CHAPTER TWENTY
THE CHILD OF VERY SUPERIOR INTELLIGENCE AS A SPECIAL PROBLEM IN SOCIAL ADJUSTMENT [1]
This discussion is limited to the problems that arise from the combination of immaturity and superiority. Thus the problems considered pertain chiefly to the period in the life of the gifted child before he is twenty years of age; for the problems of the person of superior intellect tend to be less numerous as he grows older and can use his intelligence independently in gaining control of his own life.
It should be stated emphatically at the outset that children of very superior intelligence are not, as a group, socially annoying. The problems presented are those of the child, not those of society, as ordinarily understood. That this is so is sufficiently proved by the scant attention that organized society has bestowed upon the study of gifted children. Society studies that which is socially annoying. The school attends to those who give it trouble. Thus feeble-minded children ("minus deviates," as they are called in modern laboratories) have long been studied. Millions of dollars have been spent in considering them, and a voluminous literature has grown up through prolonged investigation of their maladjustments. Gifted children, on the other hand, have been studied hardly at all. Such investigations as we have are the result of intellectual interest on the part of a few educators and psychologists, who in the course of mental surveys became interested in those children who test always at the top.
THE QUALITY OF GIFTED CHILDREN
Such data as we now possess, from the scientific study of the gifted as organisms, show us that children of very superior intelligence are typically superior in other qualities also. They are superior in emotional stability and control. The old idea that the very bright "child prodigy" is likely to be nervous has been widespread, and popular fallacy inclines to mention "bright and high-strung" in the same breath. In fact, we not infrequently hear people claiming to be "high-strung" as a kind of compliment to themselves, implying that they are therefore also bright. Psychological researches of recent years have shown these ideas to be merely superstitions, founded on nothing more substantial than the human craving for a just nature that will somehow penalize the lucky and equalize biological wealth.
The researches of Terman [2], particularly, and of Hartshorne and May [3], have shown that highly intelligent children are more stable emotionally than are unselected "controls" age for age, and are superior to "controls" in their resistance to temptation. The researches of Burt [4], and of Healy and Bronner [5], show among delinquents few children of the high degree of intelligence with which this paper deals.
The studies cited do not, of course, exhaust the recent scientific literature, but they do fairly exemplify the results of concrete, impersonal investigation, as distinguished from the results of popular "wishful thinking." The child who tests above 130 IQ [6] is typically (though of course not invariably) large and strong for his age, healthier than the average, contributes far less than his quota to juvenile misbehavior as socially defined, and is emotionally stable in superior degree.
Starting with these facts as to generally superior adjustment, let us inquire whether there are, therefore, no special perplexities in the life of a gifted child. Is it possible that a child may vary as far in a "plus" direction from the average performance of his contemporaries as an imbecile varies in a "minus" direction, and find no special problems created for him by this wide difference in mental power between himself and the average child of his age?
The psychologist who is professionally acquainted with children who test above 130 IQ will be able to formulate clearly certain special problems of adjustment, observed in the case study of these children, which arise primarily from the very fact that they are gifted. Let us attempt to state some of these problems. The more intelligent the child, the more likely he is to become involved in these puzzling situations.
THE PROBLEM OF WORK
Where the gifted child drifts in the school unrecognized, held to the lock step which is determined by the capacities of the average, he has little to do. He receives daily practice in habits of idleness and daydreaming. His abilities are never genuinely challenged, and the situation is contrived to build in him expectations of an effortless existence. Children up to about 140 IQ tolerate the ordinary school routine quite well, being usually a little young for grade through an extra promotion or two, and achieving excellent marks without serious effort. But above this status, children become increasingly bored with school work, if kept in or nearly in the lock step. Children at or above 180 IQ, for instance, are likely to regard school with indifference, or with positive distaste, for they find nothing interesting to do there.
On the other hand, if the child be greatly accelerated in grade status, so that he is able to function intellectually with real interest, he will be misplaced in other important respects. A child of eight years graded with twelve-year-olds is out of his depth socially and physically, though able to do intellectual work as well as they can. These problems come out clearly when we consider that the seats and desks planned for twelve-year-olds will not fit him; that he will always be the last one chosen in athletic contests; that no one will know how to treat him at class parties; that the teacher will be prone to complain of his manual work, such as handwriting; and that he will be emotionally immature in comparison with older classmates. When he jumps up and down, clapping his hands and shouting, "Goody! goody!" at an announcement from the teacher, the older children will laugh at him, and later may hang paper tails and other tokens of ignominy upon him; whereas his childish glee would have constituted no violation of taste among eight-year-olds.
