Growing up Gifted

The hidden plight of the brilliant brain

It's Saturday morning in the middle of November, and the desks of one fourth grade classroom in Studio City are filled with grown-ups. The room is quiet and dimly lit - a sensory-sensitive environment for gifted minds.

At the front of the room for this session stands P. Susan Jackson, a founder of a gifted clinic, a therapeutic director, an overall expert on gifted education. Like most of her listeners today, she is also a parent to a gifted child - two, in fact.

SENG hosts conferences across the country to discuss the challenges that come along with being gifted.

But this conference isn't just about celebrating smart kids.

"How many kids have sat at my feet and said, 'I'm not so sure it was a good thing to be given that gifted label?'" she says.

A mom in the audience raises her hand, and recounts through tears what her 12-year-old son told her after they found out he was gifted: "Being gifted is like being given a present and being told you have to pay for it for the rest of your life."

Giftedness is defined as possessing ability significantly above the norm. That might meanmastering the mandolin at age 7 or speaking multiple languages proficiently before being big enough to ride a bike. In education, the conversation is about intellectual giftedness, which is most commonly measured by a test of IQ.

Countless groups have created their own definition of intellectual giftedness, but the most commonly accepted baseline is an IQ of at least 130. That means about 2 percent of the population is gifted.

Books and pamphlets about new research and old problems in the gifted community greet conference guests.

But when giftedness is only defined by a number, there's a lot of confusion over what that number represents.

Sharon Duncan is the co-founder of Gifted Research and Outreach, a nonprofit devoted to answering what it means to be gifted. She says in a society so focused on success, it's easy to misunderstand the concept.

"This label has been co-opted and equated with achievement and nothing's further from the truth,"" she says. "Gifted isn't better, it's not worse. It's different."

And different doesn't always mean straight A's in school. Parents say different can be hard. Different is sensitivity to loud noises and bright lights. It's constant high energy and emotional intensity. It's anxiety attacks over unachievable perfectionism. It's social ostracism. It's existential questions from kids that aren't mature enough yet to handle the answers.

Jennifer Friedman is the mother of two gifted children. Jack and Kate are 10 and 11 now, but when Jennifer first found out they were gifted, she says the hardest part was finding the support they needed.

"I think maybe the misnomer is that these kids will be OK because they're gifted and they're smart, but with giftedness comes a lot of emotional issues that are overlooked,"" she says. "Educators don't understand this group and it just blows my mind away."

So on this Saturday in November and on other days throughout the country, Supporting Emotional Needs of the Gifted (SENG) hosts conferences that teach audiences about the other side of the gifted population. Parents, teachers, psychologists, and speakers alike meet in the hopes of answering some of the puzzles about gifted education that our best and brightest still have yet to solve.

One size fits one

Kate and Jack might be gifted siblings, but their experience has been anything but the same.

Jack is a math whiz and Kate has a way with words. He procrastinates and she plans ahead. Her emotions run high and his toughest subject in school is behavior. Once they were tested, Jack switched to a school for gifted kids called Oak Crest Academy on their Tarzana campus, and Kate wanted to stay at Brawerman Elementary School in Los Angeles where she started kindergarten.

Dr. Monica Origer, a clinical psychologist who provides therapy and test assessments for gifted kids, says parents that seek gifted testing don't all come in for the same reason. Some seek appropriate accommodations for their kids after they grew up knowing what it was like not to have them. Others come by a teacher's recommendation while some have kids with behavioral problems. For Friedman and her son Jack, it was the calls from the principal starting in second grade.

"He would start getting into trouble. He got sent home, he went to the office for kicking or not being able to sit still,"" Friedman says.

So the school suggested they get him tested.

"I knew he was really bright, but I just didn't know how bright. His processing speed is in the 99.9^th percentile. It's off the charts," she says.

Only after Jack's results came in did they test Kate and discover that she is gifted, too.

SENG Executive Director Michael Postma saw the same pattern in his own gifted kids.

"Girls tend to be camouflaged and hidden and the boys tend to act out," he says. "Then the boys become special ed cases or behavioral issues or medication, you name it."

That acting out frequently comes from boredom. Kate says that's one of the hardest parts of staying at Brawerman.

