Children with high capacities from the time they are babies are precocious in many aspects and have a special character. They stand out for presenting above-average skills and being people with some kind of talent. However, this may be a double-edged sword if these capabilities are not identified and taught to channel and manage all that potential.
In this article you will find a series of guidelines or indications that will help you to better understand everything related to this topic.
What does it mean to have high abilities?
The definition of High Capacities encompasses the concepts of: giftedness, talent and intellectual precocity.
- La giftedness it implies possessing a much superior capacity in areas and aptitudes of intelligence.
- Talented people can be exceptional in a specific aptitude (simple talent), or in several combined (complex talent).
- The children who have submitted intellectual precocity They are those who acquired certain intellectual or psychomotor abilities early on. For example, they begin to speak or write before the age of two.
Since when can we see the first signs?
Parents are the first to notice that their child, from a very young age, has different characteristics compared to other babies. They pay very direct and precocious attention to their parents, sleep little and stare with curiosity.
They are also usually very attention seekers, are easily overstimulated and reflect a high level of psychomotor coordination. They usually lift their heads before the first month of life, they say their first word to the 5 months and 6 months they can respond non-verbally on your behalf.
Most common features
They are very emotionally intense and show a Low tolerance to frustration, which causes them to explode in strong tantrums when something does not go as they expected. They usually present high sensory hypersensitivity: they are bothered by clothing labels, loud sounds, bright lights ... Children with high abilities are very creative and show great interest in unusual issues in young children, such as death, the existence of God or the origin of human existence. They are children with an excess of energy, enthusiastic and difficult to exhaust.
They have one prodigious memory and in most cases very early literacy learning is observed. They are very self-taught, and have a vocabulary rich, wide and forward for its evolutionary phase. They have a predilection for cognitive games that involve a certain degree of difficulty, such as puzzles and construction games.
Not all are advantages
In addition to having difficulties in identifying and managing their emotions effectively, they are self-critical, competitive and very perfectionist. This is what causes them to show a low tolerance for frustration. I know are easily boring and distracting if an activity doesn't capture their interest and they question the norms, if they do not coincide with what makes sense to them.
They usually experience what is known in psychology as evolutionary dyssynchrony, which means that not all areas of its development evolve in parallel. What usually happens is that intellectually they go at one pace and emotionally at another. For example, a child with high capacities may be interested in existential issues more typical of adulthood, but at the same time react with a huge tantrum to the loss of a toy.
What to do when a child has high abilities?
When suspecting high capacities, it is recommended to see a professional to confirm the diagnosis. Detection at an early age, facilitates the proper channeling of its powerl. As parents, you must inform yourself of what your child's needs are.
Having high abilities implies a different way of understanding and processing reality. This in childhood is very hard, since they receive much more information than they can manage. The world for them becomes in many cases hostile, boring and incomprehensible. That is why your best help will be to understand them and enhance all that they can give. But always always, remembering that they are children and as such, they also act and think.