A thousand concrete instances might be described to show what these problems of adjustment are. Experimental education is trying to solve them. At present, the special class is being tried in populous centers, wherein a whole group of the young gifted can be brought together (as has long been done for the dull and slow).
In less populous communities, a moderate degree of acceleration, combined with enrichment of the curriculum for the individual, is being tried. We do not yet know how the problem of adjustment to school work can best be solved. Indeed, we have just learned how to define this problem.
THE PROBLEM OF ADJUSTMENT TO CLASSMATES
Typically, where there is no scientific recognition of the presence of the gifted, these children, by the time they are eight or nine years old, are more or less accelerated in scholastic status and appear as the youngest in the class. Such a child is thus youngest in the fourth or fifth grade, in a heterogeneous group in which the oldest are retardates, thirteen or fourteen years old. Now, in the case of boys especially, it may happen that these dull adolescents lie in wait to bully and tease the young gifted boy, whose "book-learning" they detest and whose immaturity suggests the term "baby." The present writer knows of instances in which these young children have valiantly suffered at the hands of dull, bullying classmates, protecting themselves as best they might by agility and wit, since, of course, they could not possibly compete in size and strength. The gross indignities and tortures thus suffered are directly a penalty of being gifted; for little boys of like age, in the grade proper to their age, do not come into classroom contact with these over-age bullies to anything like the same extent, and hence do not become targets for the latter.
One young gifted boy thus bullied said, "I rigged up a sling and was going to hit him [the bully] with a marble, but got afraid I might shoot his eye out." This simple statement tells volumes.
It would seem that the school should somehow take effective cognizance of this problem of the bully, which is created for the gifted child directly as a result of the contacts forced upon both of them by the school. Segregation of pupils on the basis of mentality would go far to obviate such problems, but except in cities, homogeneous grouping is difficult. At present, compulsory education, with heterogeneous classes, forced upon gifted children situations that would be analogous to those arising if teachers and superintendents were compelled to consort daily, unprotected, with giant thugs and gangsters. Gifted adults are free to segregate themselves from thugs and gangsters, and also to make explicit provision for police protection, but the American school forces the dull bully upon the gifted child, in daily contacts, out of which lasting problems of mental hygiene may arise.
THE PROBLEM OF PLAY
Reports by gifted children themselves show that they are, as a group, much interested in play, and that they have more "play knowledge" than has the average child. When their reports are compared item by item with reports similarly rendered by unselected children, it appears that the gifted know more games of intellectual skill, such as bridge and chess; that they care less, age for age, for play which involves predominantly simple sensori-motor activity which is aimless; and that gifted girls are far less interested in traditional girls' play, as with dolls and tea sets, than unselected girls are. The gifted enjoy more complicated and more highly competitive games than the generality do, age for age. Outdoor sports hold a high place with the gifted, being almost as popular among them as is reading.
But although they love play, and have much play knowledge, the play of the highly intelligent works out in practice as a somewhat difficult compromise among their various powers. They follow their intellectual interests as far as they can, but these are checked in many ways by age, by degree of physical immaturity, and by tradition. An eight-year-old of 160 IQ may, for example, be deeply interested in tennis, but he is likely to be more or less kept from playing because his physical development is not yet equal to the demands of the game. He may love to play bridge, but others of his age who are available as playmates do not, of course, know how to play bridge, and he is not allowed to sit up at night when his elders play.
By trial-and error experience, the highly intelligent child has to work out an adjustment if he can, but there is likely to be noticeable difficulty if he tests above 170 IQ. In the ordinary course of events, it is hard for such a child to find playmates who are congenial both in size and in mental interests. Thus many of those who test very high are finally thrown back upon themselves, and tend strongly to work out forms of solitary, intellectual play. [7] The same situation is discovered in studies of the childhood of eminent persons. Yoder [8], in his study of the juvenile history of fifty very eminent persons, concluded that their play "was often of a solitary kind." Reading, calculation, designing, compiling collections, constructing an "imaginary land," evoking imaginary playmates—these forms of play stand out prominently among the recreational interests of such children. Since physical activity is hard to carry out interestingly alone, their play tends to become habitually sedentary. Nevertheless, they develop a high degree swimming, skating, and other forms of athletic enjoyment which do not depend upon being included in a group.
