Why Gifted Kids Are Actually Special Needs

so oh boy i sure do love being perceived as a gifted child i hope i don't end up as being a perfectionist perfectionist burnout with burnt out i suppose with depression anxiety unfulfilled expectations and no real interests or goals so this is something that someone cross-posted to our subreddit you know it's a meme we've had a couple of streams about burnout and gifted kids so today what i'd like to talk to you all a little bit about is the pathway from gifted child to burnt out perfectionist as well as sort of the way that society

actually sets gifted children up to kind of fail so i know it's kind of interesting but when we think about a gifted child we think about we perceive gifted as an advantage but in my experience working with a lot of gifted children it's not always an advantage and in fact oftentimes it can be a burden and so i've seen this a lot in our community i've worked with a lot of people who kind of fall into that this category i suppose i sort of fall into it as well where i grew up kind of get

i'm gifted right so like school was easy for me i was told from a very young age that i was smart i was also kind of held accountable for like not studying right there like i'd kind of like not study very much and maybe get a b plus or an a minus and my teachers would tell my parents the same thing every single parent-teacher conference they'd always say well if all look just applied himself he would be the best student in the class if he only just like studied more he'd be the best student in

the class right they were like he's super smart he has a lot of potential right so they use these words like they talk about how smart i am they talk about all the potential i have and if i just applied myself i'd be you know i'd be such a i'd be the best student so it's kind of interesting because we perceive giftedness as an advantage but as one of my teachers once told me we'll kind of get to this towards the end they once explained to me that um this is in in not in medical

school but when i was training to become a psychiatrist i had a supervisor who once told me that gifted gifted children or special needs children and what that literally means is that like the needs of a child who's gifted are actually different from the average child and the parents who recognize that and recognize that this child is going to need like a slightly different structure a different curriculum or a different way of being raised are the ones that end up sort of doing a really good job and oddly enough in her clinical experience she found

that much like any other special needs children um you know kids that were not treated appropriately despite their gifts were the ones that kind of struggled so this statement when i first heard it i thought was like absolutely ridiculous kind of blew my mind a little bit but i respected the supervisor a lot and i started thinking about it so what i'd like to share with you all today is sort of the pathway that a gifted child takes how a society treats them how parents treat them the kind of struggles they face or the influences

that they have let's not even call it a struggle because it may not be a struggle and then sort of how they end up so i'd like to kind of share with that with you all today okay so the first thing that tends to happen is when a child is gifted they te school tends to be easy right so if you kind of think about it developmentally there are a lot of different things that happen in school so let's talk about school so school is a place where you get you socialize right so you get

socialization skills it's a place that you learn and people think that school is primarily about learning and it is primarily about learning but it's just not about learning that the subject material so sure we learn like arithmetic and mathematics and all that kind of stuff we learn history and science and all that good stuff but really school if you kind of look at it developmentally is a wonderful opportunity to learn certain key things socialization is a really important piece the other thing is like habits and how to study and this is the first sort of

disadvantage that i think gifted children sort of face is that you know if you're young and you're gifted school is so easy that you sort of get by without the luxury of studying and so we kind of perceive this as an advantage right like if you have to if you go through school and you don't study like that's easy like it's easy easy clap right and so it is and that sort of makes sense but the the interesting thing that i found is that oftentimes being intelligent especially when you're super young as a kid actually

sets you up for failure down the road because you never need to learn the habituated study like technique that you kind of need to that that you need to succeed later on so for a normal kid what tends to happen is like they don't have to study like in first grade but maybe like second grade third grade they have to learn how to study like once a week maybe they like learn how to study the night before the test because it doesn't come easily to them and then fourth grade fifth grade now you're you're doing

homework a couple days a week you know you're studying two or three days before the test then you kind of hit middle school where maybe you're studying like four days before the test and so there's this very graduated sense of increasing responsibility as you go further and further in school and it's sort of designed that way right we're not like no teacher has a six six year old that they're like giving 14 hours of homework a week to it's just absurd and then at the top end of the spectrum in terms of study habits and

