Giftedness is Relative
… and Most Gifted People Don’t Even Know They’re Gifted!
The Relativity of Giftedness
It is important to understand the relativity of intelligence, talent, and giftedness. Why is this important? Because no two people are alike. Even between identical twins, their brains, bodies, reactions to their unique environments, and their preferences and personalities are not exactly the same. Unusually intelligent people — both gifted adults and gifted children — can find themselves in different groups whose members have different intellectual characteristics or overall goals than they do.
For example, when young, people who are clearly talented athletes in several different sports eventually have to choose which sport they want to focus on if they wants to turn one sport into a career. Some of them may continue to be good at several sports and may even take one or two of them up again later in life and become quite good in at least one of them. But even the professional basketball player Michael Jordan, after a 13 month mediocre stint in the MLB for the White Sox, ended up in celebrity tournaments instead of the professional leagues in his non-basketball talent areas. My point is: no matter how naturally talented or brilliant someone is in any field or domain, one still has to focus on, put in practice, and strengthen their knowledge base and experiences to improve and compete with the best.
Of course, this is true for careers other than professional sports. Should you live in a small or rural town, you may be known as the smartest kid there. And it might be true. There’s always the chance that another youngster will move into town and quickly take your place in the “smartest kid” category. What I attempt to show in Chapter 1 of my Big Book[i] is how “who else is there” can make you and others around you think of you as higher or lower on the pecking order ladder of smartness. It is natural to make comparisons, but sometimes talking about better or worse, more or less, good enough or not good enough, can be unnecessary and potentially destructive.
I also show how sometimes the apparent differences are not in raw talent but in the opportunities to practice and achieve in a domain. Sometimes, it is about choices we make because we love one domain over another. So, we decide to “go for it” even though there are other things at which we may naturally be good, make more money, or have more obvious success.
In other instances, sometimes people simply do not have choices. Some people are kept too busy just trying to survive and put food on the table. Some are in abusive relationships that wreak havoc on their self-concept and personal options. And some may move so often due to poverty or work situations (e.g., migrant seasonal crop picking) they never make friends or get settled into one school before they leave for another. Some highly intelligent people may be part of a group that is denied opportunities to make their own choices or work outside the home. And some countries deny access to education or careers due to — and based on — sexism, systemic racism, and caste systems. These can all be critical reasons their talents and focus go unnurtured by others or themselves.
Throughout my 2023 book (The 5 Levels of Gifted Children Grown Up: What They Tell Us), I illustrate and explain what’s really going on here with relativity. My hope is that each person can eventually find or create their own niche, develop an ability they love and are good at, and recognize themselves as just the right person for the role. And for parents reading this blog or the full book, I also hope the information contained here will help you guide your children toward making those discoveries themselves.
Sometimes individuals, families, and school personnel misunderstand the relativity of intelligence and what it looks like, though, which can make it difficult to achieve this goal of self-discovery. That relativity affects the advice and options we have available to us when we endeavor to meet the needs of intellectually gifted children and adults. Not surprisingly, the different chosen or incidental treatments and options afforded to one gifted child cannot help but affect others around her — the others with whom she interacts and is being compared.
What is Giftedness?
Early in my parenting journey, I started to read and learn about different gifted programs as I realized my children were probably going to need them. I was surprised to learn schools may not have gifted programs at all, or the special programs often start as late as third grade, or many of these children are slightly below the “cut-off” line for inclusion. Additionally, the development of the Renzulli Three Ring Triad[ii] in 1974 threw a big monkey wrench into identification for many children (like mine, I feared):
Renzulli: Gifted behavior occurs when there is an interaction among three basic clusters of human traits: above-average general and/or specific abilities, high levels of task commitment (motivation), and high levels of creativity.
It was my own disagreement with this model that first led to my getting involved in learning more about high intelligence. I found that the higher the intellectual difference between classmates and the gifted child, the more that child appeared to be unmotivated.
Although some children behaved well under the same circumstances — and much of that is discussed in Section III of the book— I experienced this mismatch of views from the time my children were young and I still see it often now with other children. There was a persistent misunderstanding of a difference between motivation for learning and motivation to act interested in “learning” things one already knew.
So, what does it mean to be gifted? It depends on whom you ask. One reason there seems to be little agreement about a clear definition of giftedness is because different views are held both by professionals in the field and the general public alike. For professionals, there is little agreement in their definition of what giftedness is. And it adds to the complexity when we look at adult giftedness; is it different than how we identify or recognize giftedness in children?
Fortunately for professionals and specialists, New Zealander Maggie Brown created a Delphi Study for her doctoral dissertation that addresses this “what is adult giftedness?” issue. [iii] A Delphi study is an anonymous series of questionnaires narrowed down over at least three iterations by the author to focus on what the respondents think about the presented topics.