Of six young children testing above 180 IQ, known to the present writer, only one [9] had no conspicuous difficulty in play, during early childhood. [10] The other five were all so divergent from the usual in play interests that parents and teachers noticed them. They were unpopular with children of their own age because they always wanted to organize the play into a complicated pattern, with some remote and definite climax as the goal. As the mother of one six-year-old said, "He can never be satisfied just to toss a ball around, or to run about pulling and shouting." Children of six years are ordinarily incapable of becoming interested in long-sustained, complicated games which lead to remote goals, but are, on the contrary, characteristically satisfied only by the kind of random activity which bored this child of 187 IQ. The playmates of ordinary intelligence naturally resented persistent efforts to reform them and to organize them for the attainment of remote goals. Furthermore, they did not have in their vocabulary words that the gifted child knew well, used habitually, and took for granted. Literally, they could not understand each other. The result was that the child of 187 IQ did not "get along" with those of his own age and size. But when he sought to join the play of children of his own mental age (above twelve years), the six-year-old was rejected by them also, as being "a baby" and "too little to play with us." The child, thus thrown back upon himself, developed elaborate mathematical calculation, collecting, reading, and games with imaginary playmates, as his chief forms of play.
These young children of extremely high intellectual acumen fail to be interested in "child's play" for the same reasons that in adulthood they will fail to patronize custard-pie movies or chute-the-chutes at amusement parks. It is futile, and probably wholly unsound psychologically, to strive to interest the child above 170 IQ in ring-around-the-rosy or blind-man's-buff. Many well-meaning persons speak of such efforts as "socializing the child," but it is probably not in this way that the very gifted can be socialized. The problem of how the play interests of these children can be realized is one that will depend largely on individual circumstances for solution. Often it can be solved only by the development of solitary play.
What, if any, effect the habitual evocation of imaginary playmates, and the elaboration of the imaginary land, may exert on character formation and habits of adjustment in adulthood is at present unknown. Psychologists should study the hygienic aspects of these methods of finding satisfaction outside of the real world. Since gifted children are, as has been stated, on the whole a stable and rational group, perhaps no effects, or good effects only, result from this play of the imagination.
SPECIAL PROBLEMS OF THE GIFTED GIRL
It has been mentioned that gifted girls are less interested in traditional girls' play than are unselected girls. They show a preference for boys' books and boys' play, and a greater community of interests with boys than the generality of girls display. This merely means that girls of a high degree of intelligence are, as a group, more competitive, aggressive, and active than girls are supposed to be.
An illustrative case is that of a seven-year-old girl of IQ 170, whose mother wished to learn from psychology how to break her child of being a "tomboy" and how to rear her to "be a lady." The mother complained that the girl had never cared for dolls, that she would not take an interest in her clothes, and that she wanted to do nothing after school but read or play "rough, outdoor games." "How," inquired the mother, "could I break her of the habit of climbing lampposts?" This child was active and competitive. When asked why she did not play with dolls, she replied, "They aren't real. The doll that is supposed to be a baby doll is twice as big as the one that is made like a mother doll."
Aside from their dissatisfaction with the play habits ordinarily associated with their sex, gifted girls have various other problems to face which arise directly from the facts that they are able and that they are girls. When they reach the stage of life-planning, as they do very early, they are confused in their self-seeking by the uncertainty in contemporary customs as to what a girl may become. This difficulty is growing less and less, to be sure, but it is still something to be reckoned with, especially in certain localities. The intelligent girl begins very early to perceive that she is, so to speak, of the wrong sex. From a thousand tiny cues, she learns that she is not expected to entertain the same ambitions as her brother. Her problem is to adjust her ambitions to a sense of sex inferiority without, on the one hand, losing self-respect and self-determination, and, on the other, without becoming morbidly aggressive. This is never an easy adjustment to achieve, and even superior intelligence does not always suffice to accomplish it. The special problem of gifted girls is that they have strong preferences for activities that are hard to follow on account of their sex, which is inescapable.
PROBLEMS OF CONFORMITY
Judgments of teachers and parents indicate that highly intelligent children are, on the whole, more easily disciplined than children generally are. Nonetheless, certain problems of discipline do arise, which grow out of their intelligence. First, in the case of the schoolroom situation almost the only respect in which discipline is especially troublesome with these children is in the matter of orderly discussion when they are together in special classes. It is hard for them to maintain silence when ideas press for utterance. The tendency is for many to speak at once, each striving to outspeak the others. An atmosphere of confusion is thus created unless discipline can be imposed. To hold his tongue, to listen quietly and respectfully to others, to speak according to some order of procedure, and to restrain disappointment at failure to be heard at all—these habits seem especially difficult for gifted children to form. Only gradually do these children learn self-government in this respect.
