Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion When did you know?

Hi, I am new, with a DD toddler who will be 2 in mid august. I am new to this "gifted" thing. I started to suspect that something was up when my DD 2-4 months of age, but have only recently come to the conclusion that she will need to be tested eventually (just knowing "how" to read, knowing circle s, sphere, square vs. cube, linguistic skills and 99% of milestones on par with a 3-5 year old, etc).
Just trying to get an idea of what parents and resources are out there and all of that.

My questions are these:
1) when did you start to see that your kid was different?
2) In hindsight were there things that were "normal" for you, your SO, or your families, but in reality were indications of giftedness that you merely accepted as routine?
3) when did you for sure conclude/accept that your child was gifted?

1. From birth pretty much.
2. Probably, but I have no idea what normal looks like, DS is an only.
3. Still working on that one, but testing helped a lot.

Just have fun with your DD and enjoy the toddler/preschool years. If I could I would go back and give myself that very advice. 18mo-2yrs was my favorite time with DS and I wish I had known to appreciate it more. And take lots of pictures, she's likely cuter right now than she will ever be again in her life :p

I have two kids, twins now 17yo. They just finished their junior year in high school, and actually perform similarly (high) in terms of grades and test scores. But they are and always have been quite different, and it was one of them that drove me to the internet for information.

1. from babyhood, for sure, but I wouldn't say birth
2. With twins we had the control experiment. DH and I worried we were neglecting DT2 while feeding DT1's voracious appetite for language learning before age 2. So we made a conscious effort to help him learn too and he made it abundantly clear he had no interest, which is presumably closer to the norm. DT1 was reading by age 2 yo and reading fluently by age 2.5, and is still a standout in high school classes related to language.
3. For us, the harder question was "what do our kids need academically to thrive?" We made a conscious choice to keep our kids in the neighborhood public schools with only subject acceleration (as available) and to augment where needed. There were some rough spots and hard choices along the way, but we have no regrets. They'll be applying (mostly out of state) to college in the fall, and they are very well-prepared and super-excited about their futures.

One of my two children....

1. From the Time he started talking, he just cracked me up...all.the.time. I knew he was different but I didn't know he was gifted.

2. I thought he was typically developing because his older brother was delayed. So I didn't realize he was exceeding the typical pattern of developing until later.

3. After a lot of denying....By the end of K I finally admitted it. It took the school a bit longer-- except a few of his teachers knew and tried to tell me at age 4 and again at 5.

My other son the path was different because of the delays but I knew all along that the delays and 2nd exceptionality weren't the whole story. So late elementary he was tested and confirmed. And nothing about his journey through childhood was normal. But he has a pretty normal life now at 17 (if a bit quirky).

I still don't know because DD4 hasn't been tested. But she hit all her milestones pretty early up until about 3 years old, e.g. pulled herself up to standing at 3 months, first word at 4 months, walking by 9 months, great over arm throw by 18 months plus alphabet, counting, shapes, etc., all learned from watching youtube videos on the ipad - which she figured out how to work, and so on, maths at 2, reading at 3. So she was definitely different when she was young.

At 3 everything slowed down a bit when she started daycare and then school last September. Her maths and reading went backwards too. I guess she's busy learning social skills. That, and we moved to a foreign country, so she's probably been busy absorbing her second language. Or else maybe she just had a fast start and now she's slowing down. Or maybe because I don't speak the language well, it's harder for me to compare her to other kids her age - because I don't know what they're saying most of the time.

Sorry, I'm rambling a bit now. But anyway, I won't be concluding that she's gifted until she gets tested, which isn't on the cards for now.

Ds10. When the test results came. Ds8 when ds10 was tested.

They are normal for my family and a lot of the non-family kids we know and knew then also turned out to be gifted so my perspective was kind of skewed. I knew he was bright but I was thinking 80 to 95th percentile not well above 99th.

Some days I am still unsure.

In retrospect, I should have known sooner.

