Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion how many of you parents are also gifted?

I found my old IEPs last year and saw I had been tested 3 times with the WISC over a period of 10 years and the scores showed my numbers increasing each time. I know I must be at a minimum MG (which is where my last scores put me) considering what I accomplished despite the significant 4 years delay in language acquistion due to late diagnosis of my disability and the one writeup attached to one of the IEPs showed the person who administered my testing felt that my true potential and abilities were not reflected in the testing.

Neither of my parents are native English speakers and my mother did graduate work at a high level US university and became a computer programmer while my father holds two law degrees - one from a prominent law school and one from his native country so he practiced law in both countries. However he was definitely what they called a late bloomer. My mother from the start was 2 years younger than the rest of her classmates and still excelled academically (socially was a different story).

DH's parents were not tested but both had PhDs in hard sciences and although he was not tested, he had a sibling tested as HG+ at the least.

DS's WPPSI scores shocked us especially with ceiling the verbal section and placing him into a gifted environment where even though he is the youngest in his room, he is thriving has validated what his tester told us. DD is still young although her daycare teachers have pointed out how advanced her verbal skills and awareness of her world she is.

I'm not, but my husband and sister are. My husband's siblings are not gifted (I wouldn't even consider them bright), but many of their children are. Two of my sister's kids are gifted, and one is average to low average.

I would consider my sister to be gifted in mathematics only, while my husband seems to be gifted in all areas, his biggest strength is math though too. Our son's strength is also in mathematics.

The inconsistent pattern of heritability in our families is interesting to me. We are really in the beginning stages of understanding how genetics influence intelligence. I wonder how much more we will learn in next 50 years or so and how such knowledge will influence society and education.

I kind of feel like an idiot after reading all the posts lol. I'm not remotely close to being like everyone else but hey I would rather my kid be intelligent I guess lol. But it is very interesting to see how our kids seem to take after their parents!

I do not buy into the 'nurture' begins in the womb myth and believe it to be complete and utter poppycock.

My mother was born in a Japanese internment camp which which is about as far from a comfortable high SES home environment as it gets and still went on to be valedictorian at her high school and get an undergraduate degree (at the top of her class) in Mathematics in 1961. There are numerous stories of Concentration Camp survivors including those born into camps who went on to over achieve. Neither Japanese internment camps nor Nazi concentration camps were environments in which a fetus would have heard an abundance of nurturing sounds of that I am certain.

Interesting question. Nobody except DS has ever been tested, so all the following is based on observation. DH and I, yes. My brother also. My father yes (despite a *very* rough and nonacademic upbringing), my mother probably only above average. On my father's side, his brothers and sisters not (mostly below average) - but don't know enough about the grandparents (they were farmers). On my non-gifted mother's side, my uncle yes, likely my aunt, certainly my grandmother - one of the most brilliant people I've known. On Dh's side, father probably, mother definitely not (average), sister not sure (certainly above average, but also dyslexic).

Yes, there are many anecdotes of survival and overcoming great adversity. That said, the article linked did not refer to "comfortable high SES home environment" but rather to a research study of sound pattern recognition.

The concept of nurture as described in the article did not equate "nurture" with "nourishing" but rather with environment as distinct from genetic material (frequently called "nature versus nurture"). A consideration of "nurturing sounds" as positive, nourishing sounds is possibly a separate point unrelated to the study.

Anecdotes and research studies co-exist and may sometimes point in the same direction. Both can provide important insight.

I believe the influence of sounds in the womb relates to language acquisition, not to whether they are nurturing.
As far as actual nutrition during pregnancy is concerned, I read when I recently got seriously into this (again, don't make me cite sources, we're just having a conversation here, right?) that it is the quality of nutrition before, not during pregnancy that counts. Children born during famine do not show much impairment. Children born to mothers who have lived through famine but born after the fact show a lot.

My Dad...yes..(no test but HG engineer), My mom...probably not but probably above average. Older brother PG (saw his testing), me (not tested), younger brother PG (saw his testing), sister (not tested). I would guess both me and my sister are just garden variety gifted but my sister always played the role of the spacey/ditzy sister (although she really isn't). She also is the most socially savvy/gifted of all of us.

My two sons...one is PG or HG (I have two different scores) and one tests solidly gifted with very very low processing and ASD and I really think without his 2nd E he would be PG too.

My FIL is really smart but not tested. Talented artist too. MIL not sure. DH I would guess mild gifted. His sister has a PG son and another son who is probably gifted with social anxiety and late bloomer academically (coming into his own in high school). He is a very talented musician (as in music teachers are constantly saying he has outgrown them).

Ditto! I often say it's a good thing I've seen all the answers at this point, so I'll never be tested again.

I'm with you, I don't know how smart I ever was, but I'm definitely dumber now, after nearly a decade of lost sleep, split attention, and a focus on wiping butts and noses. Thank goodness both kids had early academic interests or else I'd never have a chance to learn something. I'm just coming out of the lingering intense babyhood season of life and it's surprising me how much it is affecting my sense of myself. (The joke now is that DS4 still wakes me up early in the night sometimes, and then quizzes me on math all day. Some kind of torture!)

Anyway, I'm one of those who realized how I line up with gifted checklists as I was reading to learn about my first child. I was a Regent's scholar here in California (as was DH), and I made a top group of 70 writers out of the whole state once as a teen, for a college summer program. AP, 4.0, all that. But I always just said I was a hard worker. Now I see my sensitivities as part of the deal, and finding friends in a new town, as an adult not in school, made me appreciate my nerdy, probably also gifted friends. I was never in the gifted program in elementary, because my parents thought "those kids were weird" and probably just couldn't handle driving me to a different school. Of course by mid high school I finally had a good group of friends, who had all been in the gifted classes together their whole schooling lives. Meanwhile I was hitting ceilings on big benchmark tests and reading assigned books in one day and having a hard time socializing. Ah well.

DH is probably smarter than me, although it's hard to tell as he's STEM and I'm humanities, in terms of strengths. His mom used to take workbooks to school because he already knew what they we're learning. He graduated suma cum laude, and is a very successful programmer.

But we both think DD is smarter than us. Maybe because she presents differently, so we are impressed, but she seems way beyond where we were as kids. And now DS is really starting up with math and science, too.

DH's dad is an accountant, and my mom is a childcare provider who won a scholarship to the UC system back in the day. She just dropped out because she got married and had a kid, and then wanted to do something where she could be at home with us. But she's pretty smart. DH and I are the big nerds of the family, though.