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

Most folks who post here seem to know that their child is gifted from the time the child is a toddler. I see a lot of threads asking if a two or three year old kid is gifted. I can understand that you can recognize a gifted kid when they are PG, but what about other kids?

I ask because my middle kiddo didn’t seem so sharp when she was younger. My eldest thinks it was downright mean for me to state, “This one is not college material; we don’t need to have a college fund for her.” And we did not establish a college fund for her until many years later (she is now 14, almost 15).

In my defense, I did not see her doing many of the things that made me think that the eldest, now 17, was bright. (We didn’t really think DD17 was gifted either, just a bit ahead of the average kid). We also had DD14 repeat 2nd grade when she switched from a private school to public school, though that was really for social reasons, not academic reasons. I should note that she is now in the “correct” grade per the public school birthday cutoff; the private school had a different cutoff date. Both DD17 and DD14 have been labeled gifted per the school based upon IQ tests (FSIQ > 130).

Has anyone else had the same experience?

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.

My older one seemed to be the opposite of gifted for about 7-8 years. He's 2E. The younger one always seemed gifted.

The people who post here are probably not an average cross-section of the gifted-parent populace, disregarding for a moment the actual levels of giftedness of their children. I believe that they tend to be self-selected to a certain degree based on educational needs, but also in some cases based on an apparent desire to have a gifted child, and as gifted as possible at that. We also have some people post here in attempts to get confirmation that they themselves are different flavors of gifted, with more or less solid foundations for their self-conceptions.

For such people not only do I think that they will tend to see giftedness in every glint from a child's eyeball, but they may have convenient memories in some cases as well regarding their children's development. For IQ-obsessed parents who find little or no objective support over time for their beliefs about their children, many of them must stay away from this place out of fear. That leaves the others, who have some degree of confirmation.

I still remember a post on another message board by a mother whose child was refusing to eat soon after birth, and on that basis was reportedly diagnosed by an attending physician as profoundly gifted. It was difficult to tell whether it was a clever tweak of the other posters' egos, whether the poster was inflating something actually said by a doctor, or whether some doctor really felt he or she had a sound basis for a diagnosis of profound giftedness in infancy.

Those hopeful mommies and daddies aren't the whole picture, of course. Though the word "always" is awfully strong, I do think that a lot of parents here have a valid notion their children are highly gifted before getting confirmation through testing. Sometimes it's impossible to ignore; there are true positives in with the false ones. And for a parent whose child has extremely early milestones and does turn out to be HG+, it's hard to say that their instincts were false, whether retroactively applied or not.

He seems like a normal kid to me, he's just very smart too.  Nurture or nature?  He has a family tree full of 'em plus a mother who started educating him on the 3r's.  He loves cartoon network and playing tag.  He easily learned early academics that some kids twice his age struggle with.  

You'll never know if they were  born to be smart or if it was nature vs. nurture.  If a parent educates their child it shows the parent enjoys education, or else they wouldn't have stuck with it; nurture as a proof of nature. 


And I'm glad for that.  It ruffled 
my feathers to read parents posting elsewhere variations of, "I sometimes wish my kid weren't gifted.". Rude.  Why?!  


From the little while I've been a regular here I've seen a few of the parents of older gifted kids move on.  They've said it is because this board was good for them when they needed it, but their advocacy has been done, their kids are almost grown.  There are some parents of olders still here either because their advocacy is not finished and/or to help those of us coming after.  The bulk of parents posting about giftedness are understandably elementary school or preschool because that's when issues appear, advocacy appears, and testing happens.  I imagine the posters with gifted babies have a history related to giftedness, or a family history; sometimes it's the daycare worker who tells them.  

But posters here do like their giftedness, thank goodness.  

