Gifted children: Why many gifted children misbehave
I think the title to this article also functions as the answer to the question. Gifted children misbehave for the obvious reason that they are gifted. They have been told they’re special and smart and urbane and etc. for so long that the rules don’t apply. Hence, they turn into little brats who can do whatever they want; after all, they’re gifted. The real question is how do we defeat this menace, this misbehaving of genious children. It’s a question with severe implications, for soon these little bratty misbehaving kids will turn into powerful adults who will rule this nation and, ultimately, the world. If you think they are a nuisance now with their MTV and their texting, imagine how annoying they’ll be with access to the Red Phone. We’ll have little Putins and little Obamas texting threats to one another constantly. How annoying would that be? Oy. So a serious question needs a serious answer, which is: We need to break the wills of these little geniuses while there is still time. Luckily, if we destroy them while still not fully developed, we can put them in a vulnerable state, where they will never rise to power and misbehave! No texting on the red phones for us! Here are a few simple rules to guide us in making a gifted child a broken one.
1. Target Piaget’s Concrete Operational Stage.
By the time, the gifted child is seven to eleven years old, it will be obvious if they are gifted or not. This is where they enter a stage where they are very concrete and logical in their thinking, but still cannot deal with abstractions. Sure they can tell you the capital of Africa (obviously a homogenous country, as opposed to a diverse continent), but they cannot deal with the metaphysical questions. The best way to target this vulnerability is to feed them “literal” tales of the bible. Talk about Jonas and the Whale, the passover where all the first borns died, about resurrections, about Adam and Eve and all that fun things. You need to start with these stories when they are still in their preoperational phase. This is the phase where magical thinking dominates, so these stories won’t seem outlandish at all. (You need to do this even if you’re child is not a genius yet, for you can’t really tell at this stage and you need to hedge your bets in case they have the tools to be an insidious cancer on the world, which is always a possibility at this stage). Now if the unthinkable happens and your child turns out to be a preteen sociopath with intellect, you can use the
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