Also it has been noticed during the experimental education of the highly intelligent that they sometimes tend to slight routine drudgery in favor of more stimulating and more original projects. The sheer drudgery involved in learning their multiplication table, for example, is likely to be waived in order to follow some absorbing story or experiment, unless conformity be urged from without.
At home, a special problem of discipline may arise occasionally due to the circumstance of that child, while still very immature in years, has come to exceed one parent or both in intelligence. For the best discipline routine the parent must be more intelligent than the child or the child's respect for the opinions of the former will inevitably be lost. With the most gifted children this may quite early become a problem, since such children, by the age of ten years or before, are more intelligent than the average adult is. Very readily such a child perceives that in comparison with himself his parent is slow-witted and lacking in general information. Yet in self-control and in experience of life, the child is still very immature. Thus quite unfortunate developments may ensue in the parent-child relationship. The child may become the director of the parent's activities, reversing the socially acceptable condition of affairs. Fortunately, in the vast majority of cases at least one of the parents is a person of superior intelligence. We seldom find a very intelligent child in a home where both parents are average or below average in mental power.
Because he learns everything very quickly, the highly intelligent child is especially quick to discover what forms of conduct on his part bring him satisfactions. If the tantrum is rewarded by the parent with cookies, company, attention, or other childish delights, then the bright child may display even "bigger and better" tantrums than will those who are slower to learn. If illness brings coddling, release from undesired responsibility, and other pleasures, then the quick learner will readily perceive the value of "headaches" and other aches as means to ends. On the other hand, the very intelligent learn readily to refrain from undesirable behavior that is followed quickly and inevitably by punishment. Two or three experiences usually suffice for these excellent learners. Neglect and ostracism are good forms of punishment for them. Darwin tells us that he was cured of telling sensational fibs, as a child, simply by the chilling silence with which they were always received by his parents.
One more problem may be noted here. There is with intelligent children a stronger tendency to argue about what is required of them than is found with the average child. This tendency to argue as to the why and wherefore of a requirement is met both at home and at school, and calls for thought in proper handling on the part of parents and teachers. To find a golden mean between arbitrary abolition of all argument, on the one hand, and weak fostering of an intolerable habit of endless argumentation, on the other, is not always easy, but it is always worth while as a measure for retaining the respect of the child.
THE PROBLEMS OF ORIGIN AND OF DESTINY
Early interest in origins and in destinies is one of the conspicuous symptoms of intellectual acumen. "Where did the moon come from?" "Who made the world?" "What is the very end of autumn leaves?" "Where did I come from?" "What will become of me when I die?" "Why did I come into the world?"
Although these questions rise vaguely and intermittently in the minds of children in general, they do not begin to require logically coherent answers until about the mental age of twelve or thirteen years. Then they begin to press for more or less systematic accounts. From these circumstances of mental development, the erroneous idea has long been promulgated, even by psychologists, that puberty in some mysterious manner leads to the rise of religious needs and convictions. Since among the generality a "mental age" of thirteen years is, roughly, coincident with the age of pubescence, the two developments have been assumed to be casually related.
When we observe young gifted children, we discover that religious ideas and needs originate in them whenever they develop to a mental level past "twelve years mental age." Thus they show these needs when they are but eight or nine years old, or earlier. The higher the IQ the earlier does the pressing need for an explanation of the universe occur, the sooner does the demand for a concept of the origin and destiny of the self appear.
In the cases of children who test above 180 IQ observed by the present writer, definite demand for a systematic philosophy of life and death developed when they were but six or seven years old. Similar phenomena appear in the childhood histories of eminent persons where data of childhood are available. Goethe, for example, at the age of nine constructed an altar and devised a religion of his own, in which God could be worshiped without the help of priests.
Much could be said of the special problems of the young gifted child in this period of immaturity when his intellectual needs are those of an adolescent while his emotional control and physical powers are still but those of a child. It would be of great interest to study the reactions of older persons to the insistent questions and searchings of these young children. "You are too young to understand." "You can't know all that till you grow older." "You unnatural child!" These are responses that have been heard incidentally, falling from the lips of undiscerning parents. A girl of eight years, of IQ 150, recently was heard to express a determination to join the "Agnostic Church," because she had asked, "What is it called when you can't make up your mind whether there is a God or not?" and had been told that this would be agnosticism.
