Children With High Intellectual Abilities

Do you know what are the signs that indicate a child with high intellectual abilities? Have you ever suspected that your child may have a greater intellectual facility than other children? What do you really see in your child beyond what your eyes full of motherly love can see?

Next, we will tell what children with high intellectual capacities are like, how to help them throughout their development, educate them and, above all, how to prevent them from getting bored, discouraged or failing to enjoy the company of others.

What are high intellectual abilities?

High intellectual abilities are super giftedness, talent and intellectual precocity. Together, they constitute an intellectual quotient (IQ) above the average, that is, equal to or greater than 130. Children with high intellectual capacities represent 2% of the population, which are above the remaining 98%.

The profile of individuals with high intellectual capacities generally reflects great creativity. Certainly, these people have a great imagination and thanks to that, they are versatile, with great initiative as well as an efficient decision-making capacity.

Some important differences

• The gifted  are those individuals with high intellectual capacities that define the maximum expression of human intelligence and therefore are defined as gifted.
• Talented individuals will score high on one or more skills, but the rest of them will score the same as other people.
• Intellectual precocity is observed in children who acquire knowledge at an earlier age than others. For example, children who learn to speak, create sentences and carry on a conversation before the age of two.

How do I know if my child has high intellectual abilities?

This is determined through a complete assessment in which the following primary aspects are evaluated in detail:

• Life’s history.
• Emotional state.
• Creativity.
• Intellectual Quotient.

Signs of High Intellectual Capabilities

Although each individual has its own pace of development, it is possible to establish, in general terms, some signs along the different stages of development. Let’s talk more about this below:

High intellectual abilities in babies

• Require more attention from your parents.
• They present psychomotor coordination before the first month of life. For example, they can lift and hold their head firmly.

• In the second month of life they can vocalize more than one different sound.
• In the fifth month of life they learn to say their first word.
• In the sixth month of life, he can already identify if they call him by his name. 

High intellectual abilities in children

As the child grows, various skills will stand out and catch our attention. At first they can be disconcerting, but little by little we will understand why. Furthermore, these skills will differ significantly from those of the rest of the other children and this will give us significant clues. 

It is necessary to keep in mind a very important aspect: the emotional world of these children. Children with high intellectual abilities tend to experience their emotions with great intensity. As a result, it is possible that your reactions may seem exaggerated or disconcerting to the vast majority of people around you.

Main features

• They have a great capacity for concentration.
• Children with great intellectual abilities are competitive, demanding of themselves and perfectionists. 
• They have difficulty tolerating frustration and managing their irritation correctly.
• They tend to break the rules. Not because they’re disobedient, but because they won’t follow rules or guidelines that don’t have logic or a good explanation for them. That’s why it’s important to maintain good communication and make the boundaries clear.
• Sensory hypersensitivity in at least 1 of the 5 senses. Therefore, they will often be bothered by smells, loud music, they will complain about the sensation that some clothes produce on their bodies, they will ask to turn off the light in the room, among other examples.

• Psychomotor hypersensitivity. These children seem to have a higher-than-average energy level because they hardly feel tired and are always on the move. Through this, they release all tension. Not to be confused with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder)

High intellectual abilities in adolescence

Although the characteristics of people with high intellectual capacities appear before the arrival of adolescence, there may be cases that are not detected until adolescence. The characteristics of these teenagers are as follows:

• Tendency to constantly question and plan existential themes. For example: death, religion, life among others.
• They question the authorities and the norms, as they will see the flaws more easily than the rest, and therefore, it will be more difficult for them to be “obedient” without exposing their point of view.

• They have an excellent memory, including visual and sound.
• They have a certain disdain for relating to other people their own age because they simply get bored. They will feel that there is a chasm between themselves and other people and will feel frustrated that there is no parallel thought between them.
• They usually employ a cultured vocabulary and try to enrich it every day. They love precision. That is, they like to always have the right word, at the right time. 

The most important thing is to know that children with high intellectual abilities, just like others, need support and unconditional love. If they have high intellectual capacities, we must guide them so that they can live in society with lightness and learn to enjoy everything in life.

We must teach them to enjoy, relax and be more tactful with others. And by all means, we must prevent them from becoming individuals with a superiority complex and developing an attitude of condescension towards the rest of the world, as this will get them nowhere.