Gifted Children and Curiosity

All children are naturally curious and inquisitive; this is one of the many things that brings joy to parenting.  Plenty of parents might in fact mistake this natural curiosity children will exhibit with being intellectually gifted.  But there are notable differences between the natural curiosity of all children and the curiosity of bright children, and then again with the curiosity of gifted children.

Bright children will exhibit curiosity about almost any topic, asking questions, exploring, and wanting to know more; they will take it beyond just an immediate interest in a topic.  Bright children want to know a lot more about a topic than may be initially and superficially presented, and they will display the initiative to learn more than other children.  Gifted children take it several steps further, not only wanting to know about the topic, but to truly understand the topic from the inside out.  Gifted children might often exhibit an infactuation or obsession with a topic that goes on for long periods of time, and often results in such an understanding of the topic that they can predict outcomes related to the topic or can extrapolate their knowledge of that topic to other topics.  Their focus on learning the topic can be so intense that they have a hard time focusing on other topics until they've adequately satisfied their curiosity in the first topic (one of the reasons that gifted children don't automatically get good grades).

While bright children might research a topic to explore their curiosity, gifted children will initiate projects and experiments to test their preductions and assumptions about the topic.  The topics of their interests don't have to be academic: our daughter often obsesses over issues with her friends, and took learning to drive extremely seriously (fortunately for us, way more seriously than most teens do).  When gifted children come across a topic that interests them, they will latch on and it's often difficult (to say the least) to divert their attention.  Our son is a part-time intern for a software company and we were recently told by his supervisor that he is incredibly detailed oriented.  This attention to detail (when learning any topic) goes way back to his interest in topics from bats (the flying rodent kind) to reading (series of books) and more.

In summary, gifted children have a curiosity that goes way beyond that of other children, and (often) obsessively beyond that of bright children.  If your child displays such an infatuation with a topic, and their outcome is an amazingly thorough understanding of the topic, it might be an indicator that they are gifted.

Gifted Children and Imagination

Perhaps the most fun for the parent of a gifted child comes from a gifted child's seemingly limitless imagination and wellspring of ideas. There are different types of intelligences, and therefore different types of gifted intelligences, but we like to categorize them in 2 ways: analytically gifted and creatively gifted. We've said before that our son tends to the former while our daughter tends to the latter. So it might be logical to assume that it's our daughter who would be the more imaginative of the two, but for us that wasn't necessarily the case.

As early as preschool, long before being identified as gifted, our son would come home with the craziest (imagination on the wild side) and most detailed of stories. We still get a chuckle out of one of his stories where he claimed he and a friend pushed their teacher down the hill during recess. "And she rolled, and rolled..." The story went on and on, with incredible detail, enough so that--while we were pretty certain he hadn't actually pushed his teacher down the hill--we asked her about it at the next PTA meeting. His level of detail was quite convincing! And yes, it was all the product of his imagination.

That imagination hasn't abated, either. He's now a 20 year-old college junior who is taking World Literature. One night out to dinner recently he recounted for us the story of Gilgamesh. In amazing detail. On the way to the restaurant, all during dinner, and on the way home. He may still be talking about it, I'm not sure. While it wasn't the product of his imagination, it captured his attention enough that he had practically memorized the story. Somewhat related: gifted children will also converse with anyone willing to listen!

Gifted children can think in much more complex ways than other children. Their thinking can produce the most complex and detailed of ideas, as in our son's pre-school stories, and they can comprehend at incredibly high levels, as in his understanding of the story of Gilgamesh. This may be the easiest way to distinguish between a child who is bright and a child who is gifted: bright children will indeed memorize and recall content with ease, but gifted children will not only memorize and recall, but also extrapolate, infer, and create their own content.

Not to be outdone, our daughter too is a fountain of imagination and ideas, though more practical and grounded than that of our son (which would be really, really surprising if you knew our daughter). Her imagination comes out in her creative writing (she's been working on a book for a couple of years now) and in the particularness of her wardrobe (fortunately she's well beyond the dreadful goth years of junior high).

Gifted children often think much more abstractly than other children, as is the case with our daughter. In the late 90's (when she was around 8 or 9) there was a spate of disaster movies coming out (volcanoes, tornadoes, and storms; I'm sure you remember them). Having only seen the trailers on TV, she would turn to us and ask, "that can't happen here, can it?" She had taken the abstract concept of a volcano bubbling up out of the ground, or a tornado ravaging Kansas, and applied it to our own backyard.

Ah, the imagination of gifted children!