The Balancing Act: Organizing Intensity and Creativity

I am grateful to Betty Gilgoff’s comment on a recent post about creativity, in which she brings up the balancing act necessary for helping creative, intense, “out there” kids to live rewarding lives in a world that often does not understand them or value their strengths:

“While it contributes so much to who they are, those same qualities can also cause stress for highly gifted/highly creative young people in a world that can be unkind and demanding. As teachers and parents while we don’t want to have our children bury these traits, we do have a role in helping them to understand themselves and in helping to use their qualities to their own advantage. It becomes a balancing act, but one that the young person needs to take on and understand, rather than one that the adults and society around him/her need to impose.”

The last part of the comment is worth repeating: “one that the young person needs to take on and understand, rather than one that the adults and society around him/her need to impose.” This is one of the reasons I wrote The Smart Teens’ Guide to Living with Intensity, to encourage pre-teens and teens to embrace and own their intensity and their education.

Encourage: To inspire with courage, animate, inspirit; To inspire with courage sufficient for any undertaking; to embolden, make confident. ~ OED

Here are a couple of questions to ask as we begin to discuss this issue:

1. How do we accommodate and respect the asynchronous development of gifted children?

Nadia Webb, a pediatric and adult neuropsychologist and co-author of Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnosis of Gifted Children and Adults, writes in “Tips for Parents: Surviving Your Gifted Teen” of one aspect of the uneven development that many gifted children and teens experience:

“Phenomenal intellects can coexist with mediocre executive functioning skills. Planning, judgment, self-monitoring, and organization are the last skills to mature developmentally. This is neurologically driven and appears to be true even in gifted kids. (In fact, there is some fMRI research suggesting that the area of the brain responsible for executive functioning may develop more slowly in the gifted.)”

2. How do we encourage and teach creativity thinking in a way the includes convergent thinking and organization skills?

Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman write in the much discussed Newsweek article “The Creativity Crisis” that inherent in creativity are convergent thinking and executive functioning skills:

“This is the ‘aha!’ moment of insight, often followed by a spark of pleasure as the brain recognizes the novelty of what it’s come up with.

“Now the brain must evaluate the idea it just generated. Is it worth pursuing? Creativity requires constant shifting, blender pulses of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, to combine new information with old and forgotten ideas. Highly creative people are very good at marshaling their brains into bilateral mode, and the more creative they are, the more they dual-activate.

“Is this learnable? Well, think of it like basketball. Being tall does help to be a pro basketball player, but the rest of us can still get quite good at the sport through practice. In the same way, there are certain innate features of the brain that make some people naturally prone to divergent thinking. But convergent thinking and focused attention are necessary, too, and those require different neural gifts. Crucially, rapidly shifting between these modes is a top-down function under your mental control. University of New Mexico neuroscientist Rex Jung has concluded that those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better. A lifetime of consistent habits gradually changes the neurological pattern.”

How do you help the young people in your homes and classrooms to take on and understand the challenges and responsibilities of their own intensities and creativity?

Please share your thoughts and ideas on this topic, especially ideas that have worked! Here are some more resources to bookmark and ponder:

Brains on Fire: The Multimodality of Gifted Thinkers, by Fernette and Brock Eide

Mastering Organization Skills, by Deborah S. Delisle (in Duke Gifted Letter)

Making a Difference: Motivating Gifted Students Who Are Not Achieving, by Del Siegle and D. Betsy McCoach

College Planning for Gifted Students, by Sandra Berger