Being a Gifted Child May Not be all That it is Cut out to be

When a child is gifted, people may not realize how intellectually advanced they are, and can observe some of the child's traits in a negative way. For example, a child can appear shy to a teacher by holding themselves back in a class-held conversation because they want to hear everything first in detail. They do this because they want to try to fully understand the concept before communicating about it to other peers. Other examples are as follows:

- If the child is intellectually older then their physical body, this could cause problems because the child cannot perform the task that they envisioned mentally because of their physical disadvantage. This would cause an enormous amount of frustration in a gifted child and could discourage them from performing other ideas or interests that they have.

- Although the gifted child can understand complex concepts that people don't understand or necessarily even have to know until they're older, this could cause emotional problems. For example, if the gifted child can understand concepts such as death or sex, they are still too young to fully understand how to deal with these concepts, which would lead to constant kinds of emotional distress.

- A main issue for gifted children is that they are simply still children. Even if they understand political or environmental issues, they are still conflicted with child-like problems, such as getting teased by an older sibling, or they have fights with their parents about how they don't want to eat their vegetables.

- There can also be social issues that can be very harmful to gifted children. For example, if the gifted child has a more sophisticated vocabulary or humor then the other children their age, this could cause other children to think of them as weird or not normal. This would then cause the gifted child to be misunderstood and think badly of themselves, and could also cause them to think that their intellectual gifts are not gifts at all.

This does not occur with all gifted children, but parents with gifted children should be aware of these examples shown, and if these are seen among the child, help should be sought out as to prevent any further distress for the gifted child.