Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment gifted children

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Please read up on “asynchronous development”. It is easy to forget that the kid who talks like a four year old is really still not even two, and has the emotional self regulation skills of a typical toddler (ie none at all), exacerbated by having to integrate so much stuff that they understand intellectually but not emotionally.

Reminding yourself of this periodically really helps on those days you want to scream in frustration in unison with your kids, LOL.

�Milestones� often don�t reflect the full picture. My eldest daughter walked relatively early at ten months whereas my son was relatively late at 14 months but within one week of taking his first proper step was kicking a ball around with good coordination. WRT speech, my eldest spoke several words before her first birthday and was very articulate by eighteen months. On the other hand, no one had any idea what my son was saying until he was three and one day I just happened to catch something he said and realised he was making a very advanced scientific comment with vocabulary that no one would expect from a three year old. Thereafter, I stopped having preconceived ideas about what he might be saying and really tried to listen to the syllables and put them together. If I still couldn�t understand him, I�d ask him to try and explain his thoughts a different way and he would. To everyone else, he seemed to have flourished overnight, but all along was a highly intelligent individual who was frustrated that no one was bothering to make a connection. When he was about eight, he recalled and described to me his boredom and frustration during his early years.

Very interesting 🧐

When my eldest was a baby, under 12 months, but probably not by much, I was visiting with a friend who was a mother of 5, and I know (now) is very gifted herself. My daughter babbled and she said "Oh she's saying "blah blah"" and started talking back to her. I remember politely nodding or smiling, and thinking she was completely crazy to think my baby was talking.

Some years later, in a park with my first two children, I was chatting with a mother of a baby-turning-toddler.... And started talking back to her baby, who was clearly trying to talk to us. The mother clearly thought I was crazy, and gave me the same smile and nod I had used on my friend some years before.

People don't look for what they don't expect to be there, and often either lack the skill (or determination?) to really listen hard to what babies and toddlers are saying. My kids have all had very good diction, exceptional for age, but with child #2 & #3 I was listening and talking back from very very young, so I got accustomed to listening hard to somewhat difficult to interpret speech. 10 years later the skill is fading, but I do still find I am much more able to decipher most small children's speech than other adults, parents are often startled and say they're the only one that can understand their child (or didn't get it themselves)... It's such a shame that there isn't an awareness that babies will be trying SO HARD to communicate and if you work hard you can often figure it out.

I guess it is the same root problem as people with disabilities being incorrectly presumed to be incompetent or incapable. We have such a narrow band of acceptable speech and assume anyone that can't meet that standard doesn't have anything to say (that is meaningful or matters).

So true.
Terrible indictment of our society, but definitely true.

I’m convicted by your post, which in my hindsight, I believe reflects your great insight. Despite her great general ability to articulate, one incident with my eldest sticks out in my memory. Sometime before she was two, I gave her a pair of chopsticks. She delightedly grabbed them and yelled out ‘grums!!’. I told her they were chopsticks but she kept saying ‘grums!’ and started getting frustrated (very rare for her as she was always a delightfully behaved infant). Finally, she started demonstrating the drumming action and the penny dropped for me ‘Oh, drumsticks!’

With my son, I have to admit that I was not a very attentive parent. I worked throughout their childhoods and in my spare time was ferrying my eldest between extracurricular activities. My best friend, who often cared for him, said that the one phrase she always understood was ‘bi bo mi’ for ‘big bottle of milk’ because he would accompany this request with broad gestures of widespread arms followed by hand positions holding a bottle of milk. I feel both proud and sad that as a toddler he had to resort to miming to communicate. His frustrations at getting others to understand him may have led him to be slightly contemptuous of others (including adults) for a few years, but he has turned out to be close to ideal as a teenager. Perhaps our posts might help younger parents to avoid this particular pitfall.

Of course hearing the words is only half the battle... I have a facebook memory that comes back to remind me every year of a conversation with my youngest child while driving one day. She would have been 2.5-3yrs old and kept saying "What does orange say mummy? What does orange say?" It went on and on. I was tired and stressed, and I was driving. So I just kept on driving and making random soothing noises while thinking "What?? WHAT cam she possibly be on about?"

Finally, as we drove into our driveway, she said "Green says GO, red says STOP! What does Orange say mummy?" And I realised that we had started this conversation as we drove through the flashing orange lights of the school crossing...DUH.

Completely agreed, MoT - there’s a refrain of not respecting the personhood of young children in people who doubt their ability to communicate. To communicate and share one’s mind is innately human, but the bias of a one-up relationship to children still persists in many families.

I remember reading some of Patricia Kuhl’s work on second language acquisition when I was pregnant, and it was remarkable to discover how attuned babies are to making phonemic distinctions between languages before 9 months. That’s a *second* language! IMO, children communicate from their earliest days; it’s on us as adults to be attuned and receptive.

Thanks for this post - it warmed my heart.

This actually relates to one of my pet peeves--when adults (often teachers) talk about children (even much older children) in front of them as if they weren't there.