Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Did your gifted kid always seem gifted?

I don't know that mine didn't seem gifted so much that I didn't recognize what it was until the oldest was 6.5. My oldest seemed challenging and high needs. My youngest, now coming up on 12 in a month, did strike me as unusually verbal b/c, although most of the babies in my family speak somewhat early including my older one, dd11 was a big talker. She was putting two words together at 5.5 months and just never stopped talking.

I, like you, tended to just assume that they were above average or that the baby milestone books like the "what to expect" series was low balling everything for kids who were at the low end of expectations. I realized that my older one was gifted after assuming the she was slow b/c she was having such a terrible time in 1st grade will a drill happy teacher who had terrible rapport with young children. She was working very slowly, so we assumed that she'd just be a "C" student and argued that point vociferously with her teacher. We wound up pulling her out to homeschool and that was the point where someone else suggested to me that she was gifted.

FWIW, she's turned out to be a HG+ kid (IQ, etc.). In hindsight, it probably was more obvious than I realized, though. She wasn't solving algebraic equations at five or reading at 18 months, but there were signs there and I think that HG+ or even PG doesn't require prodigy status. The things that looked like "difficult" were probably all part and parcel of the giftie stuff.