Is there a downside?

The most difficult reaction I get to what we are going through is the rose-colored-glasses approach. There are people who cannot imagine a problem with any level of extreme on some things, and intelligence is one of those things. I'm more of a moderation-in-all-things kind of person.

My daughter started displaying extreme anxiety. I don't think anyone who witnessed it could see it as a good thing. It was pretty out-of-character and pretty quickly onset. People asked me if she could have been abused. That wasn't a helpful question, but of course, I asked it of myself - I was simply stunned at the bluntness of people who frankly didn't know us well enough or have an appropriate relationship to our daughter to ask such a thing.

She was obsessed with rules, and paralyzed by the idea that she was doing her absolute best handwriting. She would wake up crying and inconsolable because she was afraid she might have accidentally broken a rule at school but the teacher may not have seen it. This was not the fault of her teachers. They were compassionate, encouraging, concerned and communicative. When they started praising her more, she got upset that she didn't deserve the praise, etc.

We worked with the school psychologist and that helped a bit, but it quickly regressed. We had made assessment appointments with a carefully selected pediatric psychiatrist when it was recommended that we have her look into a school for gifted children. The school that was recommended to us requries an IQ test, and we ended up finding a woman who answered many questions in a balanced manner and gave us many tools to move forward. As it turns out, our daughter isn't the most extreme example, but she is rare enough and affected enough that traditional schools aren't able to make accomodations to make school work for her.

One of the most surreal experiences has been having my daughter "norm" a new version of a children's IQ test, specifically with a group in the gifted range. She did this one month after we originally had her tested and only a couple of weeks after we started homeschooling her (to have time to continue considering our options). The assessor was amazed and VERY impressed with how far her emotional symptoms had improved in such a short time. While I will never minimize the wisdom of considering mental health as a part of overall health, our daughter had symptoms that were related to something else. We have learned that this is quite common, and that many children end up having incorrect mental health diagnoses simply because the people trying to help don't have the information and training to relate it to giftedness as a cause.

There are many other ways that giftedness can present itself and many "right" answers as to how to approach a solution. I will explore some others sometime soon. For now, I just wanted to say that, yes, there is definitely a downside. I still can't talk about last fall without crying. It was SO hard on all of us. It was a very rainy season inside our home.