It seems useful, necessary, indispensable to go to the meeting, be sure of the factors in order to listen, to speak and to be touched by the so called Gifted children.
Do not let them die of boredom and drown themselves, literally or figuratively, by adopting behaviors destructive of their abilities or by behaving in a self-destructive way like out of the rules.
They need support, and to protect them, screening must begin at an early age.
It is on this condition that parents and all adults around them can best meet their needs.
Intellectual precocity is not only a matter of performance, as the media tend to show, but it is, above all, a state of mind, a particular way of questioning the world and specific way of positioning oneself in society.
In general, early children have a heterogeneous development described by Jean-Charles Terrassier in a book entitled:
Gifted children or embarrassing precocity.
(Edition ESF, 4th edition 1999) that he named:
The dyssynchrony syndrome.
This can be broken down into an Internal dyssynchrony.
Within the child's person, as well as into a Social dyssynchrony, leading to specific difficulties in relation to the relationship with the child-environment.
A- Internal Dyssynchrony:
This internal dyssynchrony has two main aspects:
- one affects the intelligence - psychomotricity pair,
- the other is on the intelligence - affectivity register.
1. Dyssynchrony Intelligence - Psychomotricity:
Insufficiency is often perceived as rather clumsy, even stuffed but can paradoxically show an extreme capacity during interesting activities and demanding a very fine psychomotricity.
This aspect of dyssynchrony often leads to academic difficulties in graphic activities, especially in boys.
Indeed, children will frequently experience difficulties in writing and very poorly live this hand they consider rudimentary because unable to keep pace with thought.
The child can then react by a desire for control, anxious control leading to a hypertonia and a too supported, trembling, irregular course.
Sometimes, the graphic gesture is slowed down excessively and if, the layout is improved, the failure is still to be feared because it can not, then, follow the requested rhythm.
He tolerates this failure more or less long, then takes refuge in attitudes of avoidance and refusal.
For example, not only graphic activity, but later orthographic acquisitions (resulting in dysorthography) and subsequent written expression are contaminated by an expanded negative investment.
Disgust, therefore, in front of any need to write but however, in front of the computer, everything is much better.
For example, Benjamin, who in front of his screen was doing wonders, had 20/20 on Q.C.M. and 0/20 in the same subject when it came to writing during a homework assignment.
Later, in his schooling, the E.I.P. may show great facilities for mathematics, but remain mediocre in spelling and written expression.
Thus, it can be seen, the psychomotor level of an early child appears more related to his actual age (or a little late) than to his mental age.
On the other hand, and always in this form of dyssynchrony, a specific difficulty is related to the speed of comprehension in writing or orally.
Indeed, often the child understands immediately and thinks that he knows the lesson because he understood it: that until the moment when he must return it in writing or orally.
Thus, less brilliant children who need to make a regular effort of attention and memory are more likely to get good grades and favor from teachers.
Early children are often reluctant, for what they do not think they have enough value, to use their memory, which they have a great capacity for, rather than to make the necessary fixation effort.
So, it will be said that they are lazy and that they could do much better if they gave themselves the means.
One will put forward an absence of concentration because, the course, very quickly or too quickly understood, will incite them to transform themselves into troublemakers, in embarrassments, in teases that some may take for indiscipline or become great dreamers.
living in a world that belongs to them.
But sooner or later, they will pay the consequences of not having been recognized as younger early and not receiving specific educational and pedagogical responses, becoming average students mediocre or good dunks whose desperation will manifest themselves in different ways.
2. Dyssynchrony Intelligence - Affectivity:
This part of their dyssynchrony is undoubtedly the one that questions adults the most when it comes to intellectually precocious children and for which reference is made to the famous IMMATURITY, a source of major misunderstanding concerning the factors.
Everyday anxiety or the fears of the night which can not be controlled by reasoning, it is supposed that these children, whose quality of intelligence we know, should know how to reason.
But it is not so and they can not help it.
