"For Many, Being Gifted Brings Lifelong Struggle"

How can parents tell If their children are gifted and what are the special needs of such youngsters? An expert offers advice on the unusually talented, and on handling their problems as they grow up.

Q Professor Torrance, we hear stories of suicides and other tragedies befalling gifted young people. Why does this happen?
A Almost all highly gifted youngsters do experience problems of adjustment that are accompanied by emotional upset. The majority learn how to handle them one way or the other, but for many, being gifted brings lifelong struggle with their giftedness and with the high expectations that people have of them.
You see nice little boys and girls who are afraid to say anything, and others who become very aggressive and obnoxious. Some end up as psychotic or delinquent -- even criminal or suicidal, as in those stories you mention.
Q What proportion of the nation's students are gifted?
A That depends on the degree of giftedness and the way it is gauged. Most schools use an intelligence quotient of 130 or above in the definition of giftedness, which, would include about the upper 2 percent or so of all students.
Q Aren't there other ways to measure giftedness?
A Yes. There is wide agreement among educators on four other types of giftedness. One comprises those who have exceptional academic aptitudes in specific areas. Such persons might be extremely gifted in mathematics but real duds language or the arts -- the boy-won-der scientist who has difficulty writing well, for example.
Another kind of giftedness is characterized by highly creative and productive thinking, a facility for fashioning totally new and imaginative ideas. There is also a category of giftedness in the visual and performing arts, and another that recognizes special talents in leadership.
There was also a category that dealt with psychomotor giftedness, but most authorities have pretty much discarded that idea.
Q Are all categories generally recognized?
A No. Some states use only the IQ criterion in their schools, while others may include all five of these categories.
Q How can parents learn if their preschool child Is exceptionally Intelligent?
A Most school systems have available a professional who can administer the appropriate tests that identify giftedness. Many colleges and universities have special facilities in this field as well.
Q Can parents themselves discern their child special gifts?
A Yes. There are many signs in all of these different areas that parents can observe. For example, does the child have a large and accurately used vocabulary? Can he or she read before entering school? Does he or she concentrate better than his or her peers? Does the child easily grasp the idea of cause and effect, why and how things work? Is there high proficiency in drawing, music and other art forms? Does he or she prefer older playmates?
My work has been largely with what we call the creative productive thinkers -- the children who, at a very early age, ask unusual questions and give unusual but good answers, and who are able to think of a lot of alternatives to different problems. If one thing doesn't work, they always have two or three other ideas that are ready to go.
They're children who start inventing poems and songs and exhibiting the kinds of behavior that are similar to those of highly creative and achieving adult people. A parent who observes these traits in a child should seek out professional guidance on the child's educational development.
Q What can parents do to provide a good home environment for brilliant youngsters?
A First of all, they should help a child learn about his or her individual differences and accept these without feeling uncomfortable. "Showing off" of talented children as prodigies should be avoided.
Just as important is to develop in the family a creative problem-solving attitude in dealing with day-to-day events as well as with academic subjects. Gifted youngsters should be taught patience so that a desire for knowledge or completion of a project does not result in their missing important details. Originality and unusual questions should be encouraged -- as well as verbal expression, reading and discussion of ideas.
Q When a gifted youngster may be heading for trouble, what danger signals might parents note?
A Noticeable depression is one -- and a rather common one --often beginning when a child loses interest in school and in learning in general. Another warning is a sudden turn to drugs, delinquency and destructive kinds of behavior.
Q Can exceptional intelligence make youngsters more aware of their mistakes or their feelings of being different?
A Yes. We get some clues about this in our programs for gifted students. I recall one girl from a very small rural community in south Georgia who attended the governor's honors program, in which the most talented highschool students in the state are brought together for a six-week summer program. She wrote a follow-up letter, saying that the greatest thing about the program was that "I went for a whole six weeks and nobody pointed me out as being the girl with the brains." It's not so much just their being different but also their feelings of inferiority, which in some instances are caused by pure cruelty.
Q In what way?
A Ridicule and hostility on the part of teachers and other students are frequent. Some teachers fail to recognize anything that the gifted do well, and point out only the things that they do badly. The child doesn't understand why that happens, which contributes to a feeling of alienation and loneliness in many of these youngsters.
Q Do their troubles usually stay with them?
A They can. A study of intellectually gifted children that I began in 1958 involved, among others, a young woman who is highly intelligent and a postdoctoral scientist but still gets criticism from her supervisors for not being creative and not following through on good ideas.

Torance, 65, is professor of educational psychology at the University of Georgia. He is the author of Guiding Creative Talent and 25 other books dealing with the problems of educating gifted and creative youth.

