No, your child does not necessarily have high intellectual potential (HPI). Since the success of the series of the same name on TF1 with Audrey Fleurot, more and more parents are consulting doctors thinking that their children are “HPI”. This acronym designates people with an IQ above 130, when the average population has an IQ around 100.
And this intelligence usually goes hand in hand with a great sensitivity and hyperactivity of the brain, Jeanne Siaud-Facchin, clinical psychologist and psychotherapist, explained a few months ago to the microphone of BFMTV.
Except that unusual behavior is not necessarily synonymous with HPI. “As soon as there’s something in the behavior, or out of classical child development, we have parents who come in thinking their child has high potential,” says Johanna Rozenblum, a clinical psychologist.
“To know if a child has high potential, you have to make a diagnosis. We do not self-diagnose HPI”, he recalls into the microphone of BFMTV.
Online tests, “it is absolutely useless”
But many parents decide to consult because they feel powerless and want to understand their children’s behavior. “He had a lot of hypersensitivity,” explains Bruce, the father of a little boy who was diagnosed with PIH.
“We felt like he was a kid who had a really hard time accepting his emotions.”
However, be careful: on the Internet, many online tests claim to calculate your IQ and detect HPI. “But it is absolutely useless to evaluate an intellectual profile”, remembers Jeanne Siaud-Facchin. “It’s like the tests in the magazines: it’s a game.”
Source: BFM TV