what we demand of students you have something like let's say law school or medical school or things like that where people are regular studying like 60 hours a week 80 hours a week in medical school because you know people have have grown up and have built enough of a study habit where they can actually handle that pace of study so what happens with the gifted kid so the gifted kid you know when you sort of level up your skill to level one like in the first grade and then you level up your studying skill to

level two in the second grade and level three in the third grade so the gifted kid never actually has to like grind that xp for levels like one through five of studying habits and so they sort of managed to get b's or a's without really minimal with minimal studying or no studying at all and then seventh grade rolls around eighth grade rolls around they start to struggle a little bit maybe they get b's they're still not learning how to study because they sort of skipped that part of of the you know the skill building and

we'll kind of get to that later and then what tends to happen with gifted kids is that they don't need to study don't need to study don't need to study and then they hit a wall they finally get into some kind of situation where their raw intellect cannot is no longer sufficient to handle the schoolwork that they're supposed to handle but they've trained themselves at that point they've customized themselves at that point to managing school with raw intellect and so when that kind of falls short they like they really kind of really hit a wall

it's a very very hard cliff to to overcome and so this is kind of the first thing that that sort of shoots gifted kids in the foot and this also leads to kind of this idea of perfectionism and burnout because then they like you know then they they struggle a lot they don't understand why they can't do it they they try they know they're smart everyone's talking to them about potential they start to feel really bad about themselves so the first kind of interesting thing that gifted kids run into is the fact that they sort

of don't develop the proper study habits because you know as a six-year-old it's kind of not your fault because like you're not mature enough as a six-year-old to realize like oh i need you know to have good study habits so even though the teacher said this last tuesday and i understand that i don't need to study i'm going to sit down and like practice my study habits it doesn't make any sense it's like completely artificial so that's the first thing that happens is that they kind of hit this wall of of you know not being

able to study the second thing to consider is the expectation so another thing that really leads gifted kids kind of down the wrong path is the burden of expectation that's placed upon them so from a very young age they're told oh you're gifted you're smart you're special you have so much potential and so what that starts to do is it constructs like a very very lofty goal in their minds right so i'm going to use kind of an analogy which is kind of like you know if i think about an amazing home like i think

about a mansion it can have a beautiful blueprint and i can buy a gigantic piece of land and i can look at that and i can say like oh like this this home or this this blueprint has so much potential and sometimes we kind of forget that like you can have like you can have a blueprint for a mansion but that's gonna actually take way more work to achieve than like building a shack so the other really interesting thing that that we sort of kind of get wrong societally is that we assume that when someone

is gifted things are actually going to be easier for them that they need to work less to accomplish the same amount but in my experience living up to a gifted child's potential involves more work it's sort of like you know it's just like building a shack versus building a mansion like sure the mansion is capable of so much more than the shaq is capable of but let's not forget for a moment that the amount of effort that it goes into building a mansion is actually way more than what's required to build a shack this is

the second place that gifted kids kind of get tripped up because everyone around is looking at them and they're sort of saying oh like this is an amazing mansion like you could build such an amazing mansion and we all kind of forget for a moment that like actually living up to that potential is very very difficult and requires a lot more of an investment than building a shack and so this gap between what people expect of you and also the idea that things should be easier for you kind of compound on themselves and sort of

end up with gifted kids kind of feeling like they're they're failing at everything right because they have all this potential and they're not they're just not living up to it so the other thing that we'll see in gifted kids is that what what tends to happen is that they will put in some amount of work but they're expecting a mansion when all they've really put in is as much as building a shack i may have lost you a little bit there but let me just explain so you know what a gifted kid will do is