They are the first to be extremely worried, unable to find in them the resources that would ensure their mastery.
indeed, their logical mind is not of any help to them.
By compensation, in the face of these anxieties, they can set up rituals that can be mistaken for manias.
Everything is a question of measurement and as long as these manias do not invade all the daily life, they must not be broken since they are a valve to anguish.
Some parents and other adults have difficulty accepting these dyssynchronic behaviors: for example, the "baby" behaviors that many of these children experience appear, again, in contradiction with their reasoning ability and the quality of their questioning. .
But to the extent that these types of behaviors are constitutive of their personality, one should not try to make them grow faster in this area, because they would be forced to develop a false maturity of facade and a chronic frustration.
Moreover, to appeal to reason, to intelligence, could only be a source of anxiety.
On the other hand, the adults, must try to help them to live in the best this dyssynchrony, by a tolerant and respectful accompaniment.
For example, Mr. Dantony, director of the college of the Immaculate Conception in Aubenas, which opened since September 1997 specific classes for intellectually precocious children, made the observation, at the boarding school, the presence of soft toys only on the early childhood beds.
Thus it is illusory to think that by artificially slowing down their intellectual precocity, we will be able to reduce this gap which constitutes the originality of their development.
Jean Claude GRUBAR, teacher-researcher at Lille III, has been able to highlight, through his work on the sleep patterns of intellectually precocious children, the coexistence at the level of paradoxical sleep of signs of immaturity and over-maturity. .
Intellectually precocious children have higher REM sleep rates than children in WISC III 90/110.
Indeed, these rates are very close to those observed in young children from 9 to 10 months (26.39% against 21.83%)
The intellectually precocious children retain, thanks to this, a high brain plasticity, that is to say a greater receptivity to the influences of the environment.
This is an index of immaturity.
On the other hand, these juvenile characteristics are associated with an over-maturity of the ratio of oculomotor frequencies
(1.44 against 0.82).
The values of the ratio of oculomotor frequencies collected in early children are those usually observed in adults.
This index makes it possible to account for the capacities to organize, during the paradoxical sleep, the information stored during the activity of the subject.
From this point of view, those children appear as over-mature.
B- SOCIAL DYSSYNCHRONY:
1. In relation to the school:
Over the years, the abilities of early children can be impaired if they are not allowed to go at their speed or if they do not respect the way they work.
If we take the example of an F1 car that would be forced, for hundreds of Km, to roll at the speed of a 2CV, the damage would be considerable and irreparable.
And if one day, the clothing manufacturers decided to produce only sizes 40 on the pretext that it corresponds to a better management of their stocks and that it is the size the most sold to the greatest number, one could imagine the disarray and the suffering of a large part of the population.
In response to such a situation, the child will tend to put his mind in a state of dyssynchrony with respect to the school environment.
That is to say, he will be distracted to defend himself against the boredom engendered by such an unambitious stimulation.
He will only experience real satisfaction by concentrating on activities that he considers difficult and
interesting enough, but that he will do most of the time at home.
The school or the direct environment did not meet his expectations, he will arrive to say that the school, among others, does not deserve his efforts.
Also, some children admit that the marks they receive are, in fact, those they attribute to the quality of the teachers or the interest that the course has generated.
We can see children, in the same subject, get the worst as the best and have, so, results sawtooth.
However, in the long term, all this will contribute to the constitution of intellectual inhibitions that can, in many cases, lead to intellectual-anorexies, that Dr. Alain GAUVRIT has studied well for 15 years as a psychiatrist at the Beaulieu Institute of Salies of Bearn.
We will read with advantage an article, written by him, in The Psychiatric Information No. 2 (February 1991) and titled Intellectual Inhibition in Early Childhood: Defend or Refrain.
2. In relation to parents
In this chapter, I have reserves:
All the factors are not going to ask all these questions - in the 3 headings - but, Yes .
