By Marylou Kelly Streznewski

“What then needs to be done that is crucial to the future success of this educational field? One of the biggest problems is that we have been mainly ‘preaching to the choir’ rather than presenting our case for gifted education to average Americans who pay most of the taxes for operating public schools. This is a major challenge which must be addressed if gifted students and their education programs are to survive and thrive.”

This statement by Maurice Fisher in the Winter 1999 issue of GEPQ struck a responsive chord in me, especially the phrase “preaching to the choir”. It is the same phrase I used when as an educator, I diligently attended state and national conferences on gifted education in order to improve my skills.

I was excited by the information I gleaned from presentations by the experts and from the books they wrote. However, there came a time when a disheartening insight emerged.

This (in some cases, literally) life-saving knowledge was circulating in a closed loop of dedicated professionals and a few savvy parents. If even 3% of the population is gifted, we are talking about information which needs to reach millions of people.

Obviously, this wider audience could not attend the NAGC’s annual conference, and would have little occasion to read the many well-written academic books in the field of gifted studies.

But they might read a trade book aimed at an intelligent lay audience; one which explained the nature of giftedness to the public, and shared the lives of gifted adults, in their own voices.

As a professional writer, I assigned myself the task of creating such a book.

Gifted Grownups: The Mixed Blessings of Extraordinary Potential  (John Wiley & Sons, 1999) is an anecdotal  study of one hundred gifted adults from 18 to 90, and diversified by gender, family background, occupation, economic status, education, geographic location, ethnic origin, social class and race.

I conducted almost three hundred hours of interviews in writing it: in living rooms, in offices, in restaurants, under trees. As I realized the depth and variety of what these non-eminent people have to offer, listened to their accounts of misunderstanding, rejection and frustration, shared their stories of success and communication, my own view of giftedness was enlarged dramatically. 

It became evident that studying the lives of eminent adults is not enough. We need to investigate, in much more depth than has been done up to now, the lives of gifted people of all ages, in all areas of society.

In the months since the publication of the book, new insights have emerged from giving talks at conferences, to parent groups, and  in bookstores.

In some cases, old fears have been realized; in others, hopes renewed. The old stereotype, “You know, the kids with glasses we all remember from school,” was resurrected for me by a radio interviewer.

When I pointed out that the Terman studies long ago showed gifted people to be taller, stronger, healthier, and even better–looking, she worried out loud about some kind of “Master race theory.”

Saddest of all have been the encounters with women (the latest only hours ago) who, over and over say, “Oh yes, the kids are gifted but they get it from my husband, not me.”

My hopes were raised by the women in mid-life who have come to respect and honor their own intelligence, and are building exciting lives; and by senior citizens who have never given up enlarging their special gifts.

Overall, I have concluded that there are large numbers of frustrated gifted adults, who can be located by anyone who knows what to look for, who do not find outlets for their potential.

We are not paying enough attention to trying to teach gifted people how to cope with their lives in the adult world. Far too many of them find their drive and creativity thwarted by persons or establishments who regard them as either silly or threatening.

I am well aware of the school of thinking which designates adults as gifted only if they have achieved something called eminence. I find many difficulties in accepting such thinking.

One: There is an inherent difficulty in changing the terms of the definition of giftedness in the middle of the definition.

A recent article in Gifted Child Quarterly (Noble, Subotnik and Arnold, 1999) presented giftedness in adults and children as distinct from one another, stating, “Giftedness in children is linked to potential, in adults to achievement.”

In attempting to employ such a method, do we not move from describing qualities within the nature of the person to effects of the actions the older person may or may not have the opportunity to take – and all within the same definition?

If we change from characteristics to accomplishments, the characteristics with which we started do not simply go away.

The racing brain, the questing mind can be observed at any and every age, and for the sake of the health of the individual person, he or she deserves to know enough about the gift to respect and honor it.

Second: If we accept the practice of trying to define giftedness in two different ways at the same time, some very strange questions and concerns begin to arise.

A question I encountered recently holds many pitfalls for the unwary thinker. “If, after several years spent raising children, a formerly gifted girl is elected to congress or organizes a nature preserve, does she become gifted again?” (The insulting implication that if you are raising children you are no longer gifted hangs in this question.) 

