I have read that siblings' IQs are within 10 points of each other.
I don't remember the exact statistic, but from what I remember is that this is true about 2/3rd of the time. If I remember correctly the study was done with a very small number of people.
There also may or may not be numbers to predict that spouse will be similar in IQ. Dr. Ruf says it's because 'We feel comfortable with people who get our jokes.'
If you take these to ideas together, it can be predicted that most gifted folks feel like their kids are 'nothing special' because the kids are similar to their memories of their siblings, cousins, and their friend's kids. When Kindy starts there is a huge 'cognitive dissonance' between how we say our kid as normal, and how real normal really is. That happened to me for sure. I remember my younger brother learning to read at age 3 when I was age 6. So on one hand I was freaked out when my son's teacher pointed out that he learned to recognize his letter sounds at age 2 and she was clearly sending me the message that this was unusual, but then DS didn't seem to be able to put the letters together and read until age 5-6, which compared to my brother seemed very unimpressive. In retrospect I think that DS's eye tracking was developing on the slow side of age-normal. DS even asked me around age 10 why I tried teaching him to read by showing him letters, and why didn't I just say the letters aloud? He accused me of being a visual learner and projecting - LOL! ((Everyone's a critic!!))
Birth Order and Personality make if very difficult for parents to be able to detect giftedness in later born children if the first born is noticeably gifted. Dottie and I talked it over, and we say: 'Test One-Test them all!'
I've also read a study that shows that parents are better at Identifying gifted kids than teachers. As a group, this is like saying that an SUV has better gas mileage than a Hummer. We parents still aren't perfect at gifted ID. If my son hadn't had behavior problems in the regular classroom, I would never have pursued IQ testing and would have been able to go on thinking he didn't have special educational needs. I might have encouraged him take the SATs for CTY summer camp if it had been publicized at his school, but it wasn't. In retrospect, I've very grateful for those behaviors which were so humiliating for me back then.
Love and More Love,
Grinity
