Sensitive Child
A sensitive child is described having a nervous system that is highly aware and quick to react to everything. Such children are incredibly responsive to their environments whether the lighting, sounds, smells or overall mood of the people in their situations, these kids pick it up.
Elaine Aron, PhD
With a sharpened sense of awareness these children are often gifted intellectually, creatively and emotionally demonstrating genuine compassion at early ages. The downside is that these intensely perceptive kids can also get overwhelmed easily by crowds, noises, new situations, sudden changes and the emotional distress of others. Criticism, defeat, the distress of others is something sensitive children feel deeply.
Charles Murray, in his book Real Education, stresses how important it is for the most talented students to learn what it is like to fail.
Murray suggests that gifted students need to hit their own personal intellectual walls so that they can have empathy with the rest of the world. He goes on to say that,
"No one among the gifted should be allowed to rise to a position of influence without knowing what it feels like to fail. The experience of internalized humiliation is a prerequisite for humility."
Being super smart can be likened to having a giant engine for a brain. The thing is, if you never take the car out of the garage for a spin, you'll never know what you can really do. And if you really want to achieve, you have to put yourself out there among the very best and learn what it feels like to fail.
We all know that overscheduled children, kids who do more activities than ours do! are a national problem. The pressure and competition continue, and nothing changes. Philosophically, we might appreciate the value of down time, but as parents, we’re afraid to do anything less than everything possible to develop our children’s potential.
Potential becomes a burden when we see it as a predestined calling to impressive accomplishments. Both parents and children can become seduced into focusing on performance rather than growth, on being the best rather than making progress, and on accumulating external awards and accomplishments as the primary measure of worth. Worst of all, this one-dimensional perspective on potential creates a terrible fear of failure.
A narrow view of potential suggests that there is some lofty gold ring of success our children will either jump high enough to reach it or else fall short. But life doesn’t work that way. In real life, there are lots of choices, lots of chances, and lots of paths. It makes no sense to talk about kids “not living up to their potential” because the miracle of children is that we just don’t know how they will change or who they will become. The path of development is a journey of discovery that is clear only in retrospect, and it’s rarely a straight line.
We live in a narcissistic age that emphasizes being impressive and seeking admiration. Sadly, smart kids are often the ones who are hurt most by this focus on externals. Because they can perform, and that performance seems so important to everyone around them, they may start to believe that they are the performance.
Compassion, perspective, grit…these qualities aren’t necessarily impressive, your kids won’t win a certificate for developing them, but they are essential to a well-lived life.
Psychology Today
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