When I started writing my blog “The Bigger Picture”, one of my first posts was titled “The Giftedness Curse”. It was about the struggles of gifted kids, that are frequently overlooked or downplayed and was based on my own experiences with my oldest son. When I told him around age 8 or 9 that he was gifted, he told me with tears in his eyes “It’s not a gift, it’s a curse”.
I just came across an article on BuzzFeed that sums up these struggles: Former "Gifted" Kids Are Sharing The Effect It's Had On Their Lives, And It's Actually Super Sad
26 former “gifted children” tell about their struggles of growing up:
"Almost every former gifted and talented kid I know, including myself, ended up with anxiety, and/or depression, and/or autism, and/or ADHD, none of which were diagnosed in childhood even though they were definitely already present. No one bothered to test us for things like ADHD or autism because we were smart and got good grades and had enough intelligence/mental capacity to mask long term because we weren’t being taxed at school and then got to adulthood when we had to use that brain power to actually do stuff and couldn’t figure out why we couldn’t cope."
Their accounts are brief tales of undiagnosed ADHD or ASD, crippling perfectionism, imposter syndrome, burnout, switching between inferiority and superiority complex and the inability to make friends. Like my son, many of these former gifted children wished they just had been “normal kids”. Over the past couple of years, I have been blogging about all of these phenomena, including doubting the concepts of “normality” and “pathology”.
"As a former gifted kid, I just got burnt out. Having my teachers and family constantly focus and praise my academic prowess and not much else because that was all that I was really good at, while it got me to the top 5% of my class, it made me resent it to no end. At some point, I just wanted to be a kid rather than the 'genius' (family’s word, not mine) people wanted me to be. And they wonder why I’m not in college right now."
I started researching gifted children and autism around 2008. It was actually an interesting time, a time in which interest in “giftedness” was waning and diagnoses of ADHD and ASD were rising. So were the publications on 2e (twice-exceptional/gifted+neurodiversity) kids and that was hardly a coincidence. In Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined (2013) Scott Barry Kaufman tells his own story from special education to Columbia University professor, a kind of reverse giftedness story, which is probably as common as giftedness burnout. The concept of “orchid children” (Thomas Boyce) made a lot of sense to me for these kinds of children.
How did any of this make sense? The highest instance in psychology for me is always evolutionary psychology. Nothing makes sense except in the light of evolution. There were different ideas that tried to explain neurodiversity as the “next step in human evolution”, having evolved to solve humanity's upcoming problems. However, this is not how evolution works and there are no indications that any recent mutations are involved in neurodiversity. On the contrary, there are hundreds of variations involved that are ancient. A certain range of variation for every trait is normal, however, the traits of neurodiverse children are too systematic and bundled to be explained by simple variation. Trying to understand the strengths and struggles of gifted and neurodiverse children the only possible solution was that they were adapted to a different ancestral environment. And that environment was foraging (hunting and gathering) rather than farming. A lot of gifted/neurodiverse traits and problems started to make a lot of sense: a high sense of justice (egalitarianism), struggle with authority, ADHD (with Thom Hartman called a “hunter mind”), and different cognition, which can be vaguely described as “mapping” vs “packing”, i.e. rote learning and memorising, which most gifted/neurodiverse children absolutely hate or struggle with.
If we start to understand gifted children as hunter-gatherers a lot of pain can be avoided. It’s important for parents and teachers to understand that, but it’s even more important for the gifted child, many of whom struggle with their sense of identity, to understand who they are.
For more on the hunter-gatherer neurotribe hypothesis check out my book
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