From the material she produced all the way through elementary school, it's obvious that she seldom said anything, because she was afraid she would say the wrong thing. In the fourth grade, she wrote a very imaginative story about a woman who could but wouldn't talk, because at a birthday party when the was 5 years old, she said something that brought pretty severe consequences.
The story ends: "From that day on, the woman never talked, because she was afraid that she would say something that she wasn't supposed to." That story parallels remarkably the woman's actual experience of always -- and still -- being afraid of saying the wrong thing.
Q How well equipped art most public schools for looking after the gifted?
A In the last five years, there has been an enormous change as schools give more attention to the gifted. There is also a big advance in training teachers to really understand the special needs of the gifted. But those youngsters still get little attention in many public schools. Recently, I've gotten a barrage of letters from parents of gifted youngsters who aren't being served in schools. Some of the things that they describe are pretty sad.
Q What do they complain about?
A The No, 1 problem is that school seems so boring and purposeless at least as perceived by these youngsters -- that they just languish. They feel frustrated and hemmed in and limited. That is their single biggest complaint.
As an illustration, in my 22-year follow-up study there was a particularly creative girl who has become a noted writer, despite a miserable childhood and adolescence. She knew she wanted to be a writer but didn't know whether she could make it. In elementary school, she had gotten perfect grades for organization, spelling and punctuation, but was always graded down for having very poor handwriting. Nobody said anything about the originality of her writing.
She describes her feelings this way: "If someone had told me back then that I was creative, I would have had something to hold on to. All I knew was that I was different."
Q Should teachers push the bright youngster to take part in nonacademic and social activities?
A Yes. Those extracurricular activities are the real salvation of creatively gifted youngsters who find regular classes uninteresting. They get intensely absorbed in their music and art or student-government activities, where they have creative outlets. They get success and recognition and the chance to use their abilities to the utmost. It helps them tolerate their boredom in regular classes.
Q Does giftedness vary between boys and girls?
A No. The boys in my follow-up study were just as gifted as the girls, but I think society generally permits boys to be somewhat more aggressive and, perhaps, as a result, made to feel less different and alienated.
Q Do these children have very talented brothers and sisters?
A It has been thought that if one child in a family was highly creative, it was likely that a sibling would be, too -- although certainly not 100 percent of the time.
Q Are college educated parents more likely to have gifted children? If so, is this a matter of genetics or environments?
A It doesn't matter how well the parents are educated as long as they give their children the proper encouragement and support. You can't say if it's heredity or experience. Inescapably, I think, it's a combination of the two.

Gifted students meet with visiting scholars in new North Carolina program. Creative outlets can help them "tolerate their boredom in regular classes."

Q What's being done to identify more gifted children from disadvantaged backgrounds?
A The latest legislation passed by Congress stipulates that a certain percentage of federal funding for research be used for identifying gifted but disadvantaged youngsters. In the past, it hasn't been a very popular topic for research, so not much of it has been done. As a result. many of the gifted but disadvantaged lose out.
I know of one girl from a public-housing project, a highly creative first grader with an IQ estimated at 177. Her teachers and parents were disturbed because she still had an imaginary play-mate and they worked to get that out of her. By the time she was in the fifth grade, she had fallen below average in creativity, and her IQ also was lower. In the 10th grade, she dropped out in order to take care of her younger brothers and sisters. She finally married and had three children. Today, this woman, who was regarded as a genius in the first grade, says: "I know I'm not very smart, but I'd still like to finish high school and go into nursing."
Q Is there any single trademark of gifted children who achieve success in adult life?
A Many gifted children suffer from being seduced into, playing somebody else's game rather than just being themselves. And one point that has come to me over and over again as I've dealt with these students is that those who are successful and feel good about their lives are those who somehow have managed to resist this pressure. They do the things that they're good at rather than trying to play somebody else's game.
I'm not suggesting that they have to be nonconformists, but they do have to understand what the rules of society are and what they have to do in order to play the game their own way. Many of the tragedies result from people who continue to play society's game even though they are saying inside, "This is not me; this not what I want to do."
Q Can special schooling for the gifted take place on a wide scale without raising charges of elitism?
A I think so, although this is certainly an area of wide disagreement. I think it's a matter of giving all students a fair chance. If we put out as much effort to give gifted children a chance to do the things that they can do as we provide for children in some other categories, we really won't have any trouble. Societies have always had to depend upon a creative, gifted minority for its images of the future, and I think we always will. I'm willing to accept some charges of elitism to accomplish that.

Copyright 1980, U.S. News & World Report, Inc.