One of the most profound natural gifts that a person can be blessed with is a high degree of native intelligence. Being born intelligent opens up a lot of doors to the individual which are inaccessible to the average person, and pays off in countless personal and transpersonal ways for the individual’s entire lifetime. The gift of intellect is so profound and deep that it puts other people in awe of the truly bright. In many ways, being born intelligent is like being born rich or beautiful, but with the added benefit of it being a fortune that is impossible to lose and unlike beauty, does not fade with age.

But like all profound gifts, intelligence does not come without its own problems and pitfalls, and these start at a very early age for the gifted individual.

The one I wish to talk about in this article is what I call the “Prodigy Trap”. The basic outline of the problem is that the experience of being a child prodigy has the potential problem of creating in the child an entirely unrealistic and maladaptive idea of how the world worlds and what life will be like for them, and if left unaddressed, this can cause problems for the individual their entire lives.

To understand how this happens, we need to take a look at the world from the gifted child’s point of view. At quite an early age, they discovered that things which were to them quite easy and natural gained them a highly disproportionate amount of praise and positive attention from adults. Things which other children struggled hard a long to master came to them easily, even effortlessly. Being so young, you have no idea why this is, what it means, or what it is like to be any different. You can’t imagine why other people find these things so hard when they are so easy for you. And it shows.

Already, this separates you from the other children. Even if you are otherwise well socialized and have a supportive and stable home environment, this places consider stress on your social relationships. You lack the common experience of life skills and academic struggle that binds your fellow children together like a common enemy. This alone makes you stand apart.

Potentially compounding this is a lack of common interests with other children your age. The age-appropriate activities they enjoy simply don’t appeal to you, because intellectually (but not emotionally) you are well in advance of your peers and so, understandably, what they enjoy and what you enjoy are not likely to overlap by very much. Imagine a six year old trying to play and enjoy games with three year olds. It is not a matter of snobbishness or elitism. They are just not into the same things.

A third aspect of this dilemma stems from the different approaches modern society takes towards academic education versus social education. When it comes to the traditional academic skills, we teach, we test, we grade, we monitor, we pay very close attention. A child who does poorly gets extra help. A child who does well gets extra praise. It is a well honed system that has stood the test of time.

But when it comes to socialization and social skills, we do practically nothing. We just put the kids in a group and assume it will all sort itself out somehow. This, when we know full well that when they grow up, social skills will be at least as useful to them as history or chemistry.

The average kids, having no particular pressures pushing them towards developing either side of the social versus academic skills equation, develop, by default, with a decent balance of both.

But the gifted kids live in a far more polarized world. The academic part is so easy for them that even assuming the social skills are no more difficult for them to acquire than for other kids, the difference will naturally lead to the gifted children favoring academic and intellectual development over social.

When you fold into that the problems posed by the previously mentioned barriers of lack of shared experience or interests with their peers, and the constant specter of the bullying their innocent nonconformity tends to attract, it is no wonder that so many gifted children grow up to be so, well…. different.

It is my hope that if we search beneath the dazzle of their intellects and take a good look at the problems gifted children face, we can develop educational strategies to compensate for this problems and hopefully nip them in the bud before they take root.