Where the transition to the non-gifted state takes place remains a mystery. Can criteria be developed for locating the point at which, not having achieved eminence, one is simply expected to settle for being an average person and somehow cast aside the curiosity, the racing mind, the sophisticated questions, the deep sensitivity?

If we follow the practice of one standard for children and another for adults, what do we say to the maturing person? “If you haven’t made it by a certain point/age, then you are no longer gifted”? How does this play, as a mental health question, over against all the effort we have put into the self-image of that student?

My favorite question for those who espouse a belief in defining gifted two ways at once concerns the poet Emily Dickinson. Her story is well known: the seven poems published in a minor magazine as a favor by a friend; the fifteen-hundred brilliant compositions tied in ribboned packets, filling the drawers in her house at her death. No eminence there.

But  surely Dickinson was, in her nature, a gifted person unrecognized in her lifetime. Now that Dickinson and Whitman are acknowledged to be the two major innovators in the creation of American poetry, her eminence is undeniable.

Does this mean that Dickinson became gifted after she was dead?

The argument will no doubt be made that if we nurture all children properly, many more will achieve that elusive state of eminence.

Even so, only a certain portion of the children we so carefully nurture through gifted programs will attain the highest ranks our society offers. The rest? It is for “the rest” that I wrote Gifted Grownups.

I approached the study of these one hundred gifted adults armed with a set of informal criteria which had developed over twenty years of spotting misplaced gifted students in high school English classes. What did I look for? Speed, intense curiosity, sophistication of thought processes, sensitivity, concentration, energy, and humor.

Working on the assumption that giftedness is a function of one’s nature and not necessarily one’s achievements, from among the many definitions available, I came to define a gifted person as one who has a finely tuned and biologically advanced perception system and a mind that works considerably faster than 95% of the population.

Each two to three hour interview I conducted was based on a series of index cards containing question, statements, quotes about being smarter than other people. The interviewees were asked to respond to only those cards which interested them, thus avoiding threatening questions.

They commented, argued, and validated my initial theory that  a smart kid remains a “smart kid” for life; only the costumes change, and the arenas in which they must work out their lives.

After completing my study, I came to agree with Webb, Meckstroth &Tolan in Guiding the Gifted Child (1982) that giftedness is not a tacked on extra which can be set aside by gifted children on the journey to adulthood, “…the brain that drives them is so fundamental to everything about them that it cannot be separated from their personhood.”

The implications of what these grown up smart kids told me about their lives are threefold.

First, it was obvious that there are a great many gifted people who lack even basic knowledge about their own nature.

Counterproductive actions in personal relations and employment can limit the personal happiness they may attain and blunt their possible contributions to the progress of society.

Realizing that the discontinuities they experienced were not evidence of a problem, but an indication of competence opened the eyes of many of those I interviewed to their own true nature. Internet reviews from readers continue to affirm this.

Second, a gifted person must be studied in the various contexts in which people live: as a member of a family, a student in school, a participator in human relationships, a member of the workforce, and as a citizen in society.

Here, both new and ongoing research can make a significant contribution, by looking at how persons with this particular nature (giftedness) function in these contexts. The study of these dynamic interactions provide much insight into how gifted adults can improve the way they run their lives.

The need for change is the third implication of what these individuals were able to tell me. As was stated above, we simply cannot afford, on either practical or moral grounds, to waste our precious human resources.

While improving our schools’ ability to nurture feisty minds, we need to move beyond the school setting to understand that multitalented young people may require many years to discover what they really want to do, and that for all their lives, they will seek stimulation and change. 

Recognition that giftedness exists throughout one’s life can improve the situation of workers, of bright women and of senior citizens.

If the use of the informal criteria listed above successfully yielded persons who could be defined as gifted, (and they did) then it would seem that his method could have wide applications for use by others such as parents, teachers, employers, spouses, counselors and law enforcement personnel, as they interact with gifted persons of all ages. The mechanisms of these interactions need to be studied.

While depicting the lives of a cross-section of gifted adults, Gifted Grownups offers insight into families, schooling, friendships, marriages, aging and crime – all areas which impact the lives of children.

