In recent days the news of Lina Heider, 12 years old, entered the Faculty of Economics in Bonn, after having forged ahead with her education. His story began like that of many children who are then recognized as gifted: with parents who quickly noticed very precocious intellectual abilities. At one year Lina appreciated stories with long texts, at two she knew how to count to ten: potential that was indulged to the point of leading her to achieve her high school diploma at the age of eleven, with a school career made up of advances and skipped classes.
But is it right? We asked Professor Maria Assunta Zanetti, associate of Developmental Psychology, who at the University of Pavia directs the Lab-Talento (Italian laboratory for research and development of potential, talent and giftedness), a point of reference at national level for the research and management of giftedness, i.e. the characteristic of children with a high IQ.
«It is probable», explains Professor Zanetti, that, «in the immediate future, a university educational context will satisfy this little girl who will find satisfaction regarding the cognitive aspect, but I ask myself: what does it mean for a pre-adolescent to deal with colleagues who are young adults, what is the emotional aspect and the psychological load that she must learn to manage? Cognitive satisfaction is not everything, the other side of the coin is anticipating growth at a speed that from a psychological point of view asks too much.”
How do you respond in your work to a parent tempted to indulge the desire of gifted children to run intellectually?
«We tend to hold back: these kids often have difficulty matching their intellectual maturity, which is sometimes very advanced, with their emotional maturity, which is at the same level as their peers and sometimes even a little further behind, there is really an asynchrony of development. What we do is keep together, in search of a balanced equilibrium, the cognitive dimension and the emotional dimension. This does not mean that we must bring back the cognitive, but that we cannot even favor a further widening of the distance between the cognitive and the emotional.”
We can explain it with Lina’s example?
«This little girl has to deal with university students who are 8 and 10 years older than her. This temporal distance requires that she undergo some stages of emotional development. It means, to comply with the university’s requests, risking burning up his adolescence. There are times of growth that should be more accompanied. I wonder where this rush to anticipate leads. To get where? To get a qualification that will allow you to enter the world of work sooner? Why all this need and this frenzy in anticipating development stages? Maybe we also need to recover a little, I’m not saying slowness, times that are more in line with life times. We are accelerated in everything, we have a world that pushes us in terms of performance immediately, but this has important psychological and emotional costs: the risk is not only that this girl feels old at thirty, but that this happens at the price of infinite loneliness. When we find ourselves faced with children with very high IQs who have an infinite thirst for knowledge, we also try to convey to them the importance of taking moments of respite, of moving to give the body a way to channel their energy elsewhere, because otherwise the brain never has a break and this has a cost.”