1. At birth he was extremely alert. He was looking us in the eyes at the hospital. Nearly everyone commented on this, but we didn't think much of it at the time.
2. As a baby he slept very little, and was impossible to put down. He always seemed restless, but rarely sleepy.
3. I'd say when he was 2 we were pretty sure, because he had memorized every car make/model in parking lots as we went through and could "read" logos, like Target, Babies R Us and Pizza Hut. He also knew many types of dinosaurs by name and could classify them by herbivore/carnivore/omnivore, and also by Jurassic, Triassic or Cretaceous. By the time he was 4 we had preschool teachers confirming our suspicions. His preK 4 teacher and I were both in tears and hugging at our conference.

I think one reason we didn't catch on right away was that he didn't talk until he was 20 months, but he had a different sound for different objects, buzzing, whooshing and brumm brumm-type noises that we eventually realized formed patterns. He was also colicky and that threw us off a bit.

Our 2nd child was different, but also unique from other children we came across. He was very calm even though he also refused to nap. He liked to watch other kids.

By the time he was 3 he was solving multi-step math problems in his head and understood the concept of percentages. He was always easier to manage in play groups as he's a little more naturally social than his brother. The only way it's really obvious he's different from most kids is if you start talking math or science.

Have fun with your DD. I can't say that I enjoyed the toddler years, because they were so much work and as a SAHM I often felt isolated, but now that my kiddos are older I really miss those days.

DS- we only started to suspect at 3.25 years but more along the lines of "very bright". He would have random "flashes" that would catch people by surprised with the complexity of his thought but he was very adapt at blending in. He also had some delays with speaking (just barely making the minimum 10 words at 18 months) and he was by nature cautious with motor skills (he did not try to walk until 13 months, and he was confident he would not fall). We had him tested at 3.5 to rule it out, and his results stunned us at that age. At that same time, he was starting to tell us directly how he hated his daycare so we had to change tracks fast and put him into a GT school that started at 4 years old, where he just bloomed. So far, at 6 years, we are now wondering if his test results may have understated some of his capacity because he seemed to really have taken off in his GT school beyond what we expected - and loving every minute of it.

DD was more obvious and her 2/3 year old teacher noticed her right off the bat - told us up front that DD will need to be in a GT program. The teacher had made efforts to keep her mentally occupied even at 2-3 years old and would leave me notes of some of the hilarious quips she would say. She is now in same school as her older brother and doing well, but it is clear too that her interests and way of processing information is quite different from her brother. We have not had her tested other than an informal screening by the admissions department at the GT school.

3) I just found out DS6 is considered gifted.

1) I knew he was bright for sure since he was about a year old, but nothing screamed "this kid is gifted". He didn't do anything extraordinary as a baby, aside from turn the pages of books by 8-10 weeks, if I remember correctly (I think it was before I returned to work). He on the tail end of normal as far as verbal milestones, he's never been very articulate, he's not a font of knowledge, he has an immature sense of humor and a bunch of other things that made me think he was probably bright, but not gifted. He did do puzzles early, he learned his alphabet earlier than most kids and he has always liked numbers and counting. The ladies that ran his preschool would have college students in to help at times and often told us how they didn't tell the students that he was rather bright. The students would always come back to the teachers in disbelief after working one-on-one with him.

2)For me, probably only his ease in learning. He picks things up quickly compared to many other kids. On either side of our family (our first cousin's kids) there are at least 3, maybe 4 kids that I'd bet are gifted. One has been talking since 6 months, with full, clear sentences by 12 months. One could identify the make and model of almost any car at 3. He didn't even need to see the whole car, just part of it. My son didn't do any of that.

Thank you for all of these responses. makes me feel so much less alone. That's been my biggest issue, as a SAHM. None of the other SAHM's I know have kids that act like mine.
my own answers to my own questions:

1) about 2 weeks in. She was far too alert, looked for noises, looked for her dads voice, insisted on being propped up to see the room and turn her own head to look around.

2) a bit, as she got older. I thought that the earlier events were flukes, just really advanced pattern recognition (not realizing that that in itself was odd). My own brother was alert, and as he got older he picked up bigger words like a sponge, my sister was walking talking, running, smiling, etc all weeks and months ahead of time.

