We see exceptional intelligence as a blessing. So why are so many brilliant children miserable misfits?
Get our daily newsletterTOM REMEMBERS the day he decided he wanted to be a theoretical astrophysicist. He was deep into research about black holes, and had amassed a box of papers on his theories. In one he speculated about the relationship between black holes and white holes, hypothetical celestial objects that emit colossal amounts of energy. Black holes, he thought, must be linked across space-time with white holes.
But children like Tom are different. He was brought up in an underprivileged part of south London: 97% of pupils at his first school didn’t speak English as a first language. When it comes to numbers – or his other passions such as Latin and astrophysics – Tom’s parents have little idea what he’s talking about. His genius is not of their engineering.
Many others echo the pain of Tom and his family. Mensa, an international organisation founded in Britain in 1946 to nurture the country’s most intelligent people, has 20,000 members . When I put out a request via Mensa to hear from gifted children and their parents, my inbox fills with emails, many of them anguished. Those that I speak to say that, for fear of inspiring jealousy, they don’t dare talk to others about their children’s abilities.
But Lyn Kendall, a consultant on gifted children at Mensa – who was herself a gifted child in a working-class family – insists that reading Nietzsche to your five-year-old, or forcing them to do three hours of extra homework, cannot “make” a genius. So-called “intelligence” tests abound online. Many children take aptitude tests at school. Most of these can be gamed or, at least, children can be trained to excel at them. Mensa does its best to make its tests “culture fair” – in other words it aims to identify intelligence that is intrinsic rather than taught. “The original gifted children will have invented the wheel and discovered fire,” says Kendall.
Eyre claims that a certain type of parent, usually a highly educated one, takes pride in having a “gifted child” to show off. But this view wasn’t borne out by the parents I spoke to, most of whom found their children’s gifts to be a source of anxiety, even distress. We have long known that some individuals have extraordinarily high intelligence. Only more recently have psychologists started to look at whether and how this affects other areas of these individuals’ lives. Gifted children often experience what psychologists call “asynchronous development”: exceptional abilities in some areas may be associated with, or come at the cost of other aspects of maturity.
Kendall identifies several characteristics common among gifted children who have no identified behavioural disorders. One trait is that many of them are deeply anxious, usually as a result of over-thinking everything. “Your brain has the capacity to work out all the variables,” she explains, “so it inevitably does.” Hilary emailed me about her son, Lorenzo: “I am finding it increasingly difficult to cope with his heightened emotion and anxiety.
“Neurologically, high IQ goes with increased efficiency in neural functioning,” says Sonja Falck, a psychotherapist in Britain who works almost exclusively with clients of “extreme intelligence”. “That’s measurable,” continues Falck. “If a person is getting a lot of stimulation and processing it very quickly, they are susceptible to being over-stimulated.”
Sonja Falck is wary of the word “gifted” because “it connotes privilege”, in that the gifted person is seen as having an advantage over everyone else. But it’s not necessarily an advantage. “Someone who is gifted, but who grows up in an environment that is not supportive, can really suffer. This suffering is hugely under-acknowledged.” Falck tells me about a client of hers who had an abortion: she couldn’t bear the idea of giving birth to a child who might suffer for her “gifts” as she had.
After Tom’s assessment at Potential Plus, Chrissie sought advice on how best to educate him. It was obvious to her that his south-London primary school couldn’t cope. Apart from his first teacher at the school, whom Tom describes as “incredible” and who encouraged his interest in maths by sitting with him during break times to work through problems, his other teachers seemed to hate him.
Some countries have cultivated an educational environment that is welcoming to gifted children. Singapore runs a highly selective programme designed to identify the most exceptionally intelligent students each year. At the age of eight or nine all children are assessed in maths, English and reasoning. The top 1% are transferred from “normal” classes to the Gifted Education Programme which is run in nine primary schools up to the age of 12.
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