Does being a gifted kid make for a burned-out adulthood?

About 10 years ago, a label started showing up in social media bios about as frequently as Hogwarts house affiliation and Myers-Briggs personality type: “former gifted kid.”

These were the jaded adults who had been labeled “gifted” as children, plucked out of their homerooms to go through their schools’ programs for highly intelligent children. Their complaints were many: They had been told they had potential but not been taught how to live up to it, the former gifted kids said. So tied were their identities to the image of themselves as effortlessly smart and high-achieving that they found themselves unable to attempt anything at which they might not excel immediately. Their lives were now stunted, artificially trapped in place because of the high expectations they experienced as children.

As with the Hogwarts house-affiliated, those who identified as former gifted kids were mercilessly mocked. It was pathetic to hold onto those faded childhood accolades as an adult, sneered social media observers. After all, if the former gifted kids were so smart, shouldn’t they know that those gifted programs were just an underhanded tool of school segregation? They weren’t even, probably, all that gifted.

Under the face of unrelenting mockery, the “former gifted kid” label faded away from social media. The former gifted kids are still out there, in Reddit’s After Gifted subreddit and anguished TikTok videos, but the label is no longer a viral meme. It has the whiff of the early 2010s about it, like a GIF of Leslie Knope eating waffles or a millennial pause.

Here’s the thing. What if the former gifted kids were right all along? What if being labeled “gifted” actually does have the potential to make your life a whole lot worse?

I spoke with a group of gifted kids and gifted educators and reviewed the literature. There’s a lot of debate over the lives of gifted kids, up to and including the question of how we define giftedness. But one thing everyone seems to agree on: The struggle for gifted kids is decidedly real.

While there’s no standard definition of giftedness, researchers generally agree that among children it means high intelligence, frequently measured as an IQ above 120. For children, giftedness is a measure of potential more than anything else.

For both adults and children, researchers agree that high intelligence is frequently accompanied by pretty consistent personality quirks.

Kids who have been identified as gifted tend to be highly emotional and sensitive. They tend to have a strong sense of justice and as such can be prone to black-and-white thinking. Frequently, they go through spells of behaving like mini-adults only to crash back into childishness.

“When I was a kid, if I finished my work early in class, I would get up and help other kids because school for me was very easy,” recalls Haley, a 23-year-old former gifted kid who is now pursuing their master’s degree and requested to withhold their full name for privacy reasons. “It meant that there was a lot of pressure put on me to do really well.”

There are two leading theories among people who study the gifted as to why we see these kinds of behaviors so frequently: nature or nurture. There’s a fair amount of evidence on both sides.

Neuroscientists are on the side of nature. As laid out by the nonprofit organization Gifted Research and Outreach, neuroscientific research suggests some differences in the brain architecture of people with high IQs. One study shows more gray matter in the portions of the brain that deal with attention, auditory processing, emotional stimulus, and recognition in the brains of people with high IQs than in the brains of the control group. Another study shows more connections between different parts of the brain, suggesting more efficient information processing. These differences help explain why gifted kids find it easier to learn things, but also why these kids find it hard to wrangle their emotions and sense of justice.

Megan Cannella is the director of outreach at the Davidson Institute, a nonprofit foundation that provides resources to “profoundly gifted” students. Cannella argues that, based on the neuroscience, gifted students should be understood not just as smart but as neurodivergent — meaning that their brains don’t follow the standard models other people’s do.

“The kiddos we work with here at the Davidson Institute are in three standard deviations above [average] intelligence,” says Cannella. “If they were three standard deviations below, there would be an expectation that there should be support and extra services and a better understanding of how their brain works. And rightfully so! Kids at the other end of this bell curve deserve all of those services and many more. Your brain works just as differently, just in a different way.”

Psychiatrists, meanwhile, are on the side of nurture. They argue that gifted kids exhibit their behavioral quirks because of the adult pressure that comes along with the gifted label.

Joan Freeman, a UK psychologist, created a study she called Gifted Lives that monitored the mental health of gifted children over a 35-year period starting in 1974, checking in with her subjects multiple times over the course of decades to see how they were faring. It’s Gifted Lives that offers the most compelling evidence that being called gifted changes the way you think and behave.

Freeman’s study divided its subjects into three groups of 70 children each. The target group was a cohort between the ages of 5 and 14 whose parents had identified them as gifted. (Freeman confirmed their IQ with her own test protocol.) The second group was made up of 70 randomly selected children of the same age, gender, and school background as each of the test children. The last control group was similarly matched to the test subjects in age, gender, and schooling — but according to Freeman’s test protocol, they were also matched in their IQ. The only thing separating the target group and the last group of children was that the parents of the latter hadn’t labeled them as gifted. Their abilities and potential, however, remained the same.

Over the course of her 35-year study, Freeman found that those who were labeled gifted by their parents were significantly more likely to struggle with their mental health than were either of the control groups.