3) recently. Shes too young to be tested, but if this pattern continues then, I will. Even if she slows down she will still be on par with my family, which I learned, through all of this that my own parents are gifted, both in the 140's. I never knew.
I am thinking of having myself tested eventually, just for curiosities sake. I was homeschooled, but kept strictly in my grade, but thought that it was normal to test 6 grade levels ahead of my age group, to easily see patterns. I wished to blend in anyways.
It's odd, isn't it, how we research our children's oddities and find that we, ourselves, are also odd, or at least more odd than we had assumed.

When my firstborn was young I watched him carefully for signs of giftedness. I had some issues growing up as a gifted child, and frankly I was hoping that he'd end up "merely" bright -- but failing that, I wanted to be prepared to support him in any way he needed. So I was relieved when he showed no signs of early verbal ability or other language-related precocity, in fact he had some language delays.

But as he headed into kindergarten his interest in numbers was obvious, so on a whim I got him some Life of Fred books to read together. (I still remember joking about "putting underpants on your head before putting socks on your shoes is not commutative!") He absorbed the concepts quickly and easily and shocked me by the things he could do in the abstract (multidigit subtraction with composition and decomposition, or feeling his way through an understanding of negatives and infinities.) Around the same time, I started reading The Hobbit aloud to him and he not only showed engaged listening, but each day we picked the book up again he could clearly and concisely summarize the previous day's passage. Finally, that was also about the time that his baby sister (age 4) revealed that she could not only read, but fluently enough to read aloud multi-syllable words with lovely inflection. O_O So...I guess I knew when my first was about 6 and my second was about 4.

In hindsight there might have been signs for both of them earlier. I don't think it really matters though. I would hope it wouldn't have changed how I raised them. I still believe that early identification can have a detrimental effect if it causes parents to focus too much on academic acceleration and not enough on just exploring the world and using the senses and finding their place in society.

NB, my kids aren't tested and I have no way of knowing if they're DYS level or just MG or somewhere in between.

DD is 3Y9M old. When she started speaking all the alphabets in sequence and 1-20 numbers in sequence by 17 months, or when she started speaking in compound sentences and started correcting our pronunciation or verbal grammatical mistakes by 21 months, or when we observed she could permanently register in memory pretty much anything from months ago, or even when we first started noticing what seemed like a strange sense of perfectionism and intense emotions – we didn’t really think much about anything.

Until a few months ago, when I just happened to read, rather accidentally, that there was a concept in this world called “Giftedness”. When I first read about it, a chill ran down my spine. Many of what I was reading suddenly seemed like describing DD. The speaking, the memory, the perfectionism, the emotional intensities, the Overexcitabilities, the intense curiosity that makes her ask "Why" "What if" "What happens if" questions all day along – all of it seemed to just fall in place. It seemed suddenly that we found the jigsaw where all the pieces just seemed to fit in place. Sometime ago, when I asked “What happened, how did you fall down?” just after she fell playing in the playground, she replied “Because I lost my Centre of Gravity. My tarsal hurts.”. And yesterday she got terribly upset when I mistakenly referred to Titanoboa as a dinosaur, "It's a snake. A biiig snake. It smells by licking. It has no venom. It's not a dinosaur."

Understanding DD has been a challenge for me and DW. She cannot sit still – she needs constant persistent movement and gets overstimulated by things which seemed to interest her. If not for the few hundreds of articles I’ve read, I’d probably be thinking ADHD by now. She revels in patterns – she makes patterns out of everything. Even as a 21 month old, during a Play & Music class we took her to – while all the kids were taking Maracas and shaking and throwing, she took the Maracas and started arranging them forming a semi-circle pattern. This pattern-seeking even extends to certain types of repetitive behavior – where, given a standard scenario at home or outside, she would repeat the same words or actions and expect us to follow suit and gets terribly upset if I turn on the lights – while it’s an activity within her daily pattern. Again, if not for all the articles this would’ve put up a red flag for ASD.

