It's significant that a large portion of gifted kids come from households where they're the smartest by far. My mother designs curriculum for gifted education, and over the years I've seen that part of the difficulty in raising a gifted child to being a healthy, successful adult is knowing what to do with them.
Richard Feynman was building complex electronic booby traps in his room when he was seven. Before turning ten he had nearly burned down his house with a homemade transformer in his ad hoc laboratory. Most parents would see him as a problem that needed to be fixed, or be so confused that he'd end up being ignored. Many parents can't see the world from the perspective of a gifted child, realizing how slow school seems, how frustrating their peers might be. Many parents wouldn't consider sending their kid to math camp, or Robot One, or having them apprentice for an electronics engineer. Since the adults wouldn't consider it fun, it doesn't occur to them, unless they're very close with their child, that their kid might love a month doing advanced math, or learning physics early.
I believe that gifted kids are fragile. They need strong reinforcement at home telling them to do what makes them happy, whether the other kids dream of being scientists, or a cellists, or a astrophysicists, or not. Since smart kids are also very aware of themselves, they're also very sensitive to the expectations of their parents and teachers. A lifetime of being told how exceptional you are can lead to severe depression if you wind up simply average. Someone with those kind of expectations lumped on them can even become very successful and still spend the remainder of their life lamenting the potential they had, judging themselves for not becoming a first chair, first rate, phd everything.
> It's significant that a large portion of gifted kids come from households where they're the smartest by far.
I'd also point out that it's also predictable and will continue to be true for a very strong reason: reversion to the mean. It's not going to change, which makes measures like designing a good curriculum or at least having camps and programs all the more important.
Richard Feynman was building complex electronic booby traps in his room when he was seven. Before turning ten he had nearly burned down his house with a homemade transformer in his ad hoc laboratory. Most parents would see him as a problem that needed to be fixed, or be so confused that he'd end up being ignored. Many parents can't see the world from the perspective of a gifted child, realizing how slow school seems, how frustrating their peers might be. Many parents wouldn't consider sending their kid to math camp, or Robot One, or having them apprentice for an electronics engineer. Since the adults wouldn't consider it fun, it doesn't occur to them, unless they're very close with their child, that their kid might love a month doing advanced math, or learning physics early.
I believe that gifted kids are fragile. They need strong reinforcement at home telling them to do what makes them happy, whether the other kids dream of being scientists, or a cellists, or a astrophysicists, or not. Since smart kids are also very aware of themselves, they're also very sensitive to the expectations of their parents and teachers. A lifetime of being told how exceptional you are can lead to severe depression if you wind up simply average. Someone with those kind of expectations lumped on them can even become very successful and still spend the remainder of their life lamenting the potential they had, judging themselves for not becoming a first chair, first rate, phd everything.