they'll like look at their peers right and they'll say like oh like this person did this and they're able to accomplish this so like i should be able to do that too and so if you look at your neighbors who are building a shack and they're like whoa they went to home depot and they got like 100 pounds of wood and they built their shack over a weekend and then like you go and get your 100 pounds of wood from home depot and you start like brought to you by home depot i suppose um and

you start building your mansion like i know it sounds kind of weird but you know 100 pounds of wood may be enough to build a shack but it's nowhere near enough to build a mansion and then what gifted kids will do is they'll look at like the foundation that they've laid with a hundred pounds of wood and they'll be like where's the i don't even have a shack like you know it's it's like they look at what they've accomplished when they put in the same amount of energy as someone else and they get really confused

because this person has a complete shack over here and like i have like barely the beginnings of a mansion and so then that sort of negatively impacts them they start to like feel like they're actually inferior to these other people because they've been told oh you're smarter than the kid next door like why the hell is the kid next door getting into college and like you're not even getting into college and so it all sort of sort of sort of compounds right because even for the gifted kid they're not trying to build a shack because

they've been told they've been they're gifted their entire life so it's not enough to be average if you're gifted so what you have to do is you try to you know build a mansion because that's what you've been told that you're capable of that's the expectation you set for yourself and then you're you're left kind of scratching your head and wondering like why you don't even have a shack yet even though you studied for a month and they studied for a month you're not getting as much as that they're getting and it's kind of super

bizarre right because we don't we just don't think about it that way we think that if you're gifted that means that everything should be easier for you that it not only they may need a hundred pounds of wood to build a shack but you should be able to build a shack and 50 pounds of wood it should be easier for you but it turns out paradoxically being harder and then we sort of end up with kind of the final state of a gifted kid which if we kind of think about it internally is a state

of like really shame and low self-esteem so all this stuff kind of compounds right like you're told you're smart so you set this expectation of what you're capable of like way up here and then like you know first grade goes by and you're up here second grade goes by and you're up here third grade goes by and you're up here boom boom boom fourth grade fifth grade sixth grade 10th grade 11th grade and then you kind of tank right and as you go to college suddenly like you don't have the study skills involved and now

in the gap between what you're capable of and what you actually accomplish this gap is where shame comes from this is the shame gap that gifted kids inevitably fall into which is when they fall short of what their expectations are and this could be once again due to the fact that you're you know you're setting out to build a mansion and you ended up not even building a shack right so all of these discrepancies between your expectations and your accomplishments in that gap and the bigger the gap is the more it's filled with shame so

then what happens is kids are ashamed right because they should be doing more they should be doing better and then like the shame then further compounds and makes it hard to find motivation and this is where you kind of get burnout so then like you have these gifted kids and you're like hey man just like go to a community college you don't have to go to an ivy league school school you don't have to go to like harvard or stanford or mit just like go to your local community college and in that comes a bunch

of shame because you've been told your entire life that you're better than that right and so you start to develop this ego of being a super smart kid and then this leads to avoidance of things because all you're left with is the identity of a smart kid so you can never even bring yourself to go to community college because smart kids don't go to community college in your mind that's where the stupid kids go and if you go to community college then suddenly you've lived your entire life for 20 years being told you're a smart

kid it's the only that's your biggest strength it's the one that everyone keeps talking about and now like suddenly you have to relegate yourself to being a stupid kid and in that gap is where the shame lives in that gap is where the ego lives okay so it's really really hard right because you're set up with these expectations people don't really acknowledge that because you're capable of a lot it's actually going to take like a lot of work to take that potential and bring it to fruition right and that's like that's the biggest thing is

people just lose sight of the fact that building a mansion actually takes more work than building a shack and your entire life people have told you like you should build this mansion because that's what you're capable of and so then we kind of get to all right so like what do we do about it right so if you're a gifted kid who's kind of perfectionistic and burnt out and like society has sort of set you up this way i'm not saying that you're not individually responsible as well but i do think that there's a whole

