Social & Emotional Needs

A gifted student may achieve well beyond current grade placement or demonstrate problem solving well above his/her chronological age. Advanced intellectual ability does not indicate that the student can manage his / her emotions any better than any other typically developing child. This uneven development is called asynchronous development. A gifted child's intellectual, emotional, and social development usually progresses at different rates, with some areas advanced, other areas immature, and still others more age-appropriate. This asynchronous development can create frustration for parents and teachers.

Gifted students may deal with issues related to perfectionism, competitiveness, underachievement, overexcitabilities, peer acceptance, and parental and social pressures to achieve.

Underachievement

Underachievement, a learned behavior, can be fostered by families, schools, and cultures. Underlying causal factors may include: a masked physical, cognitive or emotional issue, a mismatch between students and their school environment, students’ attitudes about themselves and their schooling, and lack of self-regulation and study-skills (Siegle & McCoach, 2005). Family characteristics, including parental overprotection, authoritarianism, excessive permissiveness, and inconsistencies between parents (Davis, 2011), can also be attributed to underachievement in gifted students.

Underachievement may look differently in girls vs. boys. Girls tend to underachieve covertly, especially if they believe it is necessary to hide their intelligence in order to be more socially accepted. The pressure they feel to “fit in” can be greater than the pressure they feel to achieve in alignment with their academic potential.

Underachieving gifted boys are more likely to try to manipulate others and expend more time and energy on trying to "beat the system" than they do on trying to achieve within the system (Flint 2010).