Do you grow out of giftedness?

Sprite was looking at the clothes in her wardrobe with a puzzled expression on her face.

As well as her dresses, skirts, shorts and tee shirts she has a full set of De Bono’s Six Action Shoes and several other pairs of shoes she hopes to be able to wear some day including Chindogu gift shoes and a pair of impractical high-heeled shoes which were a Christmas gift which demonstrated the giver’s lack of understanding of Sprite’s needs.

“For homework we have to write an essay titled Can a leopard change his spots?” she said.

“I asked Columbus Cheetah and he said no because a leopard’s spots are part of who he is. The leopard cannot change his spots like I change my clothes. But then I thought maybe a leopard’s spots might grow and change shape as the leopard grows.”

“Then I started to think about how people grow and change and whether you are a different person if you wear different clothes.
You know how some people say ‘Clothes maketh the man’.
And you know how some people say ‘It’s not really me’ when they look at themselves in the mirror when they are trying on clothes”

“I do like my new blue pinafore” she said. “But it is much more frilly and fancy than the shorts and skirts and tee shirts I used to wear.
So I wondered ‘Am I a different person if I wear different clothes’?”

“And Columbus Cheetah said I was not a different person. I was the same person inside with different clothes on the outside. It might make me feel different and even behave differently but I would still be the same person.”

“So then I started to think about growing and changing” she said “which is a bit hard to do when you always depict me as being the same age, whatever that is. https://spritessite.wordpress.com/about-2/
Columbus Cheetah said it did not matter that you always drew me the same age; because giftedness is asynchronous development and I am probably many ages at one time anyway. He said that, for example, I could be primary school age and think like a teenager and behave emotionally sometimes like a teenager and sometimes like a toddler.”

 

“And that made me think about when people say ‘she is just going through a phase – she will grow out of it’.
And then I wondered if being gifted  is just a stage in life – like being a teenager; and do you grow out of it?”

“Well,” I said “I believe that you do not grow out of being a gifted person.”

I reminded Sprite that I had talked about Gifted Grown Ups in a post on this blog at https://spritessite.wordpress.com/2014/10/20/gifted-grown-ups/  as part of another GHF Blog Hop http://giftedhomeschoolers.org/blog-hops/gifted-grown-ups/

And we were talking about this topic on #gtchat on Twitter recently.
“Giftedness Across the Lifespan: Do Gifted Children = Gifted Adults?”:

The questions that we discussed were,
1) How does the ‘achievement vs wiring’ debate impact this discussion?
2) Why is it important to recognize that giftedness exists throughout the lifespan?
3) How do unresolved childhood issues affect responses to social interactions for gifted adults?
4) What personality traits affect giftedness across the lifespan?
5) What changes in adolescence affect the nurturing of giftedness?
6) What can individuals do to cultivate their own giftedness as they grow older?
You can read the Storify transcript of the session at https://storify.com/gtchatmod/giftedness-across-the-lifespan#publicize
and a blog post about it on the GT Chat blog at
https://globalgtchatpoweredbytagt.wordpress.com/2015/04/14/giftedness-across-the-lifespan-do-gifted-children-gifted-adults/

This post is one stop on the Gifted Homeschoolers Forum April Blog Hop Gifted at Different Ages and Stages.
To continue hopping see http://giftedhomeschoolers.org/blog-hops/gifted-ages-stages/