Intellectual giftedness

Mm-hmm.

Giftedness is not a prize.

In fact, if you have a highly gifted kid, I feel sorry.

I mean-

As part of our fifth English-speaking episode on giftedness in the workplace, I'm very pleased to welcome Mariët Hoeksma to the podcast today.

Mariette lives in Utrecht in the Netherlands together with her husband and three children aged eight, four, and two.

She is the founder of HB Bubbelbus, which is a Dutch name that could roughly be translated as Giftedness Chat Bus.

Through her company, Mariette provides advice and support to parents of highly to profoundly gifted children.

In IQ terms, this means children with an IQ of 145 or higher.

Ooh, I actually have two podcasts.

One on the topic.

For the Dutch listeners, Hoogbegaafd: De Gids, roughly translating as Giftedness: The Guide, from Kristel Van Ijk.

And so a universal screener involves giving everybody in a certain grade an assessment that allows us to see where your strengths are.

And it's even better If you give everybody in a certain grade that screener and not look at national norms, look at school-based norms, because what looking at school-based norms does is they identify who are your top performers in your school? Who are your top performers of children who come from the same environment, who are having the same life experiences, right? Because that's what giftedness should be looking for, looking at.

Giftedness is a phenomenon that exists in every population.

It exists in every background.

It exists in every socioeconomic status.

Yeah.

Well, it's interesting because we distinguish between giftedness and high achievement because a lot of times what we have done, particularly in adulthood, is we conflate high achievement with giftedness.

Giftedness, as I think about it, is the innate neurobiological predispositions.

combined with sort of the environmental pieces that create this unique lived experience or sort of this phenomenology of giftedness, of being sensitive, intense, perceptive, curious, you know, all these sorts of attributes we think about.

And high achievement may come from that.

We know from the data on that they're not actually synonymous with giftedness.

It may be more a broadly neurodivergent profile.

Giftedness is not just over excitabilities.