A Dead Deer Encounter or the Roots of Anxiety in Gifted Children
As I was driving my four-year-old son to a friend’s birthday party, a truck, stopped at the traffic light in front of us, had a four-wheeler in its bed with a newly-shot deer flopped over the seat and roped down to keep its carcass from sliding off. Immediately after taking in the lifeless body of the deer, my son became intensely emotional.
“Mom, bring me home now! How can I possibly attend the birthday party after seeing this injustice?”
His extraordinary empathy had him feeling and describing the physical and emotional pain the deer must have experienced upon being shot. His sense of justice had him outraged with the hunter for killing a deer for sport and likely not needing it for food. The seeming disrespect for the value of the deer’s life, as demonstrated by the public display of the deer carcass strapped irreverently over the seat of the ATV, caused my son to agonize over what he foresaw as the possible societal impact of this apparent disregard for the value of the lives of all animals.
Why the Anxiety?
Anxiety in gifted children is often a result of how intensely and intuitively they experience the world around them. Gifted children comprehend the deeper nuances of the situations they encounter, so everything they face in life seems to be processed through a filter that magnifies their understanding of these situations. They are more perceptive of, sensitive to, and intuit more about the people, places, and circumstances. From these intense and deeper interactions with their world, gifted children form the complex connections among the information they receive which most of their same-age peers are not yet capable of grasping. This acute awareness of their life experiences and the higher-level relationships they make from those interactions can cause gifted children to contemplate a multitude of future worrisome circumstances—worrisome circumstances which lead to anxiety.
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The advanced cognitive abilities of gifted children—intelligence, reasoning, intuitiveness, perceptiveness, sensitivity, and empathy—give them the ability to comprehend and process information at more profound levels beyond that of children their same age. However, their emotional development may not provide the skills necessary to cope with such intense life experiences in a healthy way. The gap between a gifted child’s cognitive abilities and understanding of the world around them and their lack of emotional development needed to cope with such comprehension often leads to anxiety. This gap is called asynchronous development— the developmental disparity between a gifted child’s advanced abilities and their age-appropriate abilities and inabilities.
Asynchronous development in gifted children is common. It is the possible mismatch between their emotional, physical, and intellectual growth. The intellectual development of a gifted child can be considerably advanced in comparison to their emotional development. Many a parent of a gifted child has expressed their bewilderment when dealing with their child’s asynchronous development. They may wonder whether they are dealing with a toddler or a teenager when their ten-year-old is throwing a temper tantrum over their parents’ lack of social consciousness for their non-compliance with the local recycling program.
Gifted children have a deeper understanding of the world around them beyond that of their same-age peers, providing them with a million reasons to worry. Their anxiety is triggered when they focus on this overload of information, which causes them to reason, predict, and imagine all the future complications which can occur. The more gifted children know and understand, the more reasons for them to become anxious. If a seven-year-old child understands the scope of global warming as well as an eighteen-year-old teenager could, but only has the emotional coping skills of a child her age, she may foresee the destruction of life on Earth, and agonize over all the horrid possibilities her future holds while global warming bears down on her and the Earth’s population. Emotionally, she is not equipped to temper her anxiety with reason and more complex coping skills, nor is she able to soothe herself and allay her fears.
Intellectually, gifted children understand the possibilities. Emotionally, they may be unable to cope with those possibilities.
What Can We Do?
Within those few seconds in which my four-year-old son had seen the lifeless deer roped onto the seat of the four-wheeler, he internalized the emotional and physical pain the deer must have experienced and then conjured up all the implications this disrespect for life could bring upon society. His overwhelming anxiety over this situation resulted in a full-blown meltdown.
Although we were within a minute of arriving at the birthday party, I immediately pulled into the nearest gas station. We sat and talked about his fears. I gently tried to physically calm my son with a hug and by holding his hand. Emotionally, I empathized with his concerns. I told him I understood that he felt the hunter was disrespectful of the value of the deer’s life. I also honored his feelings and future concerns about what he felt was a tragic situation while trying not to give in to my need to give him all the reasons why he shouldn’t worry. From my past experiences dealing with my gifted children’s anxiety, I knew trying to convince him to simply not worry was hurtful and ineffective. And encouraging him to attend the birthday party despite his emotional state was not a consideration—I knew we were going home the moment he tearfully described how that deer must have felt when the bullet pierced its body. Once my son was less anxious and distraught, we headed back home.
Anxiety in gifted children can be overwhelming for both your child and yourself. It is not always easy for you as a parent not to get frustrated with all the fears your child imagines—fears which you, as an adult, understand may be unfounded or unreasonable. If your efforts to ease your child’s anxiety remain futile, then it is time to seek the help of a knowledgeable mental health professional who has experience with treating gifted children and their anxiety.