As for appearance, a child remains a child and that it is developed mentally, psychologically does not make it less calinable, in my opinion, on the contrary.
As for the limits.. again, a child who exceeds these parents is a special case of adult incompetence.
A surreficient will not benefit from a situation if it is in an interactive, stimulating and balanced environment, on the contrary!
Or, it will evolve in sublimation mode.
The following below lacks nuances and precisions.
Early children arise very early and consistently what may be called The problem of limits.
Limits of life:
(the mystery of birth, of the fatality of death, of life or not of the spirit after death, of the belief or not of God)
Limits of time (origin and end of the world, astronomy, prehistory)
Limits of the universe and loneliness of man facing the infinitely big, but also fascination for the infinitely small.
These precise and often metaphysical questions, expressed from the early age of 3-4, contribute to parents' anxiety, keep them away from other children who do not understand them and sometimes take them for disturbances.
This isolation leads parents to question themselves without being able to help the child, often not knowing themselves that this one is precocious.
On the other hand, some parents may be so fascinated by a child who, at a very young age, will be able to discuss and argue that they end up as an adult.
They will not dare to show any more authority and to fix it, like the other children, limits.
Thus, these disorders of the parental education system can lead to difficulties in terms of relationships both with the family and with the school environment.
Indeed, precocity does not explain everything and it does not excuse everything.
For the same reasons, they will allow themselves less spontaneous hugs, while these children are in great need of affection and reassurance.
All because their great reasoning ability makes them sometimes look like adults to the point that we can forget that they are only children.
Parents may be inclined, because of the early understanding and analysis of their child, to involve them in their problems beyond what is bearable at their age.
Early children perceive very early and very finely the limits, smallnesses, faults of adults.
Not knowing how to deal with them emotionally, these discoveries, this information become for them sources of anxiety and worry.
In the same vein and because of their capacity of perception, analysis, early children are far from idealizing the image of parents and especially that of the father ..
it is thus that they are not experienced as all-powerful and can not play their protective and reassuring role.
This is because early children, from an early age, have characteristics that are related to adolescents.
They know how to handle questioning and criticism of their parents to judge them very severely, as teenagers do.
But early children do it in their own way, that is to say in a very intellectualized way and find themselves desperately alone, without protection because of this difficulty in curbing their over-sized capacity for judgment and analysis.
As a result, they will tend to curl up to try to find ways to reassure themselves, protect themselves and grow.
Prof. Philippe MAZET, Head of Psychopathology Department for Children and Adolescents at Bobigny Hospital, says early children: They are alone and therefore feel lonely.
From where sometimes strong depressive anxieties.
To avoid making them appear as heartless beings, which they are not, it is It is necessary to add that what I call their oversized faculty of judgment and analysis, they know how to apply it to themselves in all lucidity, which leads them, unfortunately, to develop an image of them.
Themselves relatively devalued.
This ability to over intellectualize early children deserves to be studied by comparing it with the depressive anxieties that these children tend to develop more than the others at a very young age.
With regard to this aspect of self-image and parental image devalued, we can refer to the psychology doctoral thesis of Véronique DUFOUR who has highlighted the abnormally high frequency of this phenomenon among early children by comparing for his study two groups of children, placed in an institution for behavioral disorders and academic difficulties, tested for one between 130 and 140 IQ at WISC III and for the others around 100, that is to say the average.
For this author, some intellectually precocious children exhibit failures or avoidance behaviors towards the company, and this much more than the children of average intelligence whose school situations are however less good and the situations of maladjustment also serious.
It would be a question of helping the child of average intelligence to better or to do well, whereas the early child will have to be encouraged to begin to do, thus to invest the act, which allows to consider educational behaviors of another type.
3. Compared to others:
Most often, they seek to have older friends with whom they can engage in dialogue that they find more interesting.
In the same way that they look for the company of the adults, of which they think to be better understood.
If such conditions are difficult to meet in school, they will be lonely, mingling little games of comrades who, as a result, will notice and set up a teasing strategy leading, sometimes, to real persecution.
