To Be a Gifted Adolescent

Abstract: Adolescence is a period in everybody's life that is usually referred to as “time that everybody must go through” or “parents' hell”. Transition between childhood and adulthood is indeed of great importance in everybody's life, but it is usually accompanied with a variety of questions, problems, dilemmas and a constant need to choose among many possibilities, which adds a lot of tension to the adolescent's life and that of his or her family. Being gifted is also somewhat conflictual as it means – in most cases – a high cognitive level with somewhat lesser emotional development, along with many intellectual and educational needs that are hard to fulfil, and also usually difficult in finding peers with similar interests, level of thinking and verbal and/or logicalmathematical abilities. As a result, parents of gifted adolescents have to overcome the problems every parent of a teenager faces, and in addition – those caused by their children's giftedness. This work will open a window to many such issues not answered by education or mental health professionals. The problems presented in this part of my work are: Problems typical to adolescents; and Problems typical to the gifted with a special focus on their variations during adolescence. The second part of this article will deal with problems of gifted adolescents, namely – problems that usually do not occur among the non-gifted. In addition, I am to offer some effective ways and strategies that might help parents to deal with the challenge of raising a gifted adolescent.