But thankfully, I understand her better than I would have done if I had never read that accidental article. But she continues to be a new project for us every single day. In a dire need of constant stimulation, intense physical activities to take the edge off, newer challenges, something to constantly keep her thinking – we continue trying several things soaking in every bit of resource we could find on the internet.

At her age, she is too little to even consider testing. We would probably consider testing when she’s around 6+ years, but not to get an IQ#, but more for us to understand her better, to ensure we know what may work best for her academically and at home, to understand how to help her leverage her strengths to keep her appropriately stimulated and to help us to help her manage her intensities and Overexcitabilities as she grows up.

This thread from about 8 years ago, on a similar topic, may be of interest: First signs of giftedness.

We expected it from birth since DS comes from a family with many talented people. One grandfather has a math formula named for him and both parents are smart.
1. It stood out around 6-9 months (don't remember exactly but it was before he started walking at 9.75 months) when he made us spend 30 minutes repeating the specific pronunciation of animals in a book. He was sitting on his mom's lap and moved her finger from picture to picture and then looking at us for the word. We thought it was random until he started going back to pictures we'd already done and trying to repeat the sounds. Then after 10 minutes on one page, he turned the page and started again. Then he went back and forth between these pages working on getting the sounds right. It was so focused and for so long it caught us off guard.

2. We treated everything as normal. Ds has older gifted cousins and we have a skewed sense of normal.

3. We don't know for sure but we're pretty confident he is.

For my son, he was always ahead in developmental milestones by months during infancy, then during toddlerhood was significantly farther ahead in numbers and letters than same age peers. He was also very creative and could problem solve, at times better than us (at the age of 4, he broke the wing on his plastic dragon which we could not fix, so he traced it on a piece of cardboard and matching paper, cut it out, glued it together, and somehow used a mangled paperclip to connect it, it truly looked fixed!). He was identified as gifted by the school in first grade. My daughter, who is most like brighter than he is, I never thought would be above average during her toddler/preschool years. She was not creative, did not appear to be ahead of the curve, etc. But once she started school, she thrived and is further ahead of where my son was at her age. I have never had their IQ's tested, (pertaining to question #3), so I am only going off of what their school has said. However I would feel more confident if I had actual IQ scores.

My DD18 is an only, but here are my answers--


1. She was 'different' by the time she was 2 or 3, from our perspective-- she was more rational and thoughtful than any other children her age, and moreso by far than a good many 3-5y older than herself. She had these social reasoning/understanding skills that literally wowed when she explained herself (which wasn't that often). She outstripped adults in terms of her emotional regulation. At three. She was just, so... so... self-assured/self-possessed. Perfectly autonomous, but in a quiet, non-confrontational way. VERY determined, resourceful and purposeful, though, when she was motivated. What motivated her was unusual, too. She was actively concerned for the welfare of other people around her at 1-3yo. I didn't really appreciate that she was HG+ at that point, though, since she wasn't doing anything that seemed all that advanced... then she learned to read. Well, we taught her decoding skills just before she turned 5, I mean. She already knew phonemes, etc. from about a year old. Once she realized that decoding was a thing that worked for any text, though-- she took OFF. It was surreal. She went from BOB books to Harry Potter (and beyond, I suppose) in less than five months.

2. Absolutely. MG+ is the norm in both families. Both parents, and more than 50% of extended family are HG+. Looking back, from birth she was different. It was most striking in childcare settings, and carers (and medical staffers) noted it even in infancy. She just quietly and unobtrusively did things that were developmentally impossible, no muss, no fuss-- she was just doing her, if you see what I mean. She's NEVER done anything for "show" at all. Ever.


3. Within a year of learning to read, her comprehension and decoding skills were basically adult-- and she read faster than most adults by the time she was six. That's when I knew. When my 6yo wanted to talk about the problematic characters of Iago in Othello, or Jim in Huck Finn, there wasn't much of a way to deny it. Looking back, though, she was alert and following along in lab meetings when she was 6 and 7, too-- asked about a figure legend on a doctoral student's slide once, as I recall. I shushed her-- but the student thanked her for noticing that the units were inconsistent.

