Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Parental "advanced age" and...

lol. Maybe I can chalk dd11's giftedness up to the same. The only day (night, actually since my classes were at night) that I missed of grad school was the day she was born. She came to class with me starting when she was about 4 days old. Fortunately, she was a much quieter baby than her sister! I could nurse with her cradled in one arm and write with the other.

I grew up poor, and nobody ever identified me as gifted, but that doesn't change who I was.

My DD was identified immediately by the school as someone who required screening for gifted services, with no intervention by DW or myself. So money didn't matter there, either.

In my more sardonic moments I refer to DD as "Daddy's little retirement plan."

I thought the reason that you "might" see more gifted children from older parents, esp. women who are older, is b/c you might have more time and patience when you are older, as compared to when you are young.
Some parents who are in their 30's or 40's and having kids may have more disposable income to lavish on the child as compared to if they are having a child at age 20. They may be more settled with their careers and ready to be involved with raising a child.
Obviously, you can be a young parent and have a gifted child!

I agree with Dude. The testing isn't what makes you gifted (and the OP didn't refer to testing), and public schools commonly test for IQ these days anyway. My kids have never been tested, but it's obvious (grade skips, etc.) that they're gifted.

What I was saying was that smarter, educated people TEND to have kids later, and that their kids tend to be smarter. This is not an absolute rule, obviously, but the trend has been increasing over the last 20-25 years or so as professional options for women have increased and as women's health has improved. When I was a kid, the doctors used to talk about having a baby past 30 as being "advanced maternal age" or AMA. Now AMA is defined as over 35 (well, around here at least).

A bit of Googling shows that the average age of first time mothers is increasing (here�s an example with references to published studies).

Plus, as women get older, the chances for chromosomal abnormalities in the child increase. These include Down syndrome and trisomy 18.

IMO (with some research studies to back it up), mom and/or dad's genes have a large influence on Junior's IQ.

Plus, it's relatively easy to take IQ points away from a person, but very hard to add them in and keep them there. And the potential increases are nowhere near as dramatic as the potential losses. This has been shown by many research studies, some of which debunked studies showing vast gains in IQ (AT MOST, these gains were short-lived). Long-lasting (smallish) increases in IQ are associated with adoption at or near birth into favorable circumstances out of unfavorable ones. As far as I know (please correct me if I'm wrong), this is the only way to achieve long-lasting upward changes in IQ.

Perhaps this will change as our understanding of neuroscience becomes more sophisticated.

Although your chances of chromosomal abnormalities increase as the maternal age increases, like Downs, it's still acceptably low.
For a woman age 35, chance of a Downs child is 0.3%. Age 40, 1%. Age 45 and older, 4%. So if you are 45, you still have a 96% chance of NOT having a Downs child. Most children with Downs syndrome are born to younger mothers, simply b/c more younger mothers have children than older mothers.

One other long-lasting trainable is the working memory, right? If you keep working on it. Also there was something about higher math and the possibility it created higher reasoning abilities. I don't remember, lol.

I'd lean towards older parents being more proactive as to the reason behind the statistics. I had my two older kids in my twenties and my last in my thirties. In my twenties, the teacher and principal were still "authority figures" to me, and I often accepted their decisions because they were in authority. As a mom in my in my forties now, I am very clear when I am in a meeting that I am the mom, and that makes my decision the one that bears the most importance - not the teacher's or principal's. Not that I don't respect their point of view or expertise, but I'm not intimidated the way I was as a young mom. Had I been a young mom with my last kid, I doubt he'd be identified as 2e. I wouldn't take no for an answer and didn't accept the head-patting this time, and I pushed for testing until the school finally acquiesced - in part, I'm sure, to make me go away.

So from my own myopic personal experience, I know my son's identification is completely related to my own age.

Yes, but...the OP was about giftedness itself, not its identification or the effects of age on advocacy.

My guess would be it is correlation between giftedness (has a large genetic component, gifted adults tend to be more educated, educated parents, especially women, tend to breed later) and "advanced" parental age.

My other guess would be that correcting for education level of parents you would see slightly more gifted kids with *younger* parents, and also less special needs/2E kids.

But my belief in the higher quality of younger eggs/sperm didn't lead me to reproduce earlier (we married at 23/24 after finishing graduate studies but before starting our careers, kids born at 30/32, 33/34 and 35/36). Of course as of now none of my kids have tested as gifted either. As for myself, I was born when my parents were 26/36, am the eldest of five and was the only one id'd as gifted.