Luis Ortega I Córdoba, (EFE).- “Invisible” and “misunderstood”, the reality of the highly capable child. Thousands and thousands of children in Spain with high intellectual capacities (AACCII) are still not recognized by the educational system and remain “invisible” for a society that “does not understand them”, which causes complications in their emotional development and impotence for some families who feel forgotten.
“I realized that my son had high capacities as soon as I held him in my arms as soon as he was born and from the way he looked at me,” Rafi Sibajas tells EFE while his son Pedro, just over 4 years old, entertains himself with some strollers that he makes roll on the ground. This mother’s “clinical eye” was already trained, since she was identified with ACI at school when she was little.
“It is something that is inherited,” says Rafi, who recalls that from the first days Pedro “looked differently, as if he was already focusing, he raised his head a lot and was physically quite awake compared to children his age.”
What today families understand as “shrewd”, although in the case of Pedro it was a manifest precocity. “He began to walk at eight months and it was like his first marathon”, although despite the indications the pediatrician pointed out “that perhaps it was precocious”.
Intense, sensitive, sadness and frustration
“Pedro is very demanding of attention, very intense, very sensitive, he empathizes a lot with emotions, with situations, with animals. Since he was little, he had a vast vocabulary and could distinguish between verbs with different nuances such as throwing, throwing or throwing,” he points out. rafi.
“He really likes perfection, he is very fair and he wants explanations of everything up to the point,” Rafi adds excitedly, although she also exposes the other side of high capacity. That “demand” that he himself imposes by his nature leads him to “sadness, anger, frustration”, all “very extreme”.
A misunderstanding of the highly capable child that led Rafi to a specialized center for evaluation, something “complicated” since children are normally identified around 5 years of age. “It’s about naming the condition he has, not labeling it just for labeling, so that it is cared for as it needs to be,” points out a mother who was then faced with the difficult decision of going to school.
At first, “we do not contemplate a private school” for economic reasons and Rafi and her husband began the “pilgrimage” through “public and subsidized schools” with discouraging results. In each and every one of the “open days”, the “educated professionals” who attended them responded in a similar way: “Maybe it’s not such a big deal, it’ll go away, it’s children’s stuff…”.
Failure and bullying
“Teachers are not trained as they should and parents are not informed, so it is very complex to attend to them as they need”, demands Rafi, who assures, with knowledge of the facts, that the world of high abilities is “a world quite unknown to all” and it can even generate “fear” or “repair” in other families and even “rejection”.
Finally, Rafi removed “heaven and earth” and managed to get family help to try to give Pedro the best he could to “help him, that he is taken care of, that he does not get frustrated and does not have depression”, something that “may sound very catastrophic or too dramatic” but that is the “reality” that these children face.
In fact, studies on the highly capable population indicate that more than 50 percent have school failure and more than 30 percent suffer or have suffered at some point in school bullying, issues that “must be kept in mind today”, Rafi warns while out of the corner of his eye he sees how Pedro runs, excited, straight towards some dogs in the park whom he already knows well.
Fortunately, Pedro, a child “of the pandemic” who, when he was at home, already asked why he “had no friends”, has “taken little time to integrate” into his school with specialized care and “to be well”.
Emotional development from love and understanding
“Day to day with a highly capable child is very rewarding and beautiful, but also very hard,” says a mother who demands “attention” from the administrations and “understanding” from society.
“I would start with the Teaching study plans so that teachers know how to treat these children in the classroom”, in addition to “early identification”, mainly “in girls”, who are “hidden” and are “more difficult to detect”, and a “prevention” to avoid conflicts in educational centers, Rafi highlights in his “requests” to the country’s educational leaders.
But what Rafi wants most is that Pedro, and the thousands and thousands of children like him and the thousands and thousands who continue to be unrecognized, have all the chances to “develop like the rest”, without “obstacles or rejections” and show “all the potential that they carry inside” and that explodes and becomes “visible” from “love, affection and understanding”. EFE