An anonymous reader writes:
My eight-year-old daughter is intellectually gifted and also socially adept. Most things come easily to her. However, when something doesn’t come easily, she becomes frustrated. An example would be piano, which she says she loves, but when it is hard, she sometimes melts down over not getting it or making a mistake. I try to emphasize that some things take practice and we all make mistakes, but it doesn’t land. Missteps and challenges are inevitable in life. How do I build resilience now so that she can overcome future challenges?
Meghan Leahy, pediatrician and columnist, responded:
If your child is gifted, that qualifies as a learning need for a reason. The sooner you read and learn about giftedness, the better. This list is a good start and if reading about your eight year old isn’t helping, I strongly recommend hiring a parent coach who specializes in giftedness.
It is not uncommon to see a wide gap between academic possibility and emotional bandwidth in gifted children. It is like their brains move so fast and the processing speeds can be so quick, the brain may struggle to handle any kind of frustration (not getting the piano piece right, right away). The explosion of this frustration results in understandable explanations and logic and lectures from you, but they aren’t landing in this intense brain. Other tactics are needed. Building resilience in intense gifted children is a long game, so please get the support you need so that you don’t burn out.
Although this isn’t a truly bad answer, it’s not a particularly helpful one, either. Dr. Leahy’s response seems like a kind way of saying “your kid is just too sensitive”—that the child’s tender brain can’t handle strong feelings. Nothing in this answer connects to the particular situation that the parent spells out—painful, blocking frustration when forced with a difficult task. And the “good start” list includes 15 heavy books, few of which are obviously applicable to the issue at hand.
I chimed in with the following comment, which wasn’t published, perhaps because the live chat had ended by the time I ran across it.
I’m not a pediatrician, but I would like to suggest something from the perspective of a former gifted child. A unique circumstance for gifted children is to be celebrated and praised, certainly at school but also often at home, for things that seemed ordinary and nearly effortless to them, such as getting an A on unchallenging homework, writing a story, creating a piece of art, or just being sparkling in conversation. At the same time, such children tend to have fewer opportunities than other children to be challenged and to work hard, and as a result, they have fewer opportunities to develop the emotional resources to handle struggle and perceived failure. They may avoid tasks that challenge them as a way of avoiding the negative emotions associated with those tasks. And as a further result of this, they experience praise and love coming their way only at times when they excel. They come to believe that praise and love will always only come to them when they live up to their prodigy reputation. This can have extreme repercussions later in life.
It may be that when your daughter melts down over a persistent challenge at the piano, it’s because she perceives it as a failure that punctures her sense of worth and jeopardizes her ability to be praised and loved. I can’t tell these parents what will work, but I can say what I wish I’d had: parents and trusted adults that took my successes as lightly as I took them myself, while consistently praising and encouraging me when I stretched myself or attempted things outside my comfort zone.
