Many years ago, I attended one conference in the gifted world. One of the presenters told a story about a young girl who was simultaneously being denied gifted education appropriate to her needs and allowed to pursue some kind of sport in which she was talented.
They were telling her it would be harmful to her in some way to adequately feed her mind. She made some kind of cutting remark along the lines of "Well, then, why is it okay to harm me so your sports team does better in competition?"
IQ is a measure of intelligence relative to age. Children with a high IQ are viewed as being the mental age of someone older than they are.
This comes with inherent social, emotional and other developmental changes. They aren't necessarily more emotionally mature than children their age and even if they are, their emotional maturity may fall somewhere between physical age and mental age.
Small children with a high IQ may have a keen interest in science, but be as clumsy as your typical child that age. I've heard anecdotes on gifted lists from people allowed to handle dangerous chemicals for science projects and spilling them because they were too young to do that safely.
I always worked hard to adequately feed the minds of my children knowing that in some sense that would cause their social challenges to grow. I know from firsthand experience that knowing a lot more than normal for your age actively creates social challenges, which is why I developed a Dripping Sarcasm Voice in my teens.
I was trying to signal "This is a JOKE." without implying my classmates were stupid. And I did that in part because I was somewhat concerned that instead of looking up the chemistry or whatever, they would take my smart alek remarks seriously and possibly get hurt or something.
I was molested as a child and I've read a lot of stuff pertinent to that problem space to sort my baggage. And I believe a challenge of gifted youth that is inadequately addressed is that trying to get their needs met for adequately feeding a mind with a "mental age" substantially higher than their physical age can place them in social settings which may get them sexually assaulted under circumstances where they may not even characterize it as assault.
They may like the person and that person may be extremely "nice" to them, at least superficially. And they probably haven't previously read up on laws regarding age of consent or similar.
Most awful people are superficially charming. It helps them get next to people and set them up for being victimized.
The 1997 animated movie Hercules redid the entire movie because the voice actor for Hades played him like a used-car salesman schmoozer and they redrew the character to fit with that and it's a vastly better film because of it. The original drawings were very blatantly "He's a bad guy. He's basically Satan. Why would ANYONE trust him for five seconds???"
The summer I turned fourteen, I had a brief relationship with a 21 year old college student. I don't regret it and I don't have any desire to drag him or vilify him, though I suspect I was set up by someone else and it ended dramatically with my family threatening to arrest him if he ever contacted me again.
My primary takeaway from the relationship I had at age fourteen is that gifted youth need vastly better resources. He was the only male college student I really got to know socially and that was the primary appeal: That unlike my public school classmates, he could really engage me in meaty discussion.Had I entered college at fifteen or started part-time college at fourteen like I wanted, I might have soon learned there was nothing actually special about him or us.
I got married at nineteen to another nineteen year old. I knew lots of people my age as a teenager, so I knew my husband being similarly smart to me was uncommon and most guys capable of having a meaty conversation with me were older than me.
And I married him in part because I had BAGGAGE about age differences in relationships, but also because I wanted to be on some kind of equal social footing with my husband and not at some huge power disadvantage because he's older, he's more experienced, he's the one making the money and having married him, I'm essentially his property.
I'm also keenly aware that I get to remember this man fondly in part because other people played the bad guy role and ended the relationship and there was no break-up and I didn't know him all that long. It's a little bit like unrequited love where you imagine they are wonderful because you don't really know them well.
So I honestly don't regret getting involved with him, but I mostly didn't write about the relationship for a long time because I didn't want that to be misconstrued or used to help predators take advantage of minors and point to my writing and say "SHE says it's FINE."
No, how I personally feel about my personal choices in my private life should be food for thought for people wanting to sort their private feelings or whatever. It should not be used to say "Minors are not harmed by older people deciding to chase them and no one should object to that!" or similar nonsense.
I have tried at times to talk about how we could try harder as a society to figure out what really matters in a relationship with a big age difference and it's a super challenging thing to try to write about. It gets more challenging when talking about one of those people being a minor and the other an adult when the relationship began.
I've never really been comfortable with the fact that Celine Dion married her agent. She was just twelve when they met and he was an adult and they made vague, polite noises about "Well, yes, but she's not a child anymore."
Let's start here: Before you get into the issue of the age difference, if it weren't the entertainment industry where costars marry and producers hire their wives and similar, in most businesses, this would be viewed as a conflict of interest on the face of it. He was the equivalent of her boss.
Most corporations have rules forbidding relationships between an employee and any of their underlings. There is an assumption that it's essentially statutory rape where the underling is in no position to meaningfully consent because of they say no, they may be out of a job.
So if you need your job, most people won't say no. A sane corporation therefore makes it policy that the boss simply can't ask and that's done to protect the company.
I wrote a piece linked above -- and here it is again -- saying roughly I spent forty-six years blaming my brother for the debacle that happened the summer I was fourteen before going "Wait a minute..." and concluding it's probably more logical to blame my sister.
I had compelling reason to blame my brother. He had a track record of seriously hurting me in a way that made it reasonable to assume that.
And I was excluded from the family meeting where the decision was made to inform me I couldn't see Alex again and they advised me they would call the police if he contacted me. This was not conducive to me asking any questions about who said what at that meeting.
So even if I hadn't been a child, I would have had challenges figuring out what likely really happened. But people tend to draw a conclusion about the events of their life and then stick to that.
I did that and stuck to my conclusion for decades while doing a ton of therapy and reading everything I could get my hands on to sort my baggage, which is not typical behavior. Most people don't exam their lives that thoroughly nor make a point of becoming informed about how predators operate, etc.
So the way to bet is most people will be worse than me about "My mind is made up! LA LA LA NOT listening and don't confuse me with the facts!"
Which means whatever really happened in Celine Dion's relationship, the relationship was almost certainly perpetually shaped by the fact that she was just twelve when they met. And patterns of interaction that began because she was a child were almost certainly never updated.
So I'm inclined to think that's a skeevy relationship regardless of when it became a "romantic" thing. And I have very ugly opinions about what I think likely happened.
If you are a parent or you work in gifted education programs or otherwise have responsibility for young people who are for some reason being inserted into social settings with adults, please be cynical and err on the side of assuming the worst about people.
Pretend you are a corporation and create policies that just don't allow them to go there. No, you don't want to hear "But she's SPECIAL and my One TRUE LOVE!" Or whatever.
You don't want to have that discussion at all. It's strictly verboten. Full stop.