Part and parcel of these questionings concerning origin and destiny are those concerning birth and reproduction. At a "tender" age these children ask for an account of sex and reproduction and suffer much at the hands of parents and guardians who are shocked at what thus emanates from the mouths of babes. Lifelong problems of mental hygiene may be thus engendered by parents who cannot understand why a child should be "so unnatural" as to weep over questions of birth and death at six or seven years of age.
In the same way problems of right and wrong become troublesome for these young children in a way that does not happen except for the very able. For instance, a six-year-old boy of IQ 187 wept bitterly after reading "how the North taxed the South after the Civil War." The problem of evil in the abstract thus comes to trouble these children almost in their cradles, at an age when they are ill-suited to grapple with it from the point of view of emotional maturity. Special problems of mental hygiene are perhaps inherent in this situation which do not arise with the generality of children.
GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS
The list of problems that we have suggested here does not by any means exhaust the subject under discussion. However, the present writer believes that these are some of the more important problems of childhood that originate directly from the circumstance of being very highly intelligent among official guardians who are ignorant or careless of the fact. These problems of adjustment do not arise unless a child is gifted intellectually. They are conspicuous to the psychologist who studies children with "test knowledge" of them.
It is especially to be noted that many of these problems are functions of immaturity. To have the intelligence of an adult and the emotions of a child combined in a childish body is to encounter certain difficulties. It follows that (after babyhood) the younger the child, the greater the difficulties, and that adjustment becomes easier with every additional year of age. The years between four and nine are probably the most likely to be beset with the problems mentioned.
The physical differences between a child of six whose IQ is 150 and children of nine years (whose mental age corresponds to his) are unabridgeable, and so are the differences of taste, due to differences in emotional maturity. The child of six graded with nine-year-olds is out of his element physically and socially, but the same thing is not true of a sixteen-year-old among nineteen-year-olds. The difference between six and nine is very great. The difference between sixteen and nineteen is small in terms of biological development.
Moreover, as the bright go forward in school, they find work increasingly adapted to their powers by the automatic developments of the established curriculum. Senior high schools are, we have discovered, adapted only to adolescents of superior intelligence. Classmates become automatically more congenial through being more highly selected. The dull bully, with his crude horseplay, has left school, and in any case the gifted, being older, can defend themselves physically.
By the time a gifted person is physically mature, many of the problems herein outlined automatically disappear as problems. What after-effects there may be of the poor solution of these childish problems we do not know. Apparently these superior organisms tolerate well the strains put upon them by reason of their deviation from the average. However, that an organism stands strain well is no reason for putting or leaving strain unnecessarily upon it.
As the gifted individual grows to maturity, he or she can achieve control of his or her own life, and can dispense to a relatively great extent with inadvertent cruelties and mistaken efforts of uninformed official guardians. It is during childhood that the gifted boy or girl is at the mercy of guardians whose duty it is to know his nature and his needs much more fully than they now do.
[1] Reprinted from Mental Hygiene: Vol. XI, No. 1, pages 3-16
(January, 1931). Read by Leta. S. Hollingworth at the First
International Congress of Mental Hygiene, Washington, D. C.,
May 8, 1930.
[2] Terman, Lewis M. Genetic Studies of Genius: Vol. I. Stanford University Press, Stanford University, California; 1925.
[3] Hartshorne, H., and May, M. A. Studies in Deceit. The Macmillan Company, New York; 1927.
[4] Burt, C. The Young Delinquent. D. Appleton-Century Company, Inc., New York; 1924.
[5] Healy, W., and Bronner, A. F. Criminals and Delinquents: Their Making and Unmaking. The Macmillan Company, New York; 1928.
[6] The intelligence quotient is the ratio between the [chronological age] status achieved on tests by an individual and that achieved by the generality [of the same chronological age].
[7] Hollingworth, Leta S. Gifted Children: Their Nature and Nurture. The Macmillan Company, New York; 1926.
[8] Yoder, G. F. "A Study of the Boyhood of Great Men." Pedagogical Seminary (1894).
[9] This child attended a private school where a number of the pupils tested above 140 IQ.
[10] This was written in 1931.