People always commented that my daughter seemed more "alert" than other babies, but I thought that was silly. She seemed like a usual baby to me. She talked on time, walked a bit late, her motor skills were slow. We had no real "clues" until she started reading. That started as soon as she could talk. First it was logos and urls she would see on TV or on the backs of books. Then my mother and sister swore she read a chiropractor's sign while they were driving in the car with her. She could read the digital guide on the TV and small books. It was something my husband could do as a baby and I honestly thought his family was exaggerating. It scared me, so we really just blew it off until right before preschool. She was three and a half and could read handwritten notes and cursive and just "knew" how to add and subtract in a first grade workbook a grandparent gave her.

On the other hand, she couldn't ride a bike until she was 8 and, until she learned cursive, her handwriting bordered on dysgraphia. It was the disparate development that was our first clue that she may be truly gifted.

My questions are these:

1) when did you start to see that your kid was different?

Well before 1 year. High levels of attention from birth, extreme interest in books and new environments, and very early speech were the first clues. The pediatrician commenting superlatively on some behaviour at every well-child visit also fed that view.

2) In hindsight were there things that were "normal" for you, your SO, or your families, but in reality were indications of giftedness that you merely accepted as routine?

Yes. Precocious speech, early literacy, and innate ease with numbers were run of the mill.

3) when did you for sure conclude/accept that your child was gifted?

Haven't done testing officially, so it's not a foregone conclusion. Based on behaviours, though, I suspected I was dealing with a different flavour of child well before 1. When you look through standard baby books and the only milestones that fit are toileting, you grow suspicious.

1) I suppose I really had an inkling the first time around 15 months, when my then-H and I, to kill time at a restaurant while waiting for food, tried to count up how many words DD could speak or sign. We gave up at about 300.


2) From about ages 1.5 to 2.5, DD really looooved the moon, the stars, etcetc. I remember picking up a couple books I thought she'd like and my mother, a 2nd grade teacher, was like, "Oh, she won't possibly understand that." And I was like, "What? Of course she will." When DD was around 2-2.5 we played a spelling game in the car called "What Letter Do You Take Away?" based on the fact that our fridge alphabet set had only 1 of each letter, so you had to take away a letter from one word to make a different one. Honestly I had no idea at the time that this was a weird car game for a 2-year-old. (If only I had thought to teach her that letters have SOUNDS, instead of just teaching her their NAMES, she probably would've been reading by then.)

3) Hahaha. The ol' "Is my child really gifted, or am I fooling myself?" mind game!! For a long time I assumed DD was gifted, but moderately gifted even though, realistically, there were tons of signs that she was more than MG. Like I can go back and look at her Early Intervention evaluation at 19 months and it's clear in higdsight that she was HG/PG. But a million years later when she was 7, I shelled out hundreds of dollars to have formal IQ testing done and FREAKED THE F* OUT when I got the report.


I mean, for a totally different case, we could talk about my 2nd child, who also tests as HG/PG for IQ, except for his processing speed which is just above average--but who also has undertreated ADHD (says last week's tests) and very fresh diagnoses of dyslexia and dysgraphia. Talk about a mixed bag of skills!! He reads above grade level but NOT amazingly above grade level like his older sister. But then again, he's a grade-skipped child with dyslexia, so... yeah. Honestly, if he was my first child, I might not have any idea how gifted he is, and if I hadn't gotten him tested a couple years MAINLY because of his older sibling, I wouldn't have had any inkling that he has a learning disability.

For DS7, we started suspecting earlier but we sort of knew something was up when he was 4 years old and he mentioned that his friend's "hypothesis" was right. Apparently, he had learned about hypotheses from Dinosaur Train and applied the concept correctly to his friend's theory about newborn chicks (that the firstborn would probably be the biggest). And his interest in science continues - he just announced yesterday that he wants to study chemistry in university. Mind you, he "only" tested as MG.