reason so when we have like a generation of burnt out gifted kids i think we have to be fair and be a little bit scientific and kind of acknowledge that this may not be like an individual problem right we've got a generation of kids like this like maybe there's something societal going on and i think paradoxically we sort of set these kids up to struggle and so then the question becomes okay like what do we do about it so the first thing you should do if you're a gifted kid is to stop comparison right like

comparison is is the foundation of getting out of this problem because as long as you are comparing yourself and this is part of the issue is that if you think about the word gifted what does the word gifted imply it is a word that has no meaning outside of a comparative framework you guys get that the only way you can be gifted is if there are other people who are not gifted and so essentially what happens is like the whole idea of a gifted kid only exists in relationship to another kid and so what we

find in the minds of gifted kids is that they're comparing themselves all the time oh i don't want to go to community college that's where the stupid people go oh i don't know like why i can't do what my friend is capable of like he's able to do so much why am i not able to do so much i have an older sibling who did fantastic and now i have big shoes to fill right there's so much comparison all of the expectations that gifted kids have don't come from themselves right because if you actually based

your expectations on what you're capable of you'd be capable of a b c d or an f that's what that would be a realistic expectation but instead you create these artificial expectations that are based on comparison and why do gifted kids do that because it starts with their parents it starts with their teachers we're all told that we're gifted which is by definition a comparison to all of the other kids and so then what happens is you're looking over at the shack and you've got this blueprint for a mansion and they give you some wood

and then you try to build the mansion and like you don't even have a roof when this person has a completely built shack and then you kind of look at yourself well like man i must be like a super idiot right like and it's just it's so bizarre that when we set up this kind of when we start with this framework of a comparison we sort of doom ourselves to failure because there's like we're just it's just it's never going to work because you can't ever base the expectations of your life and what you're capable

of based on what someone else is doing right if someone else is happy studying chemical engineering it doesn't mean that you're going to be happy studying chemical engineering if somebody else is happy dating someone of the opposite sex it doesn't mean that you're going to be happy dating someone of the opposite sex the whole point is as individuals as humans we're individuals and if you're a gifted kid the first thing you've got to do is let go of all comparison so next thing is to recognize that your road is going to be a rough one

right so like when someone sets out to build a mansion they know in their mind that like this is gonna take a while right you can't expect to build a mansion in the same amount of time it would take someone to build a shack and so if you're a gifted kid and you expect a lot from yourself okay recognize that this is going to be a long road and the greater your potential is the longer it's going to take for you to get there and this is something that i can understand in hindsight like so

i grew up as a gifted kid and was like in you know the special classes or whatever i actually still remember when i was in eighth grade my grades started to dip and when i went to high school um i didn't qualify for based on my grades like my high school was like yeah he needs to be in like regular english he can't be in like advanced english or he doesn't meet the criteria for advanced english and so my parents were really really not happy with that because they have they have such a smart boy

you know he's so smart he just needs to apply himself so they went to the school and i remember having a meeting with the the honors english teacher or whatever and then he's like do you want to be in this class and i was like yeah i want to be in the class and my parents were like yeah he should be he belongs he belongs in the class right and so the teacher was like okay fine because you know i mean you're not gonna you know there are some parents that could potentially be annoying so

you're like whatever and so i ended up being in the class that i really didn't belong and i really didn't do very well right because i didn't have the work ethic but it propagates sort of this idea of like you can handle it so like i started off you know going on the wrong track kind of like in in high school it took me i took me five years to graduate from college right with a 2.5 gpa took me another three or four years to even get into medical school and so like my road has

been long and like that's just sometimes what it takes if you're a gifted kid right you take the scenic route in life so oftentimes people would ask me you know like about stuff when i remember when i was going to when i started medical school and i saw friends of mine right who were who i was in high school with they're already fully trained doctors and you know flying around and all that good stuff and i'm just like starting medical school and i was like yeah i took the scenic route in life and so recognize

