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Comment by ping_pong | Hacker News Reader

Educating a high-IQ child, especially a "profoundly gifted" child (above 145 IQ) is particularly challenging.

They get by with their raw intellect for most of school, and everyone compliments them on how smart they are. But they never learn skills like how to study, how to learn, how to persevere etc.

So once they hit their plateau, which everyone does, they don't know how to get past it and then they give up. A kindergartener that can read like a grade 8 will work off her raw intellect until she gets to grade 8, but then once her abilities max out, she won't have learned how to get past that, and that's where she flames out.

It happens all the time, even to friends of mine in high school. One of my gifted friends did well in high school but unfortunately flamed out in spectacular fashion in freshman year and I haven't heard from her in 30 years, even though we were extremely close and I reached out to her several times over the years.

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I'm growing increasingly pessimistic about posts like this which claim to have a nuanced understanding of [child development] but actually rely more on personal feelings, anecdotes, and pseudoscience.

A smart girl who grows up in a school where everyone's getting pregnant at 14 might end up pregnant at 14. A smart kid who grows up in Flint might have to deal with the same lead poisoning as everyone else, with potentially varying symptoms. A smart kid whose parents are depressed in its adolescence might be depressed.

There are many potential causes of burnout and it's extremely unhelpful to assume that we know what's happening to these kids based on "I know a guy who knows a guy". What you're essentially doing is framing a kid's failures as a moral issue of perseverance and study skills when it might be, but it also might not be.

Imagine being naturally competent but having a mental illness that invites the public to inject their own personal biases.

No. My child and my wife scored as Profoundly gifted, going to a gifted school and I myself went through gifted schools as well. I'm very familiar with this.

Nice

My IQ was only a few points lower than 145, when tested in middle school. I was praised and never pushed hard all the way to the Ivy League, where my ass was handed to me by a couple thousand other kids who had only gotten there through hard work and perserverence.

Interestingly, this is one of the inspirations for Study Swami. I saw a lot of this- and even with less gifted students but who still didn't know how to live up to their "potential."

How could you not hear from a former close friend in 30 years? Is the implication that she is dead? That’s a timespan equal to almost my whole life.

She ghosted me back in the early 90s after she flamed out of college. We were BFF in high school before BFF was a term, we were prom dates, etc. I stopped seeing her in class, and I reached out to her often in the first few years, but heard from friends that she could handle college. I've reached out a few times over the few couple of decades but her lack of response means she doesn't want to talk to me, so I respect it.

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