After a few weeks of school, “different” children often find themselves marginalized. The brains of the gifted boil, but their legs and emotional maturity do not follow. The diagnosis is therefore urgent.
What we imagine as a chance or a gift is not experienced at all like that by the person concerned: the gifted understands everything very quickly and gets bored in class. He is disappointed by the school which does not meet his expectations and risks dropping out at any time. He very quickly perceives the difference with others, a difference that is difficult to live with because he is out of step with his comrades: he does not have the same centers of interest and therefore has difficulty making friends and therefore lives in his own home. bubble away; in addition he is hypersensitive and suffers from this difference.
Gifted, precocious, in advance, with high potential, the qualifiers for these children are numerous and in France one speaks rather of intellectually precocious children. But precocity amounts to saying that these children are simply ahead and therefore that one day they could be caught up by others. Which is not the case.
More and more precocious children
These children are said to be more and more numerous, perhaps because they are detected more and because we think about them more often when faced with school problems. There would be 200,000 out of 10 million pupils between 3 and 18 years old, or about 5% of children, or one to two precocious children per class.
Spotting them is not easy! It is not necessarily a 1er class, on the contrary: behind any dissipated or even failed child, a gifted person can hide! A rather peculiar dunce who started with a very awake baby: he walked around 12 months instead of 4, he spoke well at 2 years old, and at 3 years old had the vocabulary and phrases of a child of 7 or 8 years old. He knew how to read before entering preparatory school and above all asked the question “why” thousands of times about everything, and in particular the meaning of life … In fact a child who had questions of adults, but with the emotional needs of a child and who has become a lively skin …
They read quickly and a lot, but write poorly
Their writing is often poor because the motor skills of their hand do not keep pace with the speed of intellectual development. They are unable to put their shoelaces on, but wonder what’s after death! In physical education, they are not arrows; in football, the ball goes between their feet. For them, it is annoying and they therefore refuse these games with, once again, being sidelined from the group.
Experts think they use their right brain, whereas humans use the left half of the brain more, so they are more intuitive than reasoned. But anyway, both parts of the brain are working at full speed so information is processed faster. That’s not all: his senses are heightened, more efficient: his sight is wider, his hearing allows him to listen to several conversations at the same time, his sense of smell is ultra-sensitive….
How to spot them?
As soon as you have any doubts, it is best to consult a psychologist or a child psychiatrist for psychometric tests. These IQ tests are reliable from the age of 4. The child is considered precocious for an IQ between 120-125, and for others between 130-135. But everything does not have to be reduced to the IQ to make the diagnosis of a precocious child. It takes a full and thorough psychological assessment.
But above all, there is an urgent need to take care of them because they are fragile and vulnerable children, paradoxically very exposed to school failure and learning disabilities.
It remains to be seen what to do: the answer is complex. The psychologist must be very present to help the family find the right formula to properly insert the child.
The heart of support also lies in schooling: whether or not to skip a class, change or no establishment to find one where talents can be expressed. ” It would simply be necessary for the school to recognize and take into account our peculiarities of functioning “: It is they who say it!
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