It’s usually not hard to spot the overachieving children – they’re the ones who win the spelling bee every year, skip grade levels, or have never picked up an instrument they didn’t intuitively know how to play. While one might assume those children’s futures couldn’t be anything but bright and full of promise, the unfortunate truth is that too often, life after school can be challenging for these overachievers.
Whether you’re raising a gifted child or you received that label during your younger years, it’s important to recognize how giftedness and the expectations that come with it can have a lasting impact, contributing to gifted kid burnout and low self-esteem. While most people appreciate recognition for a job well done, true motivation and satisfaction must come from within.
What Is Gifted Kid Syndrome?
While gifted kid syndrome isn’t a medically recognized condition, it’s a phenomenon with some commonly held beliefs and observations. Children who’ve earned this label due to their academic performance or unique talents often face challenges such as perfectionism and difficulty coping with failure. Often, these challenges last well into adulthood.
The Definition and Characteristics of Gifted Kid Syndrome
The National Association for Gifted Children defines giftedness as the capability to perform at higher levels compared to peers who are of the same age, have the same level of experience, and live in the same environment. For that reason, children with this label require modifications to their educational experience to be challenged to the same degree as their peers and to recognize their full potential.
Giftedness exists in every demographic, coming from all cultural and ethnic backgrounds as well as household income brackets. There’s no standard definition or calculation for this phenomenon, but many people consider children in the top 10% of performers in a given area to be gifted.
Common Misconceptions
There are several myths and misconceptions about gifted children, from the nature of their “gift” to what it means for their future.
Myth #1: Gifted Children Are Just Smart
While many gifted children do have higher IQs than their peers, giftedness is more than intelligence. These children’s brains process information differently, so they often need a different level of instruction and coursework.
Myth #2: Gifted Children Are Always Good Students
Surprisingly, many gifted students see poor grades. They may become bored, and therefore, mentally check out of classroom instruction. Alternatively, they may be brilliant but miss deadlines and overlook assignments due to disorganization.
Myth #3: Gifted Children Grow Into Successful Adults
Giftedness isn’t a free ticket to an exciting, successful career or a fulfilling social life. In fact, it can make these things harder to achieve, presenting challenges that typical children don’t have to face.
Early Signs
Some early signs of giftedness include:
- Advanced language skills
- Curiosity and a drive to understand how things work
- Early abstract thinking
- Diverse interests
- Exceptional memory and recall abilities
- Long attention span
Struggles with Motivation in Adulthood
The transition to adulthood isn’t always smooth for gifted children. According to one large study, as many as 25 percent of gifted students drop out of high school, and as many as two-fifths don’t pursue a university degree. While this doesn’t automatically mean they won’t be successful, it can indicate issues such as burnout and a lack of support.
There are several ways giftedness can lead to struggles with motivation in adulthood, including creating intense pressure, a fear of failure and underdeveloped coping skills.
The Pressure to Always Succeed
The label “gifted” comes with a lot of pressure. A student who’s accustomed to outperforming their peers is typically surrounded by teachers, mentors and family members who expect them always to succeed. This pressure to succeed can be overwhelming and lead to stress and a burnt out gifted kid.
Perfectionism and Fear of Failure
During childhood, success and perfection are easy to quantify. A perfectly spelled word, executed math problem, or performed musical piece receives recognition and commendation from people the child respects. This reinforces the idea that perfection is the ultimate goal and anything less is subpar and needs to be corrected as soon as possible.
This is challenging to navigate during childhood and even more so in adulthood when perfection and success are much harder to quantify. The stakes are higher in adulthood, and oftentimes, whether an endeavor is a success or failure isn’t evident until months or years later. For many gifted children-turned-adults, perfectionism and fear of failure is paralyzing.
Underdeveloped Resilience and Coping Skills
When gifted children outperform their peers, the adults in their lives may believe and send the message that certain talents or subjects come easily to the child. As a result, the child accepts that they don’t have to work hard to be great.
Unfortunately, they miss out on the opportunity to develop the resilience and coping skills necessary to deal with the hard things in life. To an adult who grew up gifted, challenges bring a risk of failure that they may not be equipped to handle.
How Early Praise Shapes Drive Later in Life
While praising a child seems like a benign way to recognize their accomplishments, commending the outcome rather than the effort can impact their internal drive later in life.
The Role of External Validation
When parents, teachers and role models provide a gifted child with excessive external validation, the child learns to judge their performance by the feedback they get. Rather than reflecting on how they feel about their own performance, including the process and the outcome, they look to others for validation.
The Impact on Self-Esteem and Self-Worth
When a gifted child doesn’t get the validation and praise they are accustomed to from people they respect, and they haven’t learned to reflect on their performance internally, they may feel as though they’ve failed. If overachieving is a core part of their identity, this can be a tremendous hit to their sense of self-worth.
Transition from Praise to Self-Motivation
Whether it’s a parent helping a gifted child to navigate the world or an adult who was labeled gifted as a child, the ultimate goal is to move from relying on external praise to cultivating self-motivation. For teachers and parents, this may come from recognizing the work that went into an achievement, rather than overlooking the effort and only focusing on the outcome. This shift helps the child cultivate self-motivation by fostering a growth mindset and encouraging them to develop the drive to achieve their goals independent of positive feedback.
Tips for Reigniting Motivation
For many adults who were formerly gifted children, learning to place less importance on external validation or judge an achievement by the praise it garners is the key to reigniting motivation.
Set Realistic Goals
Someone who’s used to having a very high bar set for them may struggle to be realistic in their goal-setting. Establishing reasonable expectations for career or life milestones and setting actionable goals can help them find the motivation to achieve what they want.
Explore a Nonproductive Hobby
Nonproductive hobbies such as binge-watching television shows, reading fiction or keeping a journal can help some individuals retrain their brains to pay attention to the process rather than the outcome. It also counters the idea that only productive time is valuable.
Embrace a Growth Mindset
For a perfectionist, the risk of failure can be paralyzing, discouraging them from taking on new challenges where success isn’t guaranteed. Developing a growth mindset means accepting that progress, not perfection, is the goal.
Find Support
Often, we lose motivation because of negative thoughts we aren’t even aware of, but these thoughts can greatly affect our success. Talking to a licensed therapist who specializes in helping clients recognize and overcome negative thoughts can help individuals develop the tools they need to cultivate self-motivation.
Conclusion
Having a gifted child, or growing up as a gifted child, presents a variety of challenges that can last a lifetime. By recognizing how gifted child syndrome can impact a person’s self-motivation in adulthood and shifting the focus from external validation to internal drive, individuals can foster a healthier sense of self-esteem and self-worth.
Negative thinking patterns can be hard to overcome alone, especially when they’ve been reinforced since childhood. At Restore Mental Health, we’re experienced in treating a range of behavioral health needs, including gifted kid burnout. To learn about our programs and how we can help you, contact us today.
