Responding to Concerns Related to the Social and Emotional Development of Gifted Adolescents

Based on the first author's experience with several years of small-group discussions and other clinical experiences, gifted adolescents are often unable to respond to the question "How are you like anyone else your age?" Their inability to acknowledge similarities is not surprising, given the differentness inherent in having abilities in the highest percentiles on a bell curve of intellectual ability. In fact, they may struggle with personal challenges related to that reality. However, their sometimes puzzled hesitation might also reflect little sense of shared humanity. Actually, their developmental tasks are fairly universal: developing identity, direction, autonomy, and increasingly mature relationships (e.g., Erikson, 1968; Scheidel & Marcia, 1985). How they experience developmental challenges, though, likely differs because of "a qualitative difference in awareness and intensity of experience" (Silverman, 2013, p. 21).