Brown asked experts from around the world (I was one of them) in the field of gifted education and high intelligence to complete three questionnaires using this method. Her results indicate that experts fall into at least three camps about what giftedness is: eminence, membership in high IQ societies, or the qualities of different behaviors in the context of the lives of the gifted adults.
I personally thought giftedness is an inner quality, a form of intelligence that is different, more intense, and noticeable in how some people are. And when I heard people talk about giftedness as about getting good grades and being a person of higher accomplishment, I thought they were wrong. It turns out what we believe about giftedness greatly impacts how we respond to it and what we expect from gifted people.
How Do I Define Adult Giftedness?
For readers, it’s important to first know how I define giftedness because it colors my conclusions, research interests, and what I write in the aforementioned book and myriad other writings along the way in the last 45 years. As is described in Brown’s paper, I consider giftedness throughout the lifespan as “a contextually embedded phenomenon” (2020, p. 102). For example, someone who is smart but not a good student is sometimes referred to as “street smart” and not “book smart.” In my mind, it means they are still smart but either didn’t have the opportunity for a good education or didn’t like and cooperate with the way the education was presented.
Therefore, my approach to supporting gifted children and adults has always focused on their social, emotional, and mental health, and not on what their grades were like or, later, their career status. Many other professionals in the field just as fervently see giftedness as measured by good grades, good scores, and adult career success measured by earnings and status. Their focus of support is on improving school performance and dealing with underachievement issues. More on underachievement in later posts.
So, regarding the relativity of giftedness, how did the choices parents and educators made for the gifted youngsters in my 18-year longitudinal study affect classmates, siblings, and teachers? More broadly, how did the words and messages from parents, classmates, siblings, cousins, grandparents, childcare workers, neighbors, store clerks, and teachers, etc., affect the gifted child and the other members of that child’s family?
When I talk about the relativity of intelligence, I mean its relative importance within the context at hand. It is closely related to how we determine a good fit for gifted children during their school years and later in their careers and avocations. As I share more of my work with you in subsequent posts, we look at samples of comparisons, favorable and unfavorable, that do or don’t happen because of the context.
What Does “Highly Gifted” Mean?
As part of my current writing, and my general views on the Levels of Giftedness, “highly gifted” can mean more than one thing. Most gifted programs, for example, consist of children who have scored on standardized tests at or above 130 IQ and the 98th percentile. It is the highly, exceptionally, and profoundly gifted who are generally offered placement in the typical gifted program. That is where the cut-off score of 130 usually determines who is in and who is not included.
In my Five Levels of Gifted classification structure, the 130 cut-off score for most gifted programs includes Levels Two, Three, Four and Five. As readers will see throughout The 5 Levels of Gifted Children Grown Up book, however, it is the critical mass, relativity, and context of the specific gifted program that determines the adequacy for serving the needs of the different Levels of Gifted children within the program.
At the same time, most schools and districts have college preparatory classes that are offered in some middle schools and almost all high schools that include students who score above about 120 IQ, which is about the top 10% of the population. The 120 to 130 IQ range is Level One gifted. It is also the intellectual range from which the majority of our college graduates, business executives, business owners, and professional classes (medical doctors, psychologists and therapists, and attorneys, for example), come. To not call these people intellectually gifted is simply, in my strong opinion, incorrect.
Due to the bell curve nature of distribution of different qualities, including intelligence levels and profiles, it is Level One people who run almost everything. And yet they are closer in their communication and interests to more people in a typical classroom than are the more highly gifted at their own different Levels of Giftedness.
Going forward, when I mention the highly gifted in general, I mean anyone who needs considerably more acceleration, ability grouping, and depth of instruction than the typical grade level offerings. When I describe the qualities of each Level, my use of the term “highly gifted” is to describe that first group, Level Two, in the range beyond the 98th percentile, the rarer range that has different academic, social, and emotional needs during their school years. It should become clearer as you read on. And if you’re impatient and have a longer attention span or time for reading, just get the book. Otherwise, I will keep sending you pieces so you still get information that may matter to you.
References and Further Reading
[i] The 5 Levels of Gifted Children Grown Up is a follow-up book to one I wrote and published in 2005. Losing Our Minds: Gifted Children Left Behind, my first book, was retitled 5 Levels of Gifted: School Issues and Educational Options in 2009. The content didn’t change in the retitled first book.
[ii] Available at https://gifted.uconn.edu/schoolwide-enrichment-model/three-ring_conception_of_giftedness/#
[iii] Brown, M., Peterson, E. R., & Rawlinson, C. (2020). Research with gifted adults: What international experts think needs to happen to move the field forward. Roeper Review: A Journal on Gifted Education, 42(2), 95–108. https://doi.org/10.1080/02783193.2020.1728797