that if you're a gifted kid like it's a long road like you're not going to do things faster you're not going to build a mansion as fast as someone else is going to build a shack the other thing to recognize about it being a long road if you're a gifted kid is don't expect to see the form of your mansion for a long time when other people have built their shacks you will still just have the foundation of the mansion it's not going to have a roof for a long time it's not going to have

windows for a long time so this is the other problem that gifted kids run into is as they put in an equal amount of effort compared to their colleagues they actually see less return on their investment and that in turn shatters their motivation and what makes them want to give up right because i'm putting in all this effort i'm still not seeing anything yet so it's a long road be patient with yourself and try your best not to compare to other people the last thing to kind of consider is that is the shame so gifted

kids oftentimes struggle a lot with self-esteem and shame and that once again is because their expectations are up here and their performance is down here right and so in that gap is where your shame is going to live and so as long as there is a gap in what you expect from yourself with what you accomplish you will have shame and the solution to that oddly enough is one of two ways right one is you can actually live up to the expectations that you have right so you can actually shoot up here and land up

here so you can go to an ivy league school or whatever right you can go you can start you can do a tech startup or whatever like you can like do everything that everyone has always known you're capable of doing so you can actually hit all of those metrics that's one option then the shame will go away or what you can do is let go of your expectations and bring yourself down here because the shame exists in the gap so even if you accept yourself as being like sort of a failure oddly enough the shame

will go away and as you accept yourself as you are which is not wasted potential but like in the present like you are everything that you're capable of everything that you've ever been capable of is exactly what you've achieved and once you sort of take that attitude bring your expectations down to here you will be amazed at like what happens to your motivation and what you are truly capable of but you can't achieve it as long as there is that shame gap right like in terms of performance so questions anyway so let me just kind

of summarize so i think that like you know we see this a lot where a lot of people are gifted and we think of that as an advantage but like i was saying earlier i think that you know sometimes being gifted comes with its own set of needs and by properly addressing those needs we can avoid some of these things like gifted kids you know feeling ashamed of themselves gifted kids you know not like comparing themselves to like all the other normal kids and and finding themselves lacking um and also that we have to kind

of acknowledge that our school system is sort of set up in a particular way that oftentimes causes gifted kids to stumble and through understanding like how a gifted kid you know a child who is gifted becomes an adult who's perfectionistic and burnt out we have to understand that whole life cycle in order to sort of start taking steps to change it um okay so i'm sure you've been asked this question before and have answered before so feel free to tell me where i can finally answer this question how are you able to get accepted to

harvard medical school let alone medical school alone with such a low gpa when that is such a critical deciding factor how did i stand out so that's a great question so the short answer is so i i did some amount of graduate education so i did a master's degree to boost my gpa the second thing that i did i didn't go to harvard for medical school i went to tufts for medical school and then i did my psychiatry training at harvard at mass general mclean hospital and so the short answer of like how i wound

up there is like one step at a time so you have to do you know in each of those things involved like a reality check or some degree of humility in terms of like thinking like i actually don't belong at harvard like i'm never going to wind up there i had to accept that right let alone get into medical school and the more that i accepted like i i did a lot of things that were you know humbling to say the least i wouldn't quite say undignified but i had to really let go of a

lot of ego and like take one step at a time it also took perseverance i mean i applied to 120 medical schools before i got into a single one and that was the break that i needed and then like understanding having all that failure behind me i really worked hard in medical school and really tried to excel and then i actually did an away rotation for those of you don't know what that is or for those of you do know what that is so i basically did an audition rotation at harvard which is like super

competitive you show up there with a bunch of other people who want to go there and it's basically like a test it's like a month-long test of what you're capable of and i did really well so thankfully i had set up you know a lot of good stuff over the last eight years in terms of being myself and like owning the person that i was and not being ashamed of the fact that i failed and you know recognizing that most of the students most of the other students who were auditioning um were four years younger

