Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Parents as Excellent Identifiers of Giftedness?

We went to a new parent meeting/mixer a few weeks ago at my daughter's new school (for the fall). It was really, really odd how many parents mentioned how "bright" their child was. It is a private school & I have been trying to sort out if the majority of these kids are g/t or what. What are the odds that all these kids are gifted? I guess kids at 1sd from average are plenty bright? Who knows....


I completely agree with this..

Any speculation about why this is true, if it is?

A teacher from one of the better public schools told me 40% of the kids are gifted. so it's very possible. I wonder if you can ask the percentages of different levels of gifted at a school.
We are in a gifted school, which requires 95% to be admitted and average IQ is 130.

I think that the statement is misleading and that you are being too hard on yourself. Most people that I've met, who have more than one child have at least one child who they have underestimated. This isn't to say that if you had Silverman's checklist in front of you that you wouldn't have checked off 'needs to have tags cut out of shirts' or whatever might be on the list. I think my interpretation of the data is that parents of gifted kids (who themselves are likely to be gifted) are good at filling out Silverman's checklist. No always so good at adding up the details and coming up with a judgement of 'gifted.'

To me, if you want to make the statement that parents are excellent at ID ing giftedness, you have to take away the checklist and just ask "Do you think little Jeanie is gifted?" Then get a yes or no, then test. Personally I think parents are good - 84%. Excellent would have to be over 95% but maybe I'm being perfectionistic.

Also - this study has nothing to do with LOG. It just says 'Is child above or below the 97% cut off?' Given that Silverman attracts families with PG kids, it's no shock to me that at least 95% percent of the kids are over 97% in at least one aspect, if you take into account the various miseries, etc.

If you took a random Educational Psychologist that isn't Nationally know for being a terrific advocate of gifted and highly gifted kids, and had them ask 'Is Jeanie Gifted?' I think that the numbers would be very different. I think that very few of the parents would admit to more than bright, and few would be gifted overall. It would take a long time to complete the study.

Now - if you leave the G word out and said, "Do you think Jeanie is in the top 3% of intelligence compared to other kids her age?" More might say yes.

The bottom line is that I accuse you of the greatness of followthrough, Cocopandan, and I'm so glad that you went for it and had DD tested. Good for you!

Love and more love,
Grinity

I often see child characteristics of obedience and eager to please given as reasons a child is gifted. Also those with good immitation ability (such as mimicking dance steps or making a silly face, imitating a voice or repeating big words) can seem to parents to be gifted.

Polly

I, too, see a lot of high achieving good students being considered gifted by both their schools and their parents and would be hesistant to agree that parents (or schools) are good, let alone excellent, at recognizing giftedness. I'm also not sure on some of the characteristics on the GDC checklist, honestly.

Yes, it is probably accurate to say that many, or even most, gifted kids are intense and sensitive, for instance. Does the reverse hold true? Are many, or most, intense or sensitive kids gifted? It's like a rectangle/square thing -- all squares are rectangles, but all rectangles aren't squares. I'm not comfortable with having parents fill out checklists stating that their kids are sensitive and using that to assume that the child is also gifted. I know plenty of highly sensitive children and children who meet other objective measures of personality who are not gifted.

I wonder if you are refering to younger kids/ toddlers? I'd considered DS to be non-highly-gifted precisely because he is obedient (to a certain degree), compliant (to a certain degree) and generally very good natured and not given to exerting his will unless he absolutely sees a necessity to. Compared to kids we were told by their parents to be HG+, he seemed mild and too even-tempered. This was when he was 6-7 yo (he is still very mild mannered at 8). So I told myself he couldn't be gifted. Just couldn't. Look at kid X and kid Y. Their moms told me they are HG+. They are SO strong willed and argumentative. How can my happy-go-lucky guy be highly gifted right? LOL.

I think it is because people tend to take themselves and their experiences as being the measure of normal. Add to that that people tend to marry and associate with others who are at their approximate intellectual level,and you have a situation where a solidly average parent will see a child who is 1 SD above the mean as truly exceptional, and an HG/PG parent will see a child 2 or 3 SD above the mean as fairly typical in development (well, right up until the child goes to school or is otherwise placed among truly typically developing age peers).

I like aculady's idea too: if the natural comparison class is highly talented, but the child is only average w.r.t. that class, then the parent might be more hesitant to accept the "gifted" label. Likewise, if the natural comparison class is closer to the mean, but the child clearly exceeds it, then the parent might be inclined to jump the gun. If "optimistic" and "pessimistic" are statistical labels then this explanation seems a good one.

But there's a more psychological interpretation of these terms that I thought was in play as well. I thought the idea was that, for example, the highly gifted parents are more likely to look for defeaters to the putative evidence under consideration. This is more like what people sometimes call "denial" around here. You see patterns of reasoning like, "I know the objective measures indicate a certain very high level, but is it really possible that the kid I know so well is like that?" Or "It's true that I've never actually met another kid as talented as this one, but I have read about them. And surely DS doesn't match up with those." I myself feel inclined to these kinds of rationalizations, and they seem distinct from the statistical pessimism that aculady's interpretation seems to explain. Do others see a pattern here as well?


What kinds of questions, Dottie?

To the parent of a profoundly gifted child, a moderately gifted child may not seem gifted and their parents may seem to be over optimistic about identifying them as such. But I wonder if that's a fair statement? It's one thing if a parent of a moderately gifted child is claiming that their child is profoundly gifted, but the term "gifted" currently refers to a dramatic range of abilities, doesn't it? What other word are these parents to use when their child learns and understands differently than bright, hard working children but is not profoundly gifted? I worry about the children who neither fit the stereotypes teachers/schools have about how gifted children learn and behave (stereotypes which more appropriately match bright, hard working, competitive or "pleasing" children); nor are at a high enough level of giftedness to be easily identified without those behaviors. Let's not assume bad or selfish intentions when parents try to figure out how typical or atypical their children are. In lieu of very expensive formal testing, it is often not clear at all, and I think many parents are sharing information about their children as a way of testing the waters and trying to figure that out.