result when a child feels that adults only notice what they do wrong. You can not win a power struggle with a child who is being ODD, they win every time by not doing. And you can't make them. And they don't care what you are taking away from them. The smart approach to this type of behavior is to get control over the things this kid enjoys, and sell them the time with what they like based on how well they do at meeting adult expectations. Then you don't get the explosions when you punish and take things away, you wait and encourage them to do well so you can celebrate their success with them by sharing some of what they want from you. This also allows you to keep your intereaction positive instead of negative and draining.

Thanks for the great workshop

testing, testing, testing

Free Monthly Newsletter From Brad Mason, LPC
Teaching Tips
School is back in session. Summer is over. What can teachers do to help our children who at times fall short of behavioral expectations?
Focus
This is a common complaint about many of the children who come to see me. Anytime we have disruption in our lives from stress, depression, grief, change, ADHD, and so on, our ability to ignore distractions and remember becomes compromised. For the sake of brevity, I will focus on focus and leave other behavioral issues to future newsletters.
1. Remember you have the power to choose. You can pay attention to a student when he or she is not paying attention, or you can put your energy into them when they are. Waiting until they are off-task and then re-directing can become draining for both the student and the teacher. Build confidence and energize yourselves by emphasizing intervention that targets being on task and paying attention.

2. Make it fun and easy. Establisesh a credit system for on-task behavior. Before lunch and at the end of the day, privately rate the student’s efforts on a chart. For example, poor=0 points, fair=5, good=10, great=15, awesome=20. Allow the student to exchange points for in-class privileges or easier yet let the parents create a menu of rewards the student can purchase with points at home.

Dating the point sheets will also create a log that provides data that can be useful to analyze later. This type of system will also circumvent the problems in attitude and self-esteem that can be created when privileges are lost or the child gets a sad face or an “X.” Finally, Problems with satiation are avoided by providing a menu of rewards so the student does not get tired of the same old thing. Distractible children like novelty. You can also carry tickets or class bucks with you that you can drop on the student’s desk for paying attention and staying on task at your convenience and without interrupting instruction.

If you vary the amount of points or bucks you drop off on them, and vary the schedule and interval to keep it random, you will keep the student responding because they never know when you might notice them doing good or how much the reward will be. Like a slot machine, using the same principles that keep people dropping quarters and pulling the lever as often as possible. How’s that for slick?

3. Be very explicit and teach what you expect in terms of listening and staying on task. I like to teach “Whole body listening.” You can draw the body parts that follow on your chalkboard as you explain what is expected so you have a visual cue when you ask if the students are showing you whole body listening.

Take a picture of your student on-task and put it on his desk. You listen with your eyes by looking at the speaker. You listen with your lips by keeping them closed. You listen with your hands by keeping them still. You listen with your feet by pointing them at the speaker. Listen with your shoulders and chest by keeping them open and directed towards the speaker. Finally, you listen with your brain by thinking about what the speaker is saying. So you don’t just listen with your ears!
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Right before non-compliance, the most frequent behavior that brings people in to see me is the tantrums. The aggression. The rages. Let me share with you some of the techniques I have used with families that have been successful.

The first question I often ask is What is the right way to be mad in your family? Your child may need some practice and coaching in the right words and body language to demonstrate the intensity and type of feeling he or she is having. We may use some anger scales to help the child first be able to recognize that they ARE having an emotional response, so they can learn to detect their own signs of internal distress BEFORE they hit the top of their anger scale, by this time, they are often no longer responsive to words or reason. We want them to catch it earlier, communicate it appropriately, and have a menu of options to use to manage the feelings. I often use a visual menu that shows levels of emotion, how the child looks, feels, and sounds, and things they can do to manage the feeling and return to their emotional baseline when they are better able to talk and reason. Parents and teachers can be very instrumental as coaches through this process. They can notice the child is showing outward signs of initial levels of distress, verbalize what is going on, and suggest to the child how they might be feeling and what they can do about it. We can identify thinking tools, social tools, relaxation tools, and activity tools (tonyattwood.com) the child can use to get their stress response down to a manageable level. As the child works though this with support, they become increasingly independent in the skills of emotional recognitiion, expression, and management.

We can also help the child become more stable and receptive to training by identifying triggers and pathways that underlie outbusts, and work with the environment and teach the child thinking skills to successfully adapt to changes in the environment. (cpsseminars@gmail.com)

Many questions come to me in the form of "What do I do when he does this unwanted behavior?" Thus placing focus on the problem behavior and a reactive stance to parenting and behavioral management. While this may be convientional wisdom, I propose this is the least effective and potentially most damaging way to manage behavior.

The problem lies in putting energy and descriptions of the child in terms of when things go wrong. Not only is this a drain on you as the caregiver, it is a drain on the child, your relationship, and the child's abilty to view himself in a positive and healthy light. Furthermore, rather than creating an attitude and model for how we want the child to be, we may inadvertantly be extending and magnifying what we don't want. Ask yourself this: When I punish or take away from my child, does their behavior get better, or worse? Bingo. So if we want the behavior to get better, what do we do? We become intentional about putting more energy into when the rules are not being broken. (See Howard Glasser www.difficultchild.com).

The truth is, as long as nothing is going wrong, they are doing everything right! But generally that's when we go about our business, returning calls, cooking supper, starting the laundry. We stop and pay attention when we hear the screaming. Instead of when we don't. I say that's a mistake, because of the type of interaction we end up having, because of the message it gives to the child, the way it drains our energy and makes us feel, and because we waited until it was too late. Had we noticed the child and shown our appreciation when the rules were not being broken, we could have done it at a time of our convenience, we could have been creating our child's self-image in the form that is true, that they are wonderful, good, being respectful of Mommy and Daddy, working hard and doing a good job of being gentle, sharing, and so on. If we want our children to remember this positive self-image, we need to think it and say it with greater frequency and energy than when things go poorly. Or else they will give up, giving rise to oppositional defiant behavior, depression, anxiety, and misbehavior specifically targeted at "getting" you.

That's right, sometimes your child really is out to get you! I understood this in my head but not in my behavior when my first son was 10 months old. He taught me a lesson. We would get home and he would head for the (no-no) Ozarka water machine, and let out the water, eyes gleaming playfully at me after I already said "Oh-oh, no thank you please Jack!" I thought about it and realized that as long as he got his barn and animals or Thomas the Train out on the rug and played quietly, I put my attention elsewhere! I needed to be saying "Yes Jack, good boy.”