Giftedness Health Article

Giftedness

Above-average intellectual or creative ability or talent in a particular area, such as music, art, or athletics.

Intellectual giftedness is generally indicated by an IQ of least 125 or 130 (found in about 2% of all children). Children who are extremely creative are also considered gifted, although their giftedness can be hard to identify by academic performance or standardized tests. Giftedness has been defined not only in terms of specific talents and academic abilities, but also by general intellectual characteristics (including curiosity, motivation, ability to see relationships, and long attention span) and personality traits such as leadership ability, independence, and intuitiveness. In general, gifted children are creative, innovative thinkers who are able to envision multiple approaches to a problem and devise innovative and unusual solutions to it.

In the early days of intelligence testing it was widely thought that a person's mental abilities were genetically determined and varied little throughout the life span, but it is now believed that nurture plays a significant role in giftedness. Researchers comparing the behavior of parents of gifted and average children have found significant differences in childrearing practices. The parents of gifted children spend more time reading to them and encouraging creative types of play and are more involved with their schooling. They are also more likely to actively encourage language development and expose their children to cultural resources outside the home, including those not restricted specifically to children, such as art and natural history museums. The involvement of fathers in a child's academic progress has been found to have a positive effect on both boys and girls in elementary school in terms of both grades and achievement test scores. Within the family, grandparents can also play a positive role as mentors, listeners, and role models. A disproportionately large percentage of high-achieving women have reported that at least one grandparent played a significant role in their lives during childhood. (The anthropologist Margaret Mead named her paternal grandmother as the person with the single greatest influence on her life.) Even within a single family, giftedness can be influenced by such environmental factors as birth order, gender, differences in treatment by parents, and other unique aspects of a particular child's experiences.

Parents and teachers can often identify gifted children informally by observing their behavior. However, for formal purposes standardized intelligence tests—most often the Stanford-Binet or Wechsler tests—almost always play a role in assessing giftedness, even though such tests have been criticized on a variety of grounds, including an overly narrow definition of intelligence, possible racial and cultural bias, and the risk of unreliability due to variations in testing conditions. Critics have questioned the correlation of IQ scores with achievement later in life, pointing out that standardized tests don't measure many of the personal qualities that contribute to professional success, such as independence, motivation, persistence, and interpersonal skills. In addition, the creativity and intuition that are hallmarks of giftedness may actually lower a child's scores on tests that ask for a single solution to a problem rather than rewarding the ability to envision multiple solutions, a trait—called divergent thinking by psychologists and educators—that often characterizes giftedness.

Care at home rather than in an institutionalized day care setting is generally considered preferable for a child's intellectual development until at least the age of two, especially during the first six months of life. At home the child can receive a level of attention, stimulation, and encouragement that is not possible in an institutionalized day care environment. Eventually, though, the variety of stimulation that preschools provide can be highly beneficial to a child's intellectual development. Experts have criticized the trend toward academic saturation in preschool, nicknamed "hothousing," that has become popular since the 1980s—especially in major cities—with parents seeking a competitive edge to help their youngsters get into top private schools and, eventually, universities. While defenders view this phenomenon as tapping the great learning potential of young children, detractors criticize the surfeit of structured activities that characterizes such programs at the expense of creativity, play, and emphasis on emotional development. One variation on the hothousing phenomenon is "doubleschooling," a trend that involves enrolling preschool children in two different half-day programs.