than i was that i was actually older than some of the residents there despite the fact that like they were evaluating me right so like there's someone two years younger who's like giving me a grade so navigating all that stuff was difficult but i did a good job at it and stayed focused and that's how i wound up at harvard so i trained there for four years and that's where i'm faculty now right but it's all about like letting go of the ego um how do you lower expectations uh you lower expectations by accepting what

you're capable of like actually and so expectation and and acceptance are at opposite ends of the spectrum okay so practicing acceptance is how you lower expectations so let me give you guys an example so the theme today is right so like let me think about a nyani yoga exercise to let go of expectations um let me just think about this for a second so here's a good example of a nyani yoga exercise actually i don't know if this is a good example this is one of the ones that i feel less confident this is maybe

a bad example of a yoga exercise so for the next month or two months when you go to a restaurant and someone asks you what you want to want what you want to order just tell the waiter to surprise you just tell them surprise me and then pay attention to your enjoyment or lack of enjoyment of the food right so when we go to restaurants we have expectations and if we think about the least the worst experience that you can have at a restaurant is not actually to have bad food it's to expect really good

food and get bad food that's actually worse than getting bad food if you know a restaurant is crap and you go there and you order something the food that you get is crap like what were you expecting it's totally fine actually right we do that every day like if you go to a fast food like mcdonald's or taco bell or whatever like you're not expecting you know like a gourmet meal you're just expecting some like mediocre arguably incredibly tasty depending on whether you're getting a mexican pizza or not which you can't get anymore because they're

out of sad but so like a lot of if you guys want to really understand so this is the way that nyanio works if you really want to understand expectation and acceptance you have to put yourself in situations that are like free from expectation and you can't put yourself in a situation because the expectation doesn't come from the situation right it's even that's even what i said was kind of wrong you have to practice messing with your expectations so go to restaurant just say surprise me or you can ask if they don't know like if

they're taking it back you can say what's good here okay i'll take that right if you've got dietary restrictions tell them about the dietary restrictions and just like and then you're like but what if i don't like the food that i get well yeah i mean that's the point right so like just eat what you get and see what happens and they're like but i don't like it and it's like yes so like pay attention to that and be like how hard is it for you to order food that you're not gonna like or you

order without expectations what's it like to go to a restaurant and accept that you're going to just get some random pile of food that could be amazing and could be something that you really dislike that's how you gain acceptance that's how you let go of expectations by literally going to a restaurant and like actively letting them go that is the nyani yog and then you may discover all kinds of cool things right you may even discover for example that if you go to the restaurant and you expect crap if you're like this is going to

be an absolute train wreck i'm gonna have to go home and like have a bowl of cereal after the meal it'll be really interesting how much you enjoy your meal it'll be really interesting because in that moment what you're doing is letting go of the expectation right and then like suddenly even if you get crap it's not a big deal and if you get something delicious it's like such a huge win and that's what it means to let go of expectation the more you let go of expectation the more you start to enjoy life and

the better life gets it's kind of bizarre so literally if you guys wanted nyani yoga practice to let go of expectations and earn acceptance and you can't just do this once right so you can't like wuss out of it you have to do it for a month presuming you're going to go out to eat you know and you can afford that and all that good stuff otherwise like make it three months like you know do it for a while like commit yourself this is my life now gg get wrecked noobs so try it you guys

want to learn nyan yog try it okay someone else is asking how should a parent teacher or manager support the special needs of gifted people if what's happening now is bad that's a great question so i'll give you an example so sometimes i get parents that come into my office they have a kid who's addicted to video games why is a kid addicted to video games really simple because video games match the pace of the child right that's why that's why gifted kids in a nutshell the reason that gifted kids get addicted to video games