"I don't mind it as much as other people, but in some things it's kind of hard because you're just sitting there and the teacher's like, 'just sit there,' And you don't want to sit there, you want to talk to your friends and they say stop distracting your friends. So you're just sitting there and doing nothing," she says.

Origer says part of her job is helping parents understand what that boredom means for their child.

"We expect gifted kids to tolerate a high level of frustration all day long, and often what I do is try to relate it to their lives," Origer says. "How would you like to sit all day in a classroom with someone teaching you how to read? You know how to read but what if you had to sit through that, how would you feel?"

But beyond frustration, Duncan says easy classes only hurt kids' success in the long run.

"If everything comes easy to you and for some gifted children that is the case, they never learn to work through challenge, they never learn resiliency," she says. "They tend to break down in college and they think there's something wrong with them when they've been robbed of that."

She also says gifted education is important so kids can interact with their like-minded peers, experience the same social validation other kids experience every day, and understand that there is nothing wrong with them.

While Jack continues his education at Oakcrest, Kate will finish Brawerman before moving onto a more challenging middle school. She says she wants to go to Crossroads School or New Roads School and her mom wants her to go to Wildwood School, all of which operate in Santa Monica.

But for now, Friedman says the challenges that come along with raising bright kids are outweighed by the rewards.

"It's a challenge to us. We have kids that have so much energy, that have behavioral issues, that can't sleep at night. It's difficult because they're always questioning you or questioning authority,"" she says. "Gifted does not mean easy...but I feel like I'm raising leaders and innovators."

The G Word

It's hard to learn about a community that is reluctant to discuss what they have in common. Duncan says members of the gifted population rarely talk about their giftedness out loud.

"Talking about intelligence or giftedness is socially taboo," she says. "People simply do not want to be labeled as different so people are not willing to say that. Even as they look at it in their children they will not accept it in themselves."

Duncan says she has done presentations across the country and will poll the audience about their backgrounds and their children's IQ. But when she asks which parents in the audience are gifted, she will get one or two hands at the most, even though IQ is partially hereditary. And that fear to reveal their intelligence in part comes from a belief that gifted programs are elitist. Parents say taking pride in their football star is socially acceptable, but excitement over high academic performance is inappropriate.

Khatibi says Jahan loves playing sports. He wrote a poem about how much he dislikes the "smarty pants" label.

Azadeh Khatibi says before she found out her son Jahan was gifted, she felt the same way.

"This woman came up to me and started talking to me about her son who was gifted," she says. "I thought this lady was so full of herself, she was just bragging, bragging, bragging."

But she says several months later she understood from a different perspective.

"She was trying to communicate from a place of frustration and sadness and nervousness and anxiety because she had been through so much to try to make sure that her son's needs were met," Khatibi says.

Jahan (pictured in a green shirt) and his robotics team talk strategy against their opponents from China in a world championship match.

At 9 years old, Jahan already feels the same conflict over his giftedness.

"I feel bad and good in the same way, because in one sense it sounds better than other people and I don't like to brag, but the good part is I like learning a lot and I get to learn more," he says.

Friedman faced the same social taboo. For her, it extended to her conversations with Jack and Kate's teachers.

"When I use the word 'gifted,' my husband says, 'Be careful when you say that, a lot of people don't understand, it sounds like you're showing off.'' But to me it means kids with special needs because a lot of them have special needs."

And Duncan says this confusion over terminology is part of why education is failing gifted kids.

"A lot of parents have faced backlash and the parent is not saying my kid is smart, they're saying my kid has needs that aren't being met. We tend to have this vocabulary breakdown about what giftedness means," Duncan says.

And that vocabulary breakdown continues the cycle of misunderstanding, of a deficit in gifted programs, and of heightened social and emotional turmoil in gifted kids. Duncan says the best way to break the cycle is to start with proof.

"We need to start with a comprehensive understanding at the medical level of how giftedness impacts an individual's physiology and their social and emotional development," Duncan says.

"They are some of our best and brightest, how're we leaving these children behind?" Origer says. "We want these kids to be our future."

Are you smarter than a third grader?

These questions come from a sample cognitive abilities test administered to Burbank USD third graders to determine gifted placement. How do you measure up?

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