Our gifted 11-year-old daughter confided in us that she doesn’t like herself and is “mad at herself.” She has been having trouble falling asleep for months and is anxious and crabby at home.
While she skipped a grade and is at the top of her class, our daughter has never liked attention called to her academic giftedness. She doesn’t like being the “smart” one at school and would rather have any other label, such as the “star volleyball player” or even the “best speller.” She told us it’s getting harder now to be the smart one, but “she has to be.”
Our daughter is also very gifted in music. She plays the saxophone, never practices at home, yet is first chair in the band and wins first place in competitions. She’s worried that this, too, is going to get more difficult and she won’t find the time to practice. In addition, she plays the piano, but now wants to quit.
She escapes by playing computer games. We have to coax her away from these things at times to get her to do her schoolwork and she’s miserable. She even said she’d like to hurt herself and is frustrated and depressed. This terrifies us. We haven’t had luck with therapists in the past for her perfectionism, and she doesn’t want to see a professional now. But it seems we need to act on this, and any advice you can give us would be helpful
When I conducted my research with over 5,000 middle school children for my book Growing Up Too Fast: The Rimm Report On the Secret World of America’s Middle Schoolers (Rodale, 2005), I found many gifted children experiencing similar pressures to your daughter’s. Particularly among girls, I heard about the dilemma of both wanting to do extremely well, but not wanting to get high grades for fear of being le...
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