A gifted child who drifts in school unrecognized will work chronically below her capacity and receive daily practice in habits of idleness and daydreaming. Some of them are lost to usefulness through spreading their available time and energy over such a wide array of projects that nothing can be finished or done well. Failure to learn how to tolerate in a reasonable fashion the foolishness of others leads to bitterness, disillusionment and misanthropy. Gifted children strive to play with other children but their efforts are defeated by the fact that other children do not share their interests, their vocabulary or their desire to organize activities. As a result, forms of solitary play develop, and these may explain the fact that many highly intelligent adults are shy, ungregarious and even misanthropic and uncomfortable in ordinary social interaction.
Negative individuals abound in every high IQ society.
There was no difference in the mean IQ for boys and girls. The mean age at which the children could sight read was before age 4. The child who tests above 130 IQ is typically large and strong for his or her age, healthier than average and contributes far less than his quota to juvenile misbehavior. Perhaps the stereotype about gifted children being smaller than their peers came from the fact that they tend to skip grades. By middle childhood, from 7-12 years of age, gifted children tended to be 2.5 centimeters taller than their peers, on average.