The parents of gifted children are often raising those kids well, but I have had too many sensitive patients who were gifted but too distressed to ever show their talents because their parents and teachers had no idea about how to meet the special needs of an HSC [highly sensitive child]. // Women who identify with the Great Mother, or are identified by others with Aphrodite (e.g. Marilyn Monroe), for example, or men who identify with the Hero (JFK, Martin Luther King Jr.) will sooner or later try to do things or be expected to do things beyond human capabilities, or be scapegoated for failing, or martyred in some way.

How can we better encourage and reinforce the most entrepreneurial and talented among us? We can start by changing the ways we set up schools and the ways we address the very different learning abilities and needs of the students in them. The well-known “achievement gap” refers to the difference in the average academic performance between our highest and lowest achieving population groups...I believe our most worrisome achievement gap should be the performance gap we see within each individual rather than those between any groups of people.

Although this particular story is about one individual 24 year old gifted young woman that I refer to as “weed girl,” the narrative represents the many stories that I hear on a regular basis as a psychotherapist and career counselor dealing primarily with gifted young adults. Weed Girl’s story is one of discovery that begins when she comes to therapy for “depression” and discovers that in addition to being depressed, that  she is actually a gifted or high potential young woman who has gone through life thinking something is wrong with her because parents and teachers told her from an early age that she was “too sensitive,” “too intense,” and “asking too many questions.”

By Paula Olszewski-Kubilius. Many gifted children acquire expert levels of knowledge and perform at a high level in their area. But, only a very few will become eminent in adulthood and produce groundbreaking work in their field, the kind of work that earns them a place in history and significantly alters the domain that they work in. A major issue for the field of gifted education is why so few highly gifted children grow up to be renowned and creative producers.

Adolescence is a difficult time for most people, but social and emotional issues are exacerbated in the exceptionally or profoundly gifted adolescent who discovers the needs for friendship connections, romance, and greater independence in school and home.

There are many different ways to raise and educate a profoundly gifted child; and for readers of Parenting for High Potential, I will dispense with the usual, “How did you know your child was so gifted?” stories. For most of us, the story is completely similar from our child’s birth to about age 5 or 6 when we started dealing with the schools. How we handle the school years, and how our child handles the school years, can vary tremendously. This is a brief overview of the approach I took with my middle son, Charlie.

Highly intelligent, talented students need special programs to keep them engaged and challenged. But experts say too often they aren't even identified -- especially in low-income and minority schools.

To child psychologist David Anderegg, the nerd stereotype is not just a fleeting playground obstacle. It represents a particularly American strain of anti-intellectualism that has plagued the culture since Ralph Waldo Emerson endorsed the idea that Americans were “men of action, not men of reflection.”

No conception of giftedness or talent works in a cultural vacuum... A cross-cultural view picks up a wide variety of international templates for the identification and education of the gifted and talented, which are sometimes entirely opposing. The wider view can demonstrate unrecognised stereotyping and expectations, and illustrate the often serious effects of social influences on opportunities for the development of high-level potential and its promotion throughout life.

In Britain, the academic achievements of gifted girls in grade school are surpassing those of gifted boys in almost all areas of study and at all ages, whereas this does not appear to be the case in the USA. The evidence suggests two major reasons for this difference. Emotionally, British girls are now showing greater confidence in their abilities.