I have come to the firm conclusion the one of the major ways we can help to ensure a better chance in life for our gifted children is to seriously begin the work of recognizing gifted grownups by using our professional expertise to assist them in recognizing themselves. 

We also need to include ourselves in these considerations. By acknowledging and working to resolves our own issues as gifted adults, think how much time and energy we could free to devote to our children, either as parents or professionals.

And to the degree that we help children and adults understand each other, we help society. Accepting this, I see a series of tasks before us in studying the gifted in families, as parents, as teachers, as young adults, in the workplace, with regard to mental health, relationships, women’s issues and senior citizens.      

For example, we need much more research on parental attitudes toward their own giftedness.

At the Spring conference of the Pennsylvania Association for Gifted Education  this year, I presented my book in the exhibit area.

I lost count of the number of  parents who said to me, “Oh no, not me. I’m not a gifted grownup. My husband/wife is the one the kids take after.”

Their  tension and conflict around this question was painfully evident in their faces, their voices and their body language.

In talking to parent groups, I have encountered this same kind of denial. It has also been confirmed by teachers in gifted programs.

It seems imperative to me that if men and women are to be the best parents for their gifted children, they must be able to recognize and deal with their own issues as gifted adults.

How much better for a family to be able to see that they are a dynamically interacting collection of high-powered individuals and can share both the pleasures and the problems of dealing with a world that does not always accept them.

Readers of this journal are well aware of the many daunting tasks which face us in gifted education, and I will not belabor them here. However, there is one area which I believe has received little attention, and that is the mental and emotional well being of teachers who are gifted grownups.

If such persons are fortunate enough to be working in gifted programs, they may feel sufficiently challenged and stimulated even while enduring the stress of keeping such programs alive in today’s cost-cutting climate.

Others are not so lucky. They teach in schools with lockstep curricula where innovation and challenge, two essentials for a gifted mind, are regarded as “troublemaking”.

We are aware that educators must engage in the ongoing process of awakening the general public to the needs of the gifted. In some schools that general public includes principals and administrators.

In most districts, it includes the school board. But reaching out to colleagues who may be enduring health-damaging frustration is an important task of which we should be ever mindful.

As our young people move beyond conventional schooling into the adult world of college and /or work, they continue to need special understanding. Faculties beyond the average take the gifted person higher, wider and deeper, for longer.

Multiple talents require time to be explored, and it can take at least until age thirty to sort it all out. The late John Gowan, (1971)educator and psychologist, said, “Their own longer deeper search for meaningfulness is the extra mile the gifted have to travel.”

Families can be helped by developing greater awareness of the extra mile a son or daughter may be traveling. Parents may have to patient with a student who is caught in a non-stimulating college environment or who wishes to explore other learning options than conventional classrooms.

Young people themselves need to recognize the work of this period as a necessary and productive phase of their lives and accept their special needs.

It helps if high school students can be made aware of this in advance. (An interesting question: In how many programs across the country are gifted students taught, in specific detail, about the nature of their own giftedness?)

One interviewee who handled this period with grace, advises “staying in the moment and doing your best,” as each new talent or job presents itself.

Parents whose patience is being sorely tried by a child who seems unable to “settle down” need to remember their own twenties, and possibly thirties, honestly.

What happens when the gifted children we have nurtured so carefully as parents and teachers encounter the world of corporate America and attempt to negotiate its hazards from thirty to sixty-something? 

In the interviews, I found that where employment is concerned, gifted adults exhibit an intensity, an insistence on the integrity to do the work at its best, as well as chronic impatience with shoddy work and slow thinkers.

Gifted adults work too quickly, get bored, and show it. They raise the standards for everyone else, and that is always resented. They have odd approaches to things, which irritates their coworkers. They ask for more work and make enemies.

The idealism of the young person is still there, and can cause problems with authority figures or with fellow executives. In addition, the bright mind has difficulty in accepting the illogical and may be very stubborn in expressing doubts about a project or in criticizing others.

And yet, because of heightened sensitivity, this same person may be unusually vulnerable to peer group rejection. College degree or not, gifted adults carry around in their feisty minds questions the boos cannot answer .