DS6 is a bit more stealth, but he spontaneously started reading fluently last year when he'd just turned 5. And while that's not as early as some kids on here, it seems a bit odd to me that he's never actually been taught to read and yet it just happened. He was reading poems by Jack Prelutsky with perfect inflection yesterday and had no issue reading words like knucklehead. And he rolled his eyes at me when I asked him if he knew what "edible" meant. So we still don't know if he's gifted, but he's at least fairly bright and should have no problem in grade 1.

Honestly, we haven't had too many challenges yet given that their LOG is quite moderate, if at all. The biggest problem we've had is with DS7's overexcitabilities and his intensity. And now that his emotional maturity is slowing catching to his big emotions, he's doing a lot better. In a lot of ways, we're probably very lucky.

I suspected when DS seemed to be able to apply what he learned. For instance, he recognized the letters of the alphabet at 18 months, but he would point the letters out on signs or in a book.
I also suspected when he seemed to grasp fundamental math concepts early. He was able to move seamlessly from counting out objects to understanding math in equation format before his 4th birthday. DS accelerated quickly in math and was able to do simple multiplication, division and understand concepts like fractions, add-ins (solving for x in simple equations) and negative numbers well before kindergarten.

There are other signs that we didn't look for but may have been more meaningful. DS was highly creative, he had an obsession with certain topics (usual suspects- weather, dinosaurs, ocean life, etc.). He was reading chapter books in kindergarten and accelerated quickly from the Magic Treehouse to Percy Jackson, Harry Potter, etc.

I didn't *know* until we had an IQ done- we did the IQ test at the end of kindergarten and another at the end of 2nd grade when he was diagnosed with ADHD. Both showed that he was exceptionally/profoundly gifted.

What I would say if people are looking for advice on this topic is that 1) every kid is different--we know a highly gifted child who did everything on or behind schedule while he worked out his physical energy and sensory issues- then just accelerated rapidly in intellectual pursuits and 2) it may not be what a child knows (alphabet, shapes, etc) but whether they can apply that information outside of the specific learning context. (e.g. an 18 month old knows the shape in the puzzle, would he notice it on the street sign?) 3) curiosity was huge in our house. I could not do one thing (run the vacuum, turn on the sprinkler, lock a door, etc) without a young toddler getting in the mix and trying to figure out how it "works."

For DD6, I started realizing something when she learned all her letters, on her own, before 18 months. Then she started reading sight words.


In terms of things I thought were normal, I didn't realize how much more alert she was a baby, or things about how much she loved books and knew when to turn the page, etc. Also the types of questions she asks, her ability to understand complex answers, and even remembering in depth discussions we had when she was 2.

I accept that she's gifted, but she has not taken an IQ test so I don't know the level. I doubt she's pg and she does just fine in a public school with her own age cohorts. But heR OLSAT and MAP scores back up the belief that she's at the very least, very very high achieving.

1) when did you start to see that your kid was different?

From day one, although on that day the shocks were more physical than mental. DD assisted in her own birth (to the collective gasps of every medical professional in the room), tracked moving objects were her eyes, and held her head up for several moments like it was nothing.

Mental stuff started showing up within the first three months, by the end of which she'd begun choosing her own wardrobe (my mom did not believe me until we invited her to take DD shopping), played her first prank, and said her first discernible word, which was "Doodlebop." Incidental to that last bit, she was able to sit still and observe, and react appropriately to, an entire 20-minute television show for toddlers/preschoolers.

2) In hindsight were there things that were "normal" for you, your SO, or your families, but in reality were indications of giftedness that you merely accepted as routine?

My family is mostly NT, and I already knew that I wasn't normal, so when DD started displaying things that I recognized in myself, we knew that she was more like me than normal. For example, adults described me as having a "photographic memory" when I was a child, so when DD became our official finder of lost objects at around 18mos, because she could remember where she'd last seen it (sometimes weeks ago), that resonated with me.

3) when did you for sure conclude/accept that your child was gifted?

Not until she was 5 and we were advocating for her at school. The school system recognized giftedness, and we didn't know anything about it, so we started doing our homework.