![]() After all, it’s probably true that the PG child has never met anyone else like himself/herself, statistically speaking, unless someone has made a special effort to make that happen. ![]() The very real, qualitative difference that marks the PG experience may actually feel to them like a cultural chasm that can never be bridged - and because a PG brain is such an exceedingly rare thing, it is easy to empathize with this position. This insightful passage describes how a PG child can feel a gap between themselves and a moderately gifted child - a space as uncomfortable as the gap between a gifted child and a neurotypical child. Just as a mild+ gifted person seems to feel they have to shift down gears, hold back or go slow with those of average cognition, so too do the high+ gifted feel with their mild+ gifted peers after a certain point. It is as if the questioning and exploration became “enough” for their peer, while for the high+ gifted person, he was “just getting started.” For high+ gifted people, this “arbitrary stopping point” of curiosity and questioning of mild+ gifted people seems to happen much too quickly in relationships. Many high+ gifted clients report to me that they might meet a fellow gifted person (mild+, in this case) and feel energized by the synergy of thought they share with the other person however, sooner or later, they come to feel quite or very disappointed that the other person’s openness of mind and curiosity seemed to stop at some arbitrary point. Jennifer Harvey Sallin, a psychologist and coach for the gifted, offers an excellent example of the experience of PG kids (who she calls “high+ gifted”) interacting with other children who are mildly or moderately gifted (who she calls “mild+”): If no one else on the playground cares about Mersenne primes, or no one else in Kindergarten has read Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events, with whom can the PG child be friends? With what companions can they share interests, ideas, and questions? This is perhaps the most visible and most acute vulnerability of the profoundly gifted, especially in childhood - the difficulty in finding someone with whom they can make a genuine and unselfconscious connection. One need they share with their neurotypical peers, however, is friends - and this is where the relative rarity of such children can be a gigantic hurdle to overcome. Just as a person with 20/300 vision needs a different eyeglasses prescription than one with 20/70 vision, children with extremely advanced intellectual capabilities need different things from the world around them - and indeed, it is the whole world, since their entire experience of life is qualitatively different from both moderately gifted and nongifted people. As you can see, profoundly gifted (PG) children are practically vanishingly rare in the population: Gross, reflects the relative rarity of these children. This chart, from Australian researcher and expert on the profoundly gifted Miraca U. Importantly, though, this understanding implies something that often goes unsaid even within the confines of GiftedLand: similarly, a brilliant child of IQ 166 is equally distant from the aforementioned gifted child of IQ 133…and a child with a gobsmacking IQ of 199 is just as removed from the IQ 166 child, who is already rare to an astonishing degree. (Most people with no personal experience in this territory haven’t ever had that pointed out to them, by the way - it’s a delicious little morsel to toss out if you ever find yourself mired in a “gifted education is elitist” discussion, and quite the conversation-stopper.) Almost no one would suggest that the latter child would benefit from spending all their time in a classroom of students that intellectually different from them - so the same is therefore true for the gifted child. Statistically speaking, the intellect a child of IQ 133 is as different from a child of IQ 100 (33 points) as that same perfectly average child is from a child with an IQ of 67. However, to treat those above 130 as though they are homogenous can be a grave mistake, though an unfortunately frequent one, with serious social consequences for the child. Most often, they are defined by IQ scores of 130+, which puts them in the top 5% of the population. Children who are born with extraordinary intellectual capabilities are, by definition, rare.
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