And sometimes they threaten the boss, because that odd approach turns out to be better than the boss’s idea.

Which is why, when the downsizing begins; and this is not a new phenomenon, the smartest employees are often the first to go.

Industrial psychologist David Willings told us in 1981, “Job performance is not a significant factor in promotability. Social acceptability, the ability to fit in, to think as the rest of management thinks; these are the factors which make a person promotable.

The gifted employee is not readily promotable. This idea that the gifted will get ahead anyway, and if they do not, they were not really gifted, has no basis in fact.”

In the search for maximum profit and efficiency, corporate America needs to be able to take advantage of how the most clever people really operate.

It is worth remembering that what we needed in order to run the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century was the eminent few at the top,- and bodies- to stand in front of machines and behind plows and tractors.

For the twenty-first century, bodies won’t do. We will need every fast-paced, flexible, curious, inventive systems thinker on the planet to manage the high-tech civilization which is imploding in our midst.

David Willings (1981) warns us that, “The gifted are a significant factor, if not THE significant factor in the national economy of any country and…most of the countries with which I am acquainted are recklessly squandering that resource.”        

Too often, employers regard gifted workers as unstable or troublesome and they fail to utilize their innovative approaches to improve company profits.

Here is an area where researchers and authorities in the field of gifted studies could enhance the work of industrial psychologists for the benefit of all.

The gifted adult threading a way through the maze of the contemporary employment scene may take comfort from one of the interviewees. “I play the game in industry more than I care to, but I have accepted the responsibility for playing the game for now…the challenge is to play to win!”

Nowhere in contemporary life is the challenge greater than for gifted women. A powerful statement  by Linda Kreger  Silverman (1993) could serve as a summary. “Most women are unaware of their giftedness; they are only aware of their pain – the pain of being different from the way women are supposed to be.”

Even if she moves confidently beyond denial or lack of awareness of her gifts, a modern wife and mother is constantly challenged by personal  and career responsibilities.  Researchers as well as the interviews call for change.

In “Why Doesn’t Jane Run?” Jacquelynn Eccles of the University of Michigan (1985) warned we must not simply settle for advocating more career opportunities, we must become advocates for honoring motherhood as a profession worthy of the time and talent of smart women.

To do this, we will have to change the way the modern workplace is organized, as radical as that may sound. In my own opinion, those who best understand giftedness have a special responsibility to help this to happen.

Eccles says: ”Educational and occupational training systems are now designed to mesh well with the life-patterns of men. They also tend to operate on the implicit assumption that (1) late entry into such professions as medicine, law or sciences and (2) less than complete devotion to one's profession are bad ideas [Are they not, in reality, simply different ideas?”]

Both of these assumptions need to be evaluated… In addition, educational and occupational support programs that are specifically designed for gifted women, who have different life patterns from those of gifted men, need to be developed… Many women are influenced by their desire to spend significant amounts of their time raising their children... The assumption that late entry signifies lack of commitment should not be made.”

Mother Nature has decreed that the healthiest children are born to mothers in their twenties. The male patterns of corporate society push women into their thirties and even forties to have children, a long-term disadvantage in women’s and children’s health, and not insignificantly, in health care costs.

The workplace must change to provide for a variety of acceptable career paths so that bright women can nurture their bright children as well as their own need for meaningful work.

The two accomplished authors of Answers to the Mommy Track (1993) put it quite bluntly. “If we want educated and well trained women to have children in this society, then we must supports the needs of these women and their husbands to take care of training, developing and educating these children.”

Nowhere more than here is it obvious that we can help the children by meeting the needs of the adults.

As our population ages, perhaps the second-greatest challenge in the study of gifted adults is our senior citizens. The high-powered brain/mind that drives a gifted person’s life does not switch to low gear simply because the body ages or some chronological milestone has been reached.

The persistence of curiosity, the need for stimulation and the drive to DO things does not fade. It cannot be satisfied by a steady diet of bridge, bingo and bus trips, which many well-meaning programs seek to provide.

Whether high school dropouts or professionals with advanced degrees, the bright senior citizens I interviewed continue to have both the capacity and the need to learn and grow.

