CHARACTERISTICS

Observable Characteristics of Gifted Children
based on the underlying structure of the Self
(collected from many resources)

• Sensitivity

• Remembering insults forever

• Doing three things at once

• Doing the outwardly foolish thing, taking up lost causes

• Psychic

• Interest in death and life

• Driven to understand, complexity of understanding

• Wanting to know the reasons for things, origin of things

• Asks, "Why am I here?", "What am I to do?"

• Naive

• Recognition of falsity, no "trophy friends"

• Complexifying solutions

• Finding non-conventional solutions/originality

• Not motivated by extrinsic awards, discomfort with praise

• Passionate

• Undeterred by conventional expectations

• Self taught, non-sequential learning

• Need for precision

• Recognition of unfairness even to other, strong sense of justice

• Making intuitional leaps, making logical projections

• Noticing what no one else does

• Manipulation and bargaining

• Make and follow their own plans, less teachable

• Devise practical experiments to see "What if?"

• Saying, "Actually"

• Large vocabulary, love of big words

• Delayed in toilet training, difficulty in separating from mom

• Early sense of responsibility

• Not wanting to grow up and face the world

• Less physical risk-taking

• Zipping through Piagetian stages

• Friends of both genders, later sexual interests

• Abstract thinkers before having the emotional ability to handle it

• Symbolic thinkers

• Can animate their fears, powerful emotional imagination