Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Who Noticed First?

when she was an infant, I was surprised, even startled, when she said "bigger" words very clearly. I actually thought I was hallucinating since it never occured to me that an infant could repeat words the way she did, but I didn't think of it in terms of intelligence yet. At about 18 months, it was hard to ignore that she was making big leaps ahead of other kids (knowing letter sounds, complex shapes, one to one counting) and by 2.5 she was reading, began writing, drawing. It was starting to be clear that she was a bright child, but I think it was at 3 that I started to think she might be gifted. Even now, at 5 years 3 months, I go back and forth between denial and certainty. Even with testing clearly showing she is gifted, there are times I think that isn't accurate and that the test was a fluke.

A lot of people in this thread have indicated that it was normal within their families to be gifted. This goes against my limited understanding of genetics and intelligence, but it may make sense given that this forum acts as a selection bias.

In general, my understanding is that the offspring of people who are exceptional within their populations will regress toward the mean of their population norms. So, for instance, if a bunch of people with IQs 2+ standard deviations above their population average were to mate, on average their offspring wouldn't have IQs as high as their parents. But, some of the offspring would have IQs just as high or higher than their parents (due to variance) and those are the parents represented on this forum.

If this is correct, then I think it may have an important impact on what expectations these parents may have regarding their grand children.

If this is wrong, someone please tell me why.


Oh, and as for the main topic of this thread, I'm the one who first considered that my daughter may be exceptional. She hasn't been tested or anything, so we don't have absolute confirmation... but her daycare provider has spoken to us about our daughter being a "little adult" who speaks like children years older than she is. I'm also the only parent who seems to be terribly concerned about the special needs that may be associated with her intelligence. But that might be because I was cold-stored (opposite of hot-housing)by my parents and in school.

Always happy to poke a hole in a stereotype... I was the one who noticed, and I'd have to say the very first time I noticed she was different was in the delivery room. Every night before my DD6 was born I'd read aloud to her and my wife, and I'd always start it out by saying her name in the same tone, so she'd recognize me when she came out. Then came the moment where she was placed, swaddled and screaming, in my arms. I said her name in that same tone, she stopped crying immediately, and her eyes were perfectly focused on me and tracking my relative motion as I rocked her side to side. The books said she shouldn't be able to track moving objects for another few weeks, so that wasn't normal.

At two months old we couldn't get her to wear anything she hadn't picked out. We had to hold her up to the closet so she could rifle through and make a selection. That wasn't normal.

At six months old we figured we'd come up with some baby signs to make things easier, but by the time she got there she already had words for everything she needed, and more besides. Her first intelligible word was "Doodlebop." That wasn't normal.

Later on, my wife started teaching her first colors, then shapes, then letters and numbers, so she'd be ready for school when the time came. When DD was 3 and already beyond all that and working on letter sounds and writing, I kept asking my wife, "What are we going to do with her when she gets to kindergarten?" She just shrugged her shoulders and wondered why I thought there was anything unusual going on.

DW vehemently avoided the "gifted" label even when DD was being screened for it in kindergarten, but now that we've been dealing with the school system for over a year now and she's taken some time to do some reading on the topic, she's a lot more comfortable with it... especially since it explains issues we've had with emotional intensity and perfectionism.

It's wrong, or at least, it's misleading because it has hidden assumptions that are incorrect. No time right now to write a long post, and writing a short one may be even harder, but let me try...

I think the easiest way to see that there must be something wrong with the general argument In general, my understanding is that the offspring of people who are exceptional within their populations will regress toward the mean of their population norms. is to ask yourself "which population?". Suppose you took a two humans who, considered as humans, were perfectly average - let's take in height, since we're dealing with a general argument not something specific to giftedness. If you consider them as members of the population of humans, you expect their children to be, on average, the same height as them, since they're already at the population mean. However, you can just as easily consider them as members of the population of primates, or mammals, or if they happen to be Danes (so they're below the mean height for that population!) as Danes. Depending on which population you consider, the "population mean" to which you expect their children's height to regress can be quite different. However, the children are the same people with the same inheritance, so this is obviously nonsense. Hence we should be suspicious about the original general statement.

What is true is that if you:
- took a random sample of adult humans
- measure their IQs
- caused them to mate :-)
- measured the IQs of the offspring
- then looked at the adults who'd scored very highly, and checked the IQs of their offspring;
Then you'd undoubtedly find that the offspring of highscoring parents tended to have lower IQs than their parents. A major cause of this (note hedging wording :-) is measurement uncertainty and error: since the highscoring parents were, prior to scoring highly, expected to be average, our Bayesian expectation of their "true" IQ, or if you like what we'd expect them to score if we tested them again, should not be the same as the previous measurement but somewhere in between that and the mean. Therefore it shouldn't be surprising to find their children in that range - even if IQ were 100% heritable with 100% certainty, e.g. a child's IQ was always identical with its mother's, we'd expect that.

However, the situation is not very relevant to what we see here. Most obviously, parents who self-report as gifted here do so on the basis of lifelong experience of being them, not on the basis of a single IQ test. Measurement uncertainty is therefore not very relevant. It's possible that they have a non-standard definition of gifted in mind, but then, they're likely to apply the same non-standard definition to their children, so this hardly matters.

We *also* have a great deal of selection bias, as you say. Moreover, presence here suggests an unusual degree of interest in optimising the environmental factors affecting children's intellectual development, whatever they are, which might also be expected to play a role in tending to cause children of parents here to have higher IQs than children of parents who were similar except that they were not here.

