Gifted children often feel intense, early fears and anxieties because their advanced understanding outpaces experience. Parents should validate feelings without dismissing them, offer perspective through information and preparation, limit distressing exposure, and foster helping behaviors so children build resilience and efficacy.
This post presents the BERRY Approach to help highly sensitive people harness emotional overexcitabilities. It outlines five strategies—Being With IT, Experience E-Motion, Recognize the Saboteur, Resonant Choices, and Your Compelling Purpose—and practical steps to accept, process, and channel intense emotions toward meaning, resilience, and creativity.
This post argues that vulnerability underlies creativity and that emotional overexcitabilities in gifted individuals, though often suppressed, are also the source of their strengths. Instead of forcing them to outgrow sensitivity, we should acknowledge, nurture, and encourage authentic expression so their gifts and connections can emerge.
The author describes how imposing conventional, paper-based math caused stress in her twice-exceptional child and how switching to child-led, movement-based approaches (like “swing math”) reduced anxiety and enabled mastery. She recommends noticing stress signs, adapting instruction, and prioritizing pleasure and mastery over standard assessments.
El artículo explica que los niños superdotados desarrollan habilidades de forma asincrónica: su inteligencia y curiosidad pueden adelantarse a su madurez emocional y social. Esto genera sensibilidad, empatía y dificultades para relacionarse con pares, por lo que la comprensión de esa asincronía es clave para su educación.
This article explains Dabrowski’s theory of positive disintegration (TPD), its components—overexcitabilities, developmental potential, dynamisms—and implications for gifted education. It argues TPD focuses on personality and moral development, views intense emotions as catalysts for growth, and distinguishes Dabrowskian potential from conventional definitions of giftedness.
This article examines how gifted adolescent males may underachieve to maintain a social image. Through examples it shows how peer culture, masculine norms, and fear of vulnerability can lead bright boys to avoid academic recognition. It suggests educator, counselor and mentor strategies to support healthier identities and achievement.
This article explains that gifted children experience emotional intensity alongside intellectual depth. It outlines varied expressions—bodily symptoms, fears, attachments, critical self-evaluation—and recommends acceptance, open discussion, appropriate discipline, creative outlets, responsibility, and professional support to help them understand and value their sensitivity.
Discusses rising referrals of gifted students for ADHD-like behaviors and argues environmental factors—boredom, inappropriate curriculum, emotional overexcitability, and adult responses—can mimic ADHD. Recommends careful assessment, curriculum adjustment, talent development, and considering both neurological and environmental causes before medication.
Silverman argues gifted children often display heightened moral sensitivity, intensity, and asynchronous development. Drawing on Dabrowski and others, she links cognitive complexity to empathy and ethical concern, warns that societal pressures may desensitize gifted youth, and urges nurturing their moral and emotional development rather than focusing solely on talent.
