Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums When did your gifted child talk/walk as baby???

First Words: 5 months
First Walked: 1 day shy of 15 months

DD4 was usingher hand to hold her pacifier in her mouth when still at the hospital
-was batting at toys at one week (seemed unusual and was just wondering if anyone else has seen this)
-put herself in a sitting position at 5 months
-waved bye to the dr at 6 month visit
-walked at 10 month
-tried to say name at 4 months...and then nothing until 10 words at 15 months and 70 at 18 months (and has not stopped talking since lol)
-believe she signed and said "ball" for the traffic lights at 10 months (I think indicating the were in the shape of a circle)
Now, at 4 she is really strong in math concepts (just taught her the concept of odds and evens in about 15 min), and she is not that interested in learning to read (although she has most of the concepts down)

DD1: smiled 3 weeks, rolled over at 6 weeks, sat unassisted at 4.5 months, crawled 6 months to the day, first steps 8.5 months, walked 10 months, running before 12 months, first words 8 months.

DD2: sat unassisted 5.5 months, crawled 7.5 months, rolled over 5 months, firsts steps 11 months, walking 12.5 months, running 14 months, first words 10 months

Its hard to know what will happen with DD2 since she is still only 15 months - she seems to have later spurts than her sister but is much stronger with her fine motor skills and was stacking 4 block towers well before a year and trying to draw much earlier than my older DD did.

My kids are strange. (lol). They're hot and cold... early and late.

My daughter knew the alphabet COLD at 16 months (I'd ask for letters and she'd point to them) before she ever said a single word (24 months). She was writing letters (26 months) before she was potty trained (28 months). She could read and write complete sentences, add, subtract and multiply, at 3 yrs, before she was able to play with other kids (4ish). She demonstrated conscious motor control of her hands at 5 days old, yet never crawled, and walked at 13 months.

I still don't know how she learned to tell time (is that bad? lol). She just "already could" in grade 1. I have no idea who taught her (I'm referring of course to hands on a clock, not a digital display).

My son, meanwhile, said NOTHING until 24 months, at which point he started naming all the letters of the alphabet. At 1 yr, he was obsessed with how toys worked and liked to try and take them apart. At 2 (after he started talking), he counted everything in site (up to about 10 or 15). He had advanced ability for puzzles and mazes, but didn't walk until 15 months. He has a language processing disorder, and yet was sounding out 3 letter words at 3 yrs old.

It goes on and on. (you know :-) It's late, I'm tired and I know I'm forgetting stuff.

Anyway, I stopped referring to those baby milestone books because they never made any sense. I'm to the point now where I have no idea what's normal ;p

LOL my daughter too!! I had all these plans to walk off my baby weight while she slept in the stroller - not a chance. She'd ride for a couple of minutes and start to cry, and continue crying until I took her out and carried her in a way that she could see around her.

Same here, I haven't referenced a milestone book ever with my DD2. I know Ruff puts a lot of focus on early milestones, but it's such an overgeneralization. My son seemed incredibly average. He army crawled at 7 months and sat up AFTER he crawled. He didn't crawl normally until he was 11 months and then walked at a year. He met the minimum standards for talking until he was about 26-28 months, when he began talking in adult-like sentences. He learned all his letters at 24 months and was reading and spelling simple words by 2 1/2. He also began doing math around 2 1/2, of his own fruition.

I agree with the observation that "early" isn't everything, and I'm not sure that it's truly meaningful if milestones are more-or-less on time. I think it's a lot more about atypical development (skipping or inverting milestones) and really astonishing acceleration (you know, the kind where you rationalize away what seems impossible by any means possible).

One strikingly illustrative example of 'early isn't indicative' is a comparison with a nearly perfectly matched child my DD's age (literally-- B-days same week, both with two-PhD parents, both only children, similar in appearance). Both girls were highly verbal and played well together (not parallel) at age 2, when they were in daycare together. If anything, her vocabulary far outstripped DD's. They were apart for several years (academic nomadism) and next met when they were about six. It was shocking how... ordinary (?) this other child seemed by comparison to my DD. My DH also remarked on it, and he's not one to do that. His question was; "Huh. What happened??" I mean, she was still the same lovely child, but she seemed comparatively so--so-- placid and incurious. It was as though her development had plateaued, whereas DD's had taken off exponentially. So her verbal precosity wasn't really significant, though at 2, it would have led to speculation that both were MG+, and the other girl likely PG. We know them still; the difference is staggering now that both girls are adolescents. The other child is a pretty typical middle schooler, and DD is, well-- not, and I can't even imagine it. So no, 'early' isn't 'gifted' necessarily.

