Wondering if your child is gifted? According to neuroscience experts, certain signs can help you spot a child’s intellectual potential.
How to recognize a gifted child? This question, some parents may ask themselves by seeing their child learn faster or do things differently than other children their age. As Megan Cannella (head of Family Services at the Davidson Institute, an American association specializing in supporting gifted children) explains to CNBC Make It website, a gifted or precocious child can be noticed if we pay attention to a few signs and characteristics. However, professionals are clear, every gifted child is different. The intellectual aptitudes of a precocious child are not always the same from one profile to another. So here’s, According to neuroscience experts, the 5 signs that suggest that a child is gifted (or not) and who can put the chip in the ear to the parents.
1 – Your child has trouble doing simple tasks
One of the first signs which identifies whether a child is potentially gifted relates to the field of asynchronous developmentwhich is characterized by discrepancies between an individual’s intellectual, physical and emotional capacities. Clearly, a gifted child may have trouble doing some seemingly simple daily tasks, such as tying their shoelaces or forgetting to brush their teeth. According to experts, this is quite common among gifted children. This facet can be expressed between 2 and 10 years: “the child is more at ease in complicated activities than in simple activities”, reports the national association for intellectually gifted children (ANPEIP).
2 – A strong sensitivity
At the affective level, a child who is gifted is often hypersensitive and hyperemotional. According to professionals, he has more intense emotional reactions to the world and people around him. For example, he may feel deep frustration when faced with an injustice or when he is disappointed. At the time, he couldn’t control his emotions.
3 – Your child asks himself existential questions
Curiosity in a precocious child is usually insatiable, especially when it comes to existential questions about life in the broad sense (meaning of life, death, poverty, injustices etc). The ANPEIP association explains it very well: “the child always wants to know the why of everything. His questions are original and varied, but he is not satisfied with a trivial answer, and wants to deepen until weary the other.
4 – A good sense of humor
Gifted children may also have a good sense of humor for their age., compared to other children. Most of the time, they play with words, and are ironic on many topics. It also shows that they have good cognitive abilities to perceive what is funny about a subject.
5 – Your child has poor school results
A potentially precocious child tends to get bored easily at schoolwhich has an impact on its school results which are not always good. Because he needs constant mental stimulation, if in class he does not learn new things quickly, he may lose motivation to work and thus be school failure.
Common points differentiating the intellectually precocious child from other children. ANPEIP