Gifted kids are certainly unique and much more challenging for the parents and other family members. They are challenging because they are intense, they look at the world with a different eye when compared to similar aged children. Teachers too sometimes find it hard to deal with GT kids as they have intense characteristics that they use to approach life.
The intensity in GT kids comes in the form of cognitive intensity, which means the attributes like attention, focus, and thinking GT kids use to solve the problems in their daily lives. Gifted children also have intense emotional aspects, like the passion, they feel every day, or the highs and lows in their feelings. The emotional intensity in GT children is responsible for their frequent behavioral outbursts. Behavioral outbursts are of two types – internal and external. Depression, mood swings, frustration, and anxiety are the internal forms of emotional outburst, while temper tantrums, yelling, screaming, and other actions that display anger are the external emotional outbursts that a GT child portrays.
Whatsoever form a gifted child picks to express his intense feelings, the outburst is bad not only for the child but for the parents as well. Therefore, parents should start early in life and teach the skill to manage intense feelings to a gifted child so that he does not choose frequent outbursts to be a solution, rather he learns to have control over his thinking and feelings. These are called coping strategies, which a gifted child must know how to use. Following are some coping strategies parents could make use of in order to lessen the outbursts of a GT child:
Start early
Parents should start asking their gifted child to talk about their emotions freely and honestly at quite an early age. Although, they would not want to, but it is in your hands to make your child talk about his emotions. This is one of the best things to do when you want to make your gifted child take a control over his feelings and emotions. If you start doing this at quite an early stage, your child would learn a nice way to put his emotions into words and express his heart out to you.
Focus on good behavior
Parents should remember to focus on good things and kind of ignore bad things. Otherwise, sometimes it happens that parents keep focusing on the negative things or bad habits in their children and tend to ignore the good ones, which is detrimental for the development of a child.
Give them the attention they deserve
Gifted children have unique developmental needs and experiences, which demand much more and special attention from parents and teachers. Parents cannot give same amount of attention and help to a gifted and a normal child. You have to take out more time to take care of a gifted child and to nurture their socio-emotional development.
Guidance and support
GT children are perfectionists and at times when they are not in a situation to fulfill their perfectionist desire, they are more likely to become depressed. Under such circumstances, gifted children require more and more support of their parents, who should help gifted children to relax. When GT children feel that they are not up to the mark, and they should have been doing better, they start feeling a lack of confidence and start undermining them. Here, parents have a major role to perform, as they can make their child full of self-confidence and self-esteem, by telling them and reminding them of the things that they are best at.
Summary
Gifted children have outstanding talents that take them to higher levels of accomplishment, but whenever they fail to meet their own high expectations thy get hurt. It is a challenging task for parents to rear GT children.