It's not about the snapshots, it's about the trajectory.
It's that velcro-brain and avid/obsessive interest in the world at large that comes to mind when I think about DD being so very different. Many of her early daycare carers were quietly agog, but we figured that they probably were 'flattering' to most children, and didn't think that much of it.

Some of the most striking things about her earliest development was that she had a keen sense of self at a very young age. She was also just so weirdly observant of everything ALL.THE.TIME, and eerily empathetic and socially astute (this was the thing that inspired AWE in carers, to the point that a few of them recall her VERY well even over a decade later). She seemed to understand that other children (<2yo) didn't have the communication skills or cognitive awareness to exert self-control or experience true empathy, so it was as though she needed to compensate for any other peer she was engaged with. She shrugged off antisocial behavior in peers (though she had her own ways of casually, passively resisting being run over by them-- and she did this with grace and seemingly no effort at all). Eerily 'knowing,' really.


One more early thing that was downright bizarre. When my DD was not quite two, a new infant (just 12mo) entered her daycare. His home was Spanish-speaking, and none of the adults at the daycare were bilingual. He was a very sensitive little boy-- who was highly distressed, and cried and cried his first weeks in the new setting. One of the carers told me his background in passing on the first morning; apparently DD understood that or at least worked it out from what she'd overheard.

DD was obviously very concerned about his obvious distress, and gravitated toward him. The next day, she wanted to learn "some Spanish." I thought this was innocent enough and taught her how to say hello. A day later, she wanted to know what else I knew. Why? She needed to "learn real Spanish." Why? This other child just didn't know any English and she wanted to help him. Oh, and that it made the caregivers and other children less tense, too, because he wasn't crying all the time now that she talked to him in Spanish. She needed to know more than "Hola" and how to count to ten. When I wondered where she had learned the numbers, the answer was a casual "Oh, Sesame Street yesterday afternoon because Rosita speaks Spanish sometimes."

"I need to know more, mama. I can't just count and say hello to him all day long. He's going to know that I can't understand what he says back. Besides, 'hola. hola. hola.' It's silly."

The initial foray was evidently an experiment to determine if the child's distress was solely because of the language barrier. She was quite concerned that this was her responsibility since nobody else was stepping up to the plate.

There were a handful of those unsettling moments with DD as a baby, toddler, and preschooler-- most of them didn't really register as unusual for her, so some of them I haven't really thought about in years and I certainly didn't annotate them anywhere at the time. Looking back on them, I'm amazed.

Wow, Howler--that is a really amazing example! So much empathy and insight.

Here, Here!

It reminded of my son's best friend. When they were tiny, his friend's language skills were amazing - especially in comparison to our DS. My DH and I used to joke about it all the time. P was telling us about rollercoasters and waterparks at 18 mos...our DS said maybe 15 words tops. Both at 5 now, P is confident fun-loving boy with no interest in reading/science/maths. DS can't get enough of learning...but P blows him away at soccer, so...I guess will see what the years ahead bring.

Youngest Daughter learned early her twin would talk for her, and didn't talk until she was somewhere between two and three. When she did, she spoke often in movie quotes, to the point where Peanuts videos were banned for awhile because Lucy is just so darned mean. OTOH, I remember her taking this huge animal encyclopedia into the bathroom with her when she was still getting the potty-training thing going, and sitting there for a good half hour or more with a book that weighed roughly the same as she did on her lap. (This was the same kid the school volunteers refused to work with in first grade because her vocabulary outstripped theirs.)
The other three? Pretty typical, not terribly early or late at anything. They just had an intensity I didn't see in their friends or classmates. And little stuff: things like being five and taking a drive down the freeway with Dad and pointing out the window and saying "Look Daddy! Hoofed ungulates!"