Families can help. Providing stimulating conversation, transportation to cultural activities, recognition of valuable skills, and encouragement to try new activities will not only enhance the dignity of the elderly gifted, but can prevent these valuable citizens from becoming isolated .

At this age, finding peers who are still active can be especially difficult, so that younger people can be essential for intellectual companionship.

However, it is the educational institutions where older adults can provide a vital element in hard-pressed gifted programs. Grandparenting programs, if keyed to the special abilities of individuals, could provide the crucial recognition and acceptance which a tiny smart kid may require.

Mentoring for special projects with older students  by retired professionals is another way in which gifted seniors could serve children while serving their own needs. But how the aging process takes place in an unusually intelligent person is an area where significant research should be undertaken.

Before I began the research for this book, I expected certain things would be true about gifted people. What I did not expect was that no matter where I looked –education, gifted studies, general psychology, industrial relations, business, social criticism – all the voices would say the same things about the needs of gifted people and the needs of the twenty-first century.

For example, a management consultant warns that a whole new civilization – superindustrialism – will implode in our midst in the next forty years and that its chief characteristic will be speed.

At the same time, an educational researcher tells us that gifted people are complex systems thinkers who can move rapidly in the face of change.

No one was putting voices like these together and letting them speak to a wider audience, and this has been one of the major reasons for writing this book.

Gifted Grownups is intended to be an aid to gifted adults in discovering themselves, and in gaining wider recognition for them in society, and by those who share their lives.

In addition, it hopes to be a conscious-raising statement that encourages discussion and dialogue in those areas of society where solutions need to be worked out over many years. Not only families and schools, but government, industry, universities and the helping professions must be part of this process.

Those whose expertise is specifically in gifted studies can make a vital contribution to the future welfare of gifted children and adults by spreading their knowledge beyond the choirs of academe and into the larger society.

References

Eccles, J. (1985). Why doesn’t Jane run? Sex differences in educational and occupational patterns, in The gifted and talented: developmental perspectives (p.240).Washington, DC: American Psychological Association

Ferguson, T. and Dunphy, J. (1993. Answers to the mommy track. (p.218). Far Hills, NJ: New Horizon Press.

Gowan, J. and Bruch, C. (1971) The academically talented student and guidance. (p.33). New York: Houghton Mifflin.

Noble, K.A., Subotnik, R.F., & Arnold, K.D. (1999). To thine own self be true: A new model of female talent development, in Gifted Child Quarterly 43 (3), 146.

Silverman, L.K. (1993). Giftedness and the development of the feminine. Advanced Development,  5, p.42.

Webb,J., Meckstroth, E. & Tolan, S. (1982). Guiding the gifted child. Columbus: Ohio Psychology Publishing Co.

Willings, D. (1981) The gifted at work. Paper presented at the Fourth World Conference on Gifted and Talented Children. NP. 

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Article originally published in Gifted Education Press Quarterly, Vol.14 No1 Winter 2000.

Article published here with kind permission of the author.

Marylou Kelly Streznewski received her M. Ed. from the College of New Jersey in Trenton. Certified as a program specialist in gifted education, she taught gifted teenagers for twenty-four years at Central Bucks East High School in Bucks County Pennsylvania.

The author’s perspective on gifted adults has been informed by a lifetime as a member of a three-generation extended family of smart kids and gifted grownups. A long-standing marriage to a gifted gentlemen and the raising of her own four gifted children has provided experience in the realities of life in a gifted family. As an educator, she has counseled gifted students and their families in a variety of settings.

In addition to her work as an educator, Ms Streznewski’s career has included theater, journalism, fiction and poetry; she has taught writing at high school and college levels. In addition to Gifted Grownups, her fiction and poetry have appeared nationally. Currently, she is associated with The Writers Room, a non-profit writer’s center in Bucks County, where she serves as a poetry curator, and the poetry editor of the Bucks County Writer, a literary quarterly. She is at work on a poetry manuscript and her second novel.

She is author of the book Gifted Grownups: the Mixed Blessings of Extraordinary Potential

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related pages :

giftedness characteristics

GT Adults giftedness

giftedness : articles

giftedness : books

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