PROBLEM OF LEADERSHIP
Also, in all matters pertaining to leadership, the competition with older classmates and friends exerts an influence, particularly during adolescence. The very young boy (or girl) in high school is not so likely to be elected to a post of leadership because of his comparative size, his voice, and the juvenility of his clothes. Thus a feeling may be engendered in him that he cannot gain the confidence of contemporaries; and this, in turn, may impair his self-confidence.
If long continued, this state of affairs may lead to emotional straining after social recognition. In social gatherings, size and physical maturity are important as absolute quantities and qualities, and not in relation to age. Thus a child should not be placed too far out of his age-group. A very gifted boy, reaching at twenty years a stature of five feet nine inches, remarked, "It is very odd to be as large as the people you're with!" Being always the smallest member of a social group may develop attitudes which are hard to revise when eventually the boy or girl achieves adult stature and is "as large as the people you're with."
This difficulty in assuming a normal place among more mature schoolmates arises especially in adolescence, when association with members of the opposite sex makes its introduction. Being in high school or in college with much older classmates, the boy of thirteen to sixteen finds himself at a disadvantage with the girls whom he meets. The girls brought to parties by the older boys are "too old" for him, and he feels unable to claim their attention. Many of these young boys show sufficient insight and sufficient management of their disadvantage to take care of it. They know that the trouble lies in being "too young," and that later they will achieve standing with the girls. In a few cases, however, this difficulty may lead to an unfortunate avoidance of girls, even in more mature years. In the case of girls, adjustment to the society of older boys in high school and college seems to present no special difficulties, since girls develop earlier than boys do, and are taken seriously by boys who are older than themselves.
The "inferiority complexes" of gifted persons have been little studied, but it is certain that many such persons do feel socially inferior and shy. Some of this may be due to the physical comparisons just suggested, arising from prolonged association with older persons.
PROBLEMS OF ADJUSTMENT TO OCCUPATION
Where the gifted child drifts in the school unrecognized, working chronically far below his capacity (even though young for his grade), he receives daily practice in habits of idleness and daydreaming. His abilities never receive the stimulus of genuine challenge, and the situation tends to form in him the expectation of an effortless existence. Children with IQ's up to 150 get along in the ordinary course of school life quite well, achieving excellent marks without serious effort. But children above this mental status become almost intolerably bored with school work if kept in lockstep with unselected pupils of their own age. Children who rise above 170 IQ are liable to regard school with indifference or with positive dislike, for they find nothing in the work to absorb their interest. This condition of affairs, coupled with the supervision of unseeing and unsympathetic teachers, has sometimes led even to truancy on the part of gifted children.
On the other hand, if a very gifted child is placed in the regular grades as far ahead of his age as his learning capacity warrants, the evils of social dislocation may result, as previously described. Experimental education is at present trying to solve the problem of how to secure right habits of work for the highly intelligent child, and some progress has been made in recent years.
Another problem of development with reference to occupation grows out of the versatility of these children. So far from being one-sided in ability and interest, they are typically capable of so many different kinds of success that they may have difficulty in confining themselves to a reasonable number of enterprises. Some of them are lost to usefulness through spreading their available time and energy over such a wide array of projects that nothing can be finished or done perfectly. After all, time and space are as limited for the gifted as for others, and the life-span is probably not much longer for them than for others. A choice must be made among the numerous possibilities, since modern life calls for specialization.
The dangers in development with respect to work habits are, therefore, that the child may not develop any habits of sustained effort, and that he may fail of success as a worker through being interested in too many things ever to accomplish very much at any one of them. His problem as he goes into adolescence is to make a definite choice, and to form the habit of effort.