Others, not to risk this case, will give up what makes their originality and their specificity and prefer to be friends with everyone but friends with nobody in a less dangerous fluttering.
C- RECOGNIZE:
Already, through the remarks, you could detect some signs that allow to make the hypothesis of a precocious intellectual.
Can be added:
- They show from an early age, an independence of mind and a spirit of independence and a tendency to be a little bit stubborn.
- They tend to refuse any compromise and to behave too quickly as unsuitable.
For teachers, this attitude is often uncomfortable and is one of the possible reasons for the misdiagnosis of the intellectual abilities of many of these children.
Indeed, teachers, several studies give a concordant result, only succeed in identifying less than half of the early children since they are based most often on criteria of academic success and sociability.
This can be reversed if teachers receive training on the characteristics of earliness.
- Routine jobs or routine duties annoy them quickly.
- They are perfectionists in the fields that interest them and work, in this case, independently and self-taught.
- They handle criticism that many take for insolence or arrogance. But also a severe and very destabilizing self-criticism that we can see by their propensity to say null or to think it.
- They are very observant, until to realize, as said a little boy of 4 years old, of a person with whom he had spoken, that "his eyes do not say the same as his mouth".
- They constantly ask questions about all the possible subjects, but do not content themselves with a banal answer, and want to go further to weary the other one.
- They rarely put their opinions in their pocket and in general they are very sharp.
- They often want to have the last word, and this very young, or by the use of many arguments to be right; this is how they manifest great abilities to some form of manipulation.
- They know how to take risks in a duty by proposing new solutions but sometimes longer or complicated because those expected seem to them too simple.
- They show a pronounced sense of humor but are very affected by irony. On the other hand, they have trouble dealing with puerile behavior that has nothing to do with humor.
- They can have a language flow, either very fast or almost inaudible.
- They are very concerned about concepts such as justice-injustice and are ready to engage with the "authorities".
- They do not rally at all costs to the majority.
- They are singular beings, with a strongly marked personality from an early age.
- They are hypersensitive and hyperemotifs; this is constitutive of their personality.
- What characterizes them too is excess in everything, whether Angel or Demon, or All or Nothing; they are never lukewarm but rather in the "I love or hate".
- They seem to be more "difficult" for their environment than most children, more demanding in their desires or their emotional demand, more obstinate, more anxious in their inner life but also more vulnerable.
We tend to perceive them as "problem" children simply because they are deviants to the norm.
- Teachers describe them either as children who are not very active, withdrawn, inconsistent and overly dreamy, or on the contrary as hyperactive, posers, hostile, moody, provocative, aggressive and difficult to contact.
- They may manifest excessive conformism to be forgotten in a spirit of renunciation, because of too much sensitivity to failure, or a feeling of inferiority.
- The child in pain tends to somatize and let his body talk excessively; eczema, red patches, near-permanent stomachaches, stuttering, tics, headaches that are untimely and long, asthma is also relatively common among them.
This is all the more important because the child is not recognized as precocious or because those around him have left him in the dark.
- Almost half of them are said to be scattered, superficial and unable to deepen the acquisitions made at school.
To answer these criticisms, it is necessary that each stops to question them on their centers of interest and there, they will be able to be inexhaustible and to let glimpse the depth and the density of their knowledge.
This aspect of their intellectual approach is to be taken into account in an educational perspective.
- They tend to apply to themselves, as well as to the events of their life and their own weaknesses, a clear and precise faculty of analysis. Having ideals and high demands, they are inclined to cast on themselves and on others a harsh and indulgent judgment.
- They can be subjected to the grip of depression from a very young age.
This is how they say very, very often, "I'm bad!"
So much so that I knew an early sixth-grade child who, returning home after school, locked himself into a circle of little papers on which was written "I am bad!" Because others tell me, 's that I am bad.
