Cause for Concern, or Reason to Celebrate:
Maureen Neihart Discusses her Research on the Social and Emotional Development of Gifted Children

Maureen Neihart, Psy.D., recently visited Northwestern and spoke to CTD parents about her research that resulted in her book, The Social and Emotional Development of Gifted Children: What do We Know?. She distinguished facts supported through multiple, empirical studies from common myth about gifted students. Some of her key findings were:

Gifted children have many advantages.

Growing up as a gifted learner is a qualitatively different experience. Gifted learners often show advanced social maturity, moral reasoning, and sensitivity. They are often two to four years ahead in social and emotional development than their non-gifted peers. Gifted learners are often perfectionists, a characteristic that acts as a motivating, adapting force encouraging them to reach high goals. They are also strong conceptual thinkers, fast learners that prefer solitude and complexity. They are concerned with issues of morality, justice, and spirituality.

Gifted girls and minority students need support.

Gifted girls still face more difficulties than gifted boys. As Dr. Neihart stated, “How often do we tell gifted girls to go for it?” Gifted girls typically do not fulfill their aspirations. One reason is that they are unwilling to take risks at critical junctures because of their reluctance to compromise relationships. Gifted minority students experience affiliation/achievement conflicts by associating certain attitudes or behaviors as a betrayal of their ethnic, social or racial culture. Both gifted females and minority students receive mixed messages: achieve, but don’t act white; compete, but be nice; get a good education, but don’t leave home; be ambitious, but don’t act like a man.

Gifted students are not more likely to be depressed.

In the 1980s, the media suggested a higher suicide rate among gifted learners. While studies show conflicting evidence regarding anxiety and depression among the gifted, it has generally been found that gifted children fall within the norm of the population at large. Generally, they show more resilience. Only the creatively gifted – writers and artists – have shown a significantly higher level of mood disorders and suicide.

Social/emotional problems arise from four sources:

Asynchrony: Children who are multi-exceptional are at the greatest risk because their differences in ability are magnified.

Difficulty finding friends with similar interests, ability and drive: Gifted children have difficulty connecting with kids in their class because usually they are not true peers.

Lack of Challenge: Most gifted learners in a typical school setting have already mastered 30-40% of the curriculum before school even starts. Teachers often do not differentiate instruction for gifted learners, leaving students unchallenged.

Personal characteristics: A child may possess personal characteristics apart from giftedness that make social/emotional development difficult.

Parents can support achievement.

To optimize the development of gifted children, parents should provide placement with others of like ability, flexible progression at a rapid pace, and appropriate challenges. Acceleration, from grade skipping to advancement in a specific subject, is one of the best ways to provide these measures for gifted children. Some other options include early school entrance (skip 2nd grade or transition year), non-graded classrooms, early college admission, compacted curriculum, concurrent enrollment and mentorship.

A disturbing finding shows that the families of the highest creative producers stress independence (over interdependence), are less child-centered and have more expressions of negative emotion and competition. These children learn to deal with stress and negative emotion, as it becomes a part of the path to high achievement. Families of more moderately achieving children tend to have less stress, are more child-centered, and emphasize family relationships.
Many parents do not want their children to experience any distress. Parents often intervene too early when they sense that their child is experiencing difficulty, instead of letting their child persevere through the challenge. Parents need to learn to support through the challenge instead of removing it.

Parents should:

• Allow moderate levels of stress
  
• Support risk taking
• Help students cope with setbacks and failures
• Model and encourage hard work and sustained effort
• Encourage independent thinking
  

Maureen Neihart, Psy.D. is a licensed clinical child psychologist with more than twenty years’ experience counseling gifted children and their families. She is co-editor of the new text, The Social and Emotional Development of Gifted Children: What do we Know? and a former member of the board of directors of the National Association for Gifted Children. Dr. Neihart serves on the editorial boards of Gifted Child Quarterly, Roeper Review, and Journal of Secondary Gifted Education, and she has given more than two hundred lectures and workshops worldwide. She and her husband, Doug, live in Laurel, Montana where they are licensed as therapeutic treatment foster parents and work with seriously emotionally disturbed adolescents in their home. Dr. Neihart’s special interests include children at risk and violent youth. Her one act comedy, The Court Martial of George Armstrong Custer, was produced and filmed for local television in 2000.