Raising Gifted Children: Overexcitabilities and Intensities

If you understand and live with gifted intensities, which is to say, you struggle with them, this conference might be worth a look.

The Ninth International Congress of the Institute for Positive Disintegration in Human Development will be taking place in St. Charles, IL from July 22 - 24.

This interdisciplinary conference will focus on Dabrowski’s theory of Positive Disintegration drawing from education, psychology, religion, philosophy, counseling and spirituality.


Positive Disintegration? What is that? It sounds scary, like a mental breakdown or something, right? It is kind of a breakdown, but also a building up, hence the term "positive dis-integration."

While not all kids who exhibit these intensities or overexcitabilities are gifted, many of them are. And many highly or profoundly gifted kids exhibit at least some of these tendencies. If you spend a lot of time with HG or PG kids you know what I'm talking about. They are a different kind of normal- they take in the world a bit differently than most of us, they process much of their sensory input a bit differently, too.

I recall a speaker I heard years ago say that HG/PG kids tend to have a higher level of sensory input than most, however, their sensory processing centers tended to develop more slowly which leads to a system overload.

This makes sense to me. And it's good to know why a particular child just can't wear *those* socks or the shirts with the tags or hypothetically speaking, goes from calm to apeshit tantrum in about 5 seconds, but it's how to work around those issues that is not always readily apparent.

Oh, wait, on the clothing front, check out Soft Clothing (suggestion, not an endorsement; never tried the brand, but would have loved to try their socks about five years ago had they existed back then).

And for a bit more background, check out these old posts on gifted overexcitabilities:
psychomotor OEs, intellectual OEs and sensual OEs.

I'd love to hear about your experiences with gifted OEs or intensities and how to build up their positive aspects while minimizing the aspects that make it challenging to raise such intense (and sometimes intensely gifted) children .

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