Another 4-year-old who, when asked by her mother why she was sad, said, "How would you like me to be gay, I do not know who I am!"
- On the other hand, a permanent under-utilization of intellectual capacities in early children can have the same catastrophic effects, in terms of depression as a constant excessive and abusive exploitation for other children.
- Also, the major risks, related to a very deep trouble, are on the one hand the expressed or verbalized desire to disappear, to die and on the other hand, the desperate search to have a friend too; as LAUTREAMONT said: "I was looking for a friend who looked like me".
They are obsessed, for a large number of them, by the finding that befriending seems very easy for all children except for them, too, they are unable to understand what they are guilty of deserving such a penalty.
They seek logic where there is only human behavior.
This is the first cause of concern for the parents we meet within the association, but this feeling is all the more serious as children who are not recognized as being precocious and therefore poorly helped by a misinterpretation discomfort.
- They solicit the attention of their parents so much that they are experienced as exhausting, even vampirizing. It is the same for adults in their school or social environment.
- They are in great emotional demand with incessant claims of parental love or affection of those around them.
They tend, therefore, to think when they can not make themselves available or are impatient or reprimand them, that they are no longer loved or appreciated.
Some young or adolescent children seem "glued" to their mother.
- However, the opposite, some intellectually precocious children put in place a severe control of their emotional needs, sometimes to the incentive of an entourage who supports evil dyssynchrony Intelligence - affectivity.
- Often, when they are eldest siblings, they do not understand why their parents felt the need to "make" them brothers and sisters. They seem to consider themselves owners of their parents and are, therefore, very possessive. It should be noted that elders do not have the property of possessiveness when there are other early children in the siblings.
- Generally, they do not accept the idea that parents can love all their children in the same way. There is, for them, something incoherent, illogical in this phenomenon.
To continue on the question of the elders, it can quite often happen that they put themselves in a state of intellectual inhibition as they are impressed by the intellectual qualities of their cadets and think, therefore, that they have lost everything because of these births: namely, the monopoly of the parents, their place, their vivacity of spirit to the extent that that of their cadets seems to them more praised than theirs.
This is how they begin to give up and sink into the guilt of having thought so negative.
All this being done, obviously, outside the consciousness, they will be, kind or aggressive children but of which one does not wait any more sparks.
These latter aspects are often used by professionals working with children to discuss what they call immaturity.
Recall, as we have seen above, that this has nothing to do with maturity or immaturity, but with their dyssynchrony intelligence - affectivity, and that it is constitutive of their personality.
- The age of 6 years and CP is often the time of the occurrence of tics and stuttering, arising out of unease not to receive what they expected, in terms of providing knowledge and understanding of the part of the school environment.
But these behaviors disappear rather quickly as soon as they are recognized as early by their entourage, they learn it and are specifically helped, and if possible the earliest in their development.
- They are interested in many subjects such as computer science, history, history of art, prehistory, biology, mythology; but all this knowledge will not always be returned to school to the extent that they exceeded, by personal passion, the level of requirement of the teacher.
- When writing, it is described as illegible, or in the best case, ugly but readable. We see that good writing notes can not be for them.
- There are a very large number of left-handers among the early, which is to question and study. In fact, this probable percentage is out of all proportion to that of left-handers in the general population. Statistical work is in progress, but the estimated percentage would be about 40 to 50%. The members of the MENSA Association made the same observation with their members (Association to which one can join only if the tests reveal a Q.I. higher than 135).
- The rate of dyslexia present in a smaller number of children would be about 30% (this is still under study) and would concern more boys, early or not.
It is, however, not to be neglected, because, again, of an abnormally high number compared to the general population.
This fact is still under study. Reference can be made to the work of Pr. HABIB in his book Dyslexie: the singular brain, to know the state of research on the question of dyslexia.
- Finally the quality of their gaze, mobile, scrutinizer, which gives at any time the feeling of gauging the other to assess whether and trustworthy. This too can be mistaken for impertinence. + 1
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