“As children, the labelled gifted (the Target children) were usually treated differently from the equally able non-labelled gifted by their parents and teachers, whether positively or negatively,” Freeman concluded. “Consciously or unconsciously, they were the recipients of adult attitudes and expectations, and because they were children, most did their best to comply.” The results could range from wild success to burnout and severe depression, both as children and as adults.

Still, not all of the labeled gifted children struggled, Freeman found. Overall, “the higher the intelligence” her test subjects demonstrated as children, “the more successful the individuals were likely to be as adults.” They would have more stable lives, earn more money, be more satisfied with their careers and their personal lives.

Having above-average intelligence is an advantage in life. Being burdened with the expectations parents and teachers place on you, however, is a different story.

Gifted kids, by nature, have an aptitude for learning. They also tend to face a big stumbling block the first time they encounter a new skill set that doesn’t come easily to them.

Keith Chaffee is a 60-year-old retired librarian who was a gifted kid growing up in Vermont. In college, he majored in education on the grounds that he usually did well in a classroom setting. He recalls having “something close to a nervous breakdown” when he began student teaching and discovered that he had no idea how to control his students. “It was the first time I had failed at anything connected to a classroom,” Chaffee says.

“There is a struggle even now to have a level of motivation,” recalls Haley, the master’s student. “When I was a kid, I didn’t need to study. So I never learned how to study, and that persisted even in my academic and professional career.”

Those stumbling blocks can come in high school or college, but they can also emerge in adulthood. Cannella says she frequently sees gifted students flail once they’re out of school and have to handle adult responsibilities.

“Rejection sensitivity is a big part of a lot of gifted child profiles, so something like getting feedback at work, that’s really hard,” says Cannella. “You were able to figure out the rules of school and you were able to achieve in that very specific way, and now you’re in this whole new environment where you’re relearning the rules. All those things that you were able to mask before when you could just double down and do your schoolwork and whatever — now you’re on your own without that support of a school setting or a family setting. It’s hard.”

In Gifted Lives, Freeman profiles multiple gifted students who find their self-identity so tied up in the idea of their giftedness that the thought of failure becomes unbearable to them, ultimately hampering them throughout their lives.

One student Freeman profiles, Jocelyn, attended a prestigious music school as a child only to find that she didn’t have the talent to make it to the top. She switched her focus to physics and floundered in college. The strategies she used to rely on (“last-minute learning, skimming through homework, barely revising for exams and seeming to absorb knowledge from the air”) weren’t up to the rigors of understanding difficult scientific concepts.

Jocelyn flunked out of her prestigious college and decided to go to a less well-known school to get a teaching degree. She wanted to teach music, but she couldn’t bring herself to go through the coursework to qualify.

“It could have been due to one of the problems of giftedness, shared by others in this study — a fear of not being seen to be successful,” writes Freeman. “What if she did not gain an A-grade in the subject she had worked at for so many years? What if she had only scored a B or less in music — the love of her life?”

“I’d really be better off without the label of gifted because every time I’ve been interviewed about it, it’s never been a positive experience,” Jocelyn mused to Freeman as an adult. “I have to reflect in public on my failures. It’s always looking back, and it’s obvious to anyone that was my peak, and it’s all been downhill since.”

Among both the gifted and non-gifted, there is one framework that is particularly helpful in understanding their future success and fulfillment: mindset theory, developed by psychologist Carol Dweck.

“You either have a fixed mindset or a growth mindset,” says psychologist Rena Subotnik, who specializes in gifted education. “A fixed mindset would be one of those where your sense of what you’re good at allows you to excel in those areas. But if you have to change in some way, you’re likely to hold back and not want your reputation to be threatened. You would not take a chance that suddenly you would not look gifted anymore.”

That’s the mindset we see in former gifted kids like Jocelyn who find themselves frozen by the knowledge of their giftedness. Rather than being forced to cope with the idea that they aren’t gifted after all, they choose not to try and so opt out of the question of failure entirely.

Conversely, says Subotnik, “A growth mindset is one in which you take what comes — a criticism or setback — and say, ‘What can I learn from this?’” A former gifted kid with a growth mindset would be able to take something positive away from failure and use it to move on.

We are not born with either fixed or growth mindsets innate to us, says Subotnik. “It’s the reinforcement that you get,” Subotnik explains. “If somebody tells you, ‘You’re so smart, and you’re so quick,’ that feeds a fixed mindset. But if you tell kids — and teachers are learning to do this and parents, too — ‘I really like that you try different strategies. I really like that you stuck with it,’ that’s really wonderful. That kind of feedback fosters a growth mindset.”

For a lot of former gifted kids, making their way to this kind of mindset can be difficult. The idea of being smart and prioritizing academic achievement becomes all-consuming, especially in adolescence.

Deepa Lakshmin is a 32-year-old journalist who was in the gifted program of her public school growing up outside of Reading, Pennsylvania (she has also previously written for Vox). “Separately from any sort of label any school administration could have given me, I always took my studies really, really seriously,” she says. “I associated my self-worth with my GPA. I now as an adult know how messed up that is. I wish I could go back in time and tell that young version of myself that grades don’t really matter and that who you are as a person in your character and your integrity is what actually matters.”

