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More and more, in conversation with friends or parents, it seems that almost everyone has at home a gifted child, early or hyperactive. These terms are used everywhere, without really knowing their characteristics. In the program Sans rendez-vous , presented by Mélanie Gomez on Europe 1, Louis Vera, child psychiatrist at the Pitié-Salpêtrière in Paris, and author of the book Tous precoces, tout hyperactifs really? (Larousse), helps us to see more clearly.
The school cares more and more about students who have trouble concentrating. "I have been practicing with these children for about ten years and for four or five years I have been seeing a shift and more and more requests for consultation for problems of concentration. was addressed to me by professionals and now, it is more and more the teachers who address in consultation ", notes the child psychiatrist.
It tempers this lack of concentration that seems growing. "There is a generational phenomenon of lack of concentration, which also affects adults, it is too fast to stick a label of" precocious "when a kid is bullshit and" hyperactive "when he has trouble staying sit an hour on his chair, "notes Louis Vera, which recalls:" When you're six, stay an hour sitting on a wooden chair to scratch on a notebook, it's not easy. "
Child with "high potential"
What is an early child at the bottom? How to diagnose it? "On the Internet, there are six categories of precociousness: when I read this, I want to say 'let's stop the bullshit' because we are told that to be precocious is to have a disorder and besides, there is has six different variants of this disorder, "says the child psychiatrist.
He prefers to use the term "high potential" that early. Being a child "high potential" means that we understand faster, think faster, he summarizes. He adds: "It's the kid who will connect when we talk to him, understand, ask a lot of questions, take an interest in a lot of things, when he's at home, he'll want to love, to be nurtured intellectually, to do experiments. And he's going to be a little tiring because he's always asking questions about a lot of topics. "
For him, a child "high potential", is not inappropriate. "The vast majority of high potentials, those who do not hear their voice, they are well, they have good grades, they are not failing school Yes, they are sometimes bored in class", note-t -he.
IQ tests do not measure intelligence
The child psychiatrist also demystifies the cult of the IQ test. "The tests of IQ have an interest and they have been created for that: it is to distinguish between the child at risk of learning disorders such as dyslexia and the kid who is not at risk", he explains. "This has never been done to measure intelligence because an IQ test does not take into account all the parameters of intelligence."
To know if a child is gifted, nothing is easier. "We talk to them, we ask them questions and then we will see immediately that we have in front of us a kid who hits quickly, who asks questions and who knows how to adapt quickly", summarizes Louis Vera . "Finally, the high potential will be in the order of 2 to 3%, maybe 5% depending on the criteria we use."
The doctor believes that a distinction must be made between high potentials who have learning disabilities and those who do not. "According to the studies, between 3% and 30% of young people find it difficult to concentrate in the population, and if we take objective criteria, there are approximately 3% of young people who have a disorder. So, it's very important to distinguish between attention disorders and concentration problems, yes, there are more and more people who have trouble concentrating, adults or children. more and more dysfunctional attention disorders. "
The characteristics of a child with a dysfunctional attention disorder
Concerning the dysfunctional disorder of the attention (TDA), the child psychiatrist recalls the characteristics of this disorder. A child with ADD is a child "who has trouble concentrating, in and out of school". "If it's only at school, it's because he's getting bored, and besides that, he's having trouble getting organized."
Louis Vera considers that the diagnosis can be made from the end of CP. If, in general, he is asked after six months of difficulty to concentrate, he prefers to leave one or two years of difficulty of attention before making this diagnosis. "The job is to ask the child if he has problems to read, to write, problems of coordination ... We will look for learning disabilities because having a learning disability, it means have trouble concentrating, "he says.
He also points out that "children with attention disorders are children who can be tiring, but they do not have behavioral problems, they can be grafted on, but this is not a major feature of ADD."