is one very very very simple reason can all be reduced to this games match the pace of the child and school doesn't so you've got a kid goes to school gets a worksheet does the worksheet i still remember i i had this experience i skipped the first grade so this is what happened i went to a school where you know i'd do a worksheet and then like they'd give me another one and so in in my first day of first grade i moved schools i i gave them you know i got a worksheet i did

the worksheet i gave it back to them and i said can i have the next one and she's like what do you mean the next one it's like the next one like whatever's next like i'm done with this we've got class for another 45 minutes i'm done with this can i have the next one she's like there is no next one i'm like what and it didn't take long where like you know she gave me the then she evaluated me and i got moved up a grade but same problem there and then eventually like what

heck is like school moves at the pace of like the slowest person now here's the really addictive thing about a video game now imagine you're just bored at school because it's moving at a snail's pace right because there's like other six-year-olds and like you're a six-year-old two and maybe you're a little smarter than the other six-year-olds now enter a video game what happens when you don't beat level one you replay level one and what happens when you beat level one you go straight to level two and if you beat level two you go straight to

level three you beat level three you go straight to level four so games perfectly match the challenge that a human being is capable of right if you get stuck on a boss in dark souls like you don't get to move past the boss because your parents make a phone call to from software and they're like hey my son is really good at video games can you please advance him past this boss and stick him to the next boss it's like you can't do that in dark souls like dark souls doesn't give a right so like

kids get addicted to video games because they perfectly match what you're capable of which is exactly what kids like there's this whole thing called intent to mastery we teach all this stuff to parents and things like that so what do you do if you've got a kid who's gifted you challenge them and you don't rely on school to do it for you so when parents come to me and they're like i have a kid who's addicted to video games he's 16. he thinks school is i ask him okay what do you think about schools like

school is boring then what i do is i you know i make a couple of phone calls and i'm like we're gonna like you so we were i was back when i was in boston a lot of cool startups in boston so what i'll do is we'll make some phone calls we'll stick them in an internship somewhere like we'll take some college-level internship it's some kind of startup so like we'll look around at like incubators from like mit or whatever like harvard will be like hey like there's a kid do you guys have any internship

opportunities available and we'll stick him there and he'll like be he'll work there for the summer and it like turns the kid right around no more video games because he's actually like learning so i stuck one kid in this startup that was that there's an app you take a picture of a mole on your body and it tells you the percentage chance that the mole is cancerous right so we stick the kid there we're like go help them and then like sometimes the kid is like what am i supposed to do like you start by

getting them coffee and then maybe you'll learn something and then it's it's actually fantastic like they do they do really well you challenge them right and because the cool thing is that a lot of the startup folks they sort of recognize because some of them are like misfits too so they're like okay there's like a kid here like let's put them to work because they recognize that okay you're 16. so you know how to like manage sql data databases and the kid is like no they're like google it and learn and then you're going to

manage our sql database next week and the kid is like what and like yeah and then suddenly the kid is like goes home he's not playing video games he's like reading about sql databases or whatever right just just stick them stick them into it and challenge them so as a parent you know or a teacher like i'd say like ask them so here's the biggest mistake that parents and teachers make with gifted children is that you when when a gifted child fails what we tend to do is slow down instead what you need to do

is speed up it's absolutely terrifying so if a gifted child is failing what they need more than anything else is a bigger challenge not like an easier environment now you have to make sure for a couple of other things like you need to make sure there's not adhd going on depression going on learning disabilities or other things like that going on but in the absence of all of those things challenge them more not less ask them to do more give them put them in positions of leadership right and just push them because like it's so

fulfilling when when you're a take a kid in that situation and you're like you're gonna need to do this thing and they're like i can't do that thing and you're like okay so then fail but try if you fail like no big deal but i'm not gonna i'm not gonna expect less of you i know it's kind of paradoxical because we just talked about letting go of expectation but it's not really expectations it's really having faith in them it's a subtle difference but be like i have faith in you i think you can handle it

so like give it your best shot that's what you do you challenge them respect them is instead of expect things from them you