There may, of course, be genuinely interesting genetic things going on - IQ, in as far as it is genetic at all, is clearly influenced by many many genes, and what you expect of children of people with a given IQ will depend on just which relevant gene variants their parents had, and then what really happens in a population will depend on the extent to which people who actually produce offspring tend to have the same gene variants as one another... no doubt it gets very complicated, and we aren't close (and probably never will be) to really understanding the genetics of intelligence.

Here is a post I wrote about similar issues a few months back.

I very proudly used to point out to DH that he was ahead of all the baby milestones in the books - but I was just more relieved that he was okay and not going to struggle. When I saw him at 10 months crawling to a pile of baby board books and paging through them one after the next (as soon as he could crawl) I knew that no other babies that age that we knew were anywhere near to doing that (or even wanting to do it). I still didn't actually connect it with anything in my mind though.

My MOM pointed it out to me after baby and I went away with her for a week - he was 19 months old. The sheer volume of stuff I took with for him to do was the first sign she needed apparently. The amount of energy I needed to deal with him was another she said. And the verbal development, the fine motor skills, the insatiable questions and the way he just learnt everything so fast were apparently all "not normal". When we got home she gently suggested that I "look into" gifted development of children. Took me 2 weeks to process what she said. Took me another year or so (and 2 VERY awesome in-the-computer friends) to help me accept and deal with it.

Made the second and third babies easier as then I knew what to expect.

BTW - I am also the one that reads and stuff and DH listens as I blather on about it. He has learnt by osmosis I think cause he really does get it

I noticed first, as 'at-home mom'! I had my educated suspicions anyway that they probably would be gifted, given my husband's brain and the history of both of our families - but then from very early, there were the obvious signs. My husband was less attuned, being one of those fortunate 'successful gifted' students within his normal school framework. To be honest, my suspicions were first confirmed by absolute strangers - while I would be pushing both of my tiny children along in a shopping cart at any given store, for example. People would stop and comment on how alert they both were at such young ages. I remember one man asking, "Are they gifted?" And I just replied, "Probably"...! And our Dr. told me up front that my first-born was going to be 'very smart'.

All four of mine are labeled "gifted", as have been dh, former dh, and I. It never occurred to me that my kids wouldn't be-- which I guess disappointed the kindergarten teachers the first time around, because they came to me with this idea that my kids were gifted like it was some kind of a present they were handing me, and I was pretty much "well, yeah, no kidding".
Don't know what that does to the statistical discussion. I will also add that the first three all have had extremely similar scores, even despite being tested at different times, by different people. For whatever that's worth...

Thanks for your concern ColinsMum, but as I indicated, my knowledge is limited in respect to the genetic impact on intelligence, which was not the focus of your post.

We have numerous people in this thread proclaiming that very high intelligence is normal for their families, and even that they expected their children would probably be gifted before their children even displayed any gifted traits. Of this group of parents with high expectations for their children, we mostly have posters from the group that turned out to be right, because of the nature of this forum. The ones who turned out to be wrong aren't posting here, but we should at least acknowledge that they might exist, and accept that these high expectations may be unreasonable.

All measurement error aside, it seems to me that a family of Danes who have been exceptionally tall by Danish standards for a couple generations shouldn't hang their hopes on having a child that is equally exceptional in height. I believe it is still more likely that the child ends up with a gene combination resulting in less exceptional height than his/her parents and grandparents, because the particular gene combinations that made the parents and grandparents so tall are unlikely to be repeated in the subsequent generation.

DAD22, perhaps it's because I posted in haste, but you've missed my point entirely.

What would you say to a Danish couple who are short for Danes, but tall for humans? According to your theory, should they expect their children to be taller than them (because they regress to the mean for Danes) or shorter than them (because they regress to the mean for humans)?

Undoubtedly some exist, and I accept (and already accepted) your point about the selection bias that reading only things written by members of this forum imposes. These high expectations may be unreasonable, but actually I don't see any reason to think so.

I've already explained why I'm not convinced by your theoretical argument. Here's some anecdata to explain why my intuition is that the expectations you're questioning may in fact be quite reasonable. When I think about couples I know who both work in fields where high intelligence is the norm (and as it happens, I can think of many such couples) I can easily think of many who have children who are obviously highly intelligent; I can't right now think of any where the children appear to be less intelligent than their parents [ETA: on further reflection I can think of one case]. Personally I'm more inclined to attribute the effect to environment than to genes, but whatever the balance there, my experience - as observer, not only as family member - supports the kind of expectation you're questioning. If you have evidence or a sound theoretical argument that the expectation is unreasonable, I'd be quite interested in that, since I know my anecdotes are not data.

ColinsMum, I fully expect Danish parents to have children that regress toward Danish means, not human means, not primate means, nor mammalian means. This effect was observed and quantified in the 19th century.

From Wiki:
"Galton coined the term regression to describe an observable fact in the inheritance of multi-factorial quantitative genetic traits: namely that the offspring of parents who lie at the tails of the distribution will tend to lie closer to the centre, the mean, of the distribution."

What I don't know is how knowledge of the grandparents or even great grandparents would affect the expected outcome. It seems to me that if we know the parents and grandparents were all tall, then the regression effect would be reduced (compared to cases in which we know nothing about the grandparents), but I don't think it would go away.