In Gifted Lives, Freeman describes people who carry this focus on smarts and intelligence into adulthood as “Career Gifteds.” Her description of Career Gifteds is not flattering, and it echoes the perception that adults who won’t stop talking about being former gifted kids are usually very boring and pretty annoying, too.

“Even in conversation with strangers, before long Career Gifteds will let others know in one way or another how difficult it is for them as intellectually superior people to cope with the normal world,” writes Freeman. “Career Gifteds are likely to insist that were it not for … insert excuse … they could show their true and brilliant colours. Behind the facade lies the fear of being exposed as normal and unexceptional — not gifted at all.” It’s the fixed mindset problem at play once again.

If the Career Gifted person is motivated by fear, the fear is partially based in shame, and by the knowledge of the horrible gap between what giftedness looks like in childhood and what it looks like for adults. Lots of schools have gifted programs that identify smart kids with potential. How many adults do you know who could be considered gifted?

That’s part of the draw of former gifted communities like After Gifted on Reddit and the TikTok hashtags. It’s a place to recognize that at least you aren’t the only one who fell into the same trap and feels ashamed of it.

Beyond the emotional challenges gifted kids tend to face into adulthood, there’s a heated debate about whether gifted programs in schools should exist. After all, they monopolize educational resources and attention that not all schools can afford to give their students equally.

“Many programs that are not gifted programs are filled with classroom management problems, and these poor kids are not able to learn because it’s chaos,” says Subotnik. “It’s really tragic that it’s come to a point where gifted education has become decent education, and in the rest of the system, except if you have extraordinary teachers and leadership, kids are suffering.”

Adding to the problem is the issue that gifted programs are often disproportionately full of white and Asian students, a problem consistent enough that critics of gifted programs describe them as underhanded ways to maintain school segregation.

In part, that’s because gifted programs have historically relied on IQ tests, a metric deeply rooted in eugenics that has historically discriminated against people of color and can be ineffective at testing neurodivergent people. There have been fledgling attempts to make gifted programs more equitable — universal testing, universal admission — but they haven’t led to widespread reform.

A fair question to ask at this point is: If being labeled gifted causes so many problems for kids, why even bother trying to make the programs more equitable? Yet the people I spoke to were all firm on the importance of making sure gifted kids get the resources they need to feed their brains and to hang out with people who think the same way they do.

“The classroom itself was kind of boring in a lot of ways, when you’re three weeks ahead of everybody on the reading and you knew these answers before you got to class anyway,” says Chaffee. His rural school district wasn’t big enough for a gifted program when he was a student, but he says his teachers identified him as gifted early on. They looked out for opportunities for him outside of school, including a national math competition. “Getting that occasional opportunity just to be around other kids who are at that level and to spend time with kids for whom you’re not a freak …” Chaffee says, his voice trailing off. “That was the hardest part of it, as a kid, is that other kids look at you weird.”

“I just think it’s cruel for any child to spend his or her days not being challenged,” says Subotnik. “If they’re gifted, average, or whatever, every child deserves to have some real stimulation to feel like they really learned something at least over the course of a month. To withhold that because some kids are quicker or more interested or passionate — this, to me, is cruel.”

By now, it may have occurred to you that I went through a gifted program.

It all went exactly the way the literature lays it out. I was one of the smart kids in my elementary school. I was bored in school, the classroom was chaotic and overwhelming, and getting to retreat to another place with a small group of other kids to do interesting projects was a highlight of my school life. It felt like a reward for reading fast and testing well.

Leaving school was confusing. I had no more A-pluses to earn. In my early 20s, I was underemployed and feeling steadily more depressed as I got further from graduation. I felt that I had wasted all my potential and all the opportunities that had been lavished upon me. I was ashamed to feel so directionless. It was meaningless to have been smart in school, that much was clear, but how was I to find something that was meaningful?

When I saw the gifted kid memes beginning to pop up on the internet at this age, I felt remarkably seen and touched by them. It seemed as though they were identifying something important.

Eventually, I pulled myself together enough to find some direction and made my way into journalism. These days, at 35, I find I rarely think about having been a gifted kid.

The same was true of a number of the former gifted kids I talked to. After a certain point, the gifted kid label fades away.

“Honestly, it’s not something that I think about,” says Lakshmin. “Because once you’re out of school, at least to me, it doesn’t actually mean anything.”

“It’s not something I’ve thought about in a long time,” echoes Chaffee. “Once I got to college and suddenly I wasn’t the only really smart kid there who everything was coming easy to, I realized, ‘There are a lot of kids like that. Big deal.’ It isn’t really something I thought about much after a certain point.”

The research suggests that the gifted label comes with some big downsides. The pressure can be enormous, and the skills and values you’re taught to internalize may not serve you well in the real world. Moreover, the quirks of your brain structure might leave you more sensitive and prone to anxiety and depression than other people.

Still, over time, the pressure of the gifted label can fade away. Give it long enough, and being gifted might stop mattering at all.