Enough about me, let's talk about you.  So what you didn't know?  You raised your kid like every generation of parents before you.  You just raise your kids, and that's all, just like the rest of us.  

http://www.meritaid.com/

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/

^^ here's where the parents of gifted teens go ^^

My oldest was clearly gifted from infancy, but my son (2e) was/is either "hot or cold." He had/has these moments that just amaze me, and other times he's "on the moon" clued out. Plus I have no experience with "normal" so sometimes in comparison to his older sister he seems slow. Then I get a glimpse of where he's at with certain things compared to his friends and think "wait, he's not so slow after all." He's full of contradictions. He can do things he's not supposed to be able to with his diagnoses and often times his behavior doesn't make sense (until you think "2e").

So in answer to your question... yes and no! ;p

I think it depends. All four of mine carry the "gifted" label, so it was sort of hard to say "well, this one is this way, as opposed to that one...". Dh was a gifted student, and I would have been had they invented gifted programs back in the pre-flood days. So it really didn't cross my mind that the kids wouldn't be.
Overall, they've always seemed pretty bright, albeit with asynchronous milestones (especially Miss 2E). Well, except when they've been doing really intensely ridiculous things like fingerpainting the living room walls with craft paint, which showed a complete disregard for outcome-based planning. And when I say "fingerpainting", we're not talking Gauguin or Van Gogh or even Grandma Moses. More like the bastard child of Haring and Pollock, which I figure is pretty age-typical for three.
OTOH, I don't see a whole lot of point in pursuing a gifted diagnosis at two. I mean...what does it change? What's the benefit? It's the same kid, either way, and you meet their needs, not the needs of a label. The only use I've really found for it is in regards to public schooling. Or bragging rights, I suppose, though IME after the first couple of kids the shiny wears off of that and you're desperate to avoid talking to casual subway acquaintances about what an odd little duck your kid is.

I'm so glad you posted this because it's the thread I've been wanting to start. Sure, I thought my two were the cutest, smartest little kids in the world, in the same way that I think MOST moms view their kids and in the way that I believe every child deserves to be viewed by their mom. Sure, I thought they were smart, maybe even gifted a little.

BUT DYS-level gifted? I had no idea. The child psychologist kept telling me they were gifted and telling me the things they did were unusual. Frankly, I didn't believe her. I simply felt like my children had the benefit of a mother who read to them, talked to them, took them to museums, etc. I felt that many children would be like my two if their parents were able to spend a lot of time with them, reading, etc.

When the child psychologist met with me and showed me their scores, which well-qualified them for DYS on several metrics, I responded that their scores simply resulted from me reading to them a lot. The child psychologist said reading to children doesn't necessarily get those types of scores. I don't know. These two are my first, and I haven't worked around children or been around them much.

I'm still very much trying to wrap my head around this. I feel happiest just thinking of continuing to do what we do -- reading, learning, trying to have experiences.

At the same time, I'm blown out of the water that one new DYS scholar is a model of cooperation in speech therapy if the therapist puts little stickers on a chart for good cooperation. (He hates ST because it seems babyish to him.) I'm equally blown out of the water that upon hearing that a nest of rattlesnakes had been found in a ditch, my other new DYS scholar, a newly turned 7 year-old girl, took off down the ditch with a 4 year-old to get some rattlesnakes.

Thank you for starting the thread and letting me express what I've been wanting to say for awhile.

I never had any thoughts about DS11 or DD9 being gifted until they were tested. DS was diagnosed with ADHD/dysgraphia through testing but the tester also emphasized how gifted he is. His giftedness was really hard to see early on because of his tremendous struggles with learning to read, writing and spelling.

DD9 DYS has attracted regular comments about how "smart" she is throughout her life but I never paid much attention until a friend from church, our area public school gifted coordinator, urged me to have her tested. Yikes was I surprised.

I now realize in retrospect that her single-minded, weeks long role playing of being a milk snake, being John in "Peter Pan" (the most boring character in my opinion) etc. etc. ad nauseum was a sign of her focus and intelligence. It just seemed so bizarre at the time.

One time during Christmas I was dropping her at Montessori (she was 3) and she told me a long story about baby Jesus being born and immediately smacking the sheep at the manger in the face. I tried to explain that Jesus didn't go around hitting anyone and newborn babies can't really hit at all. However, she refused to go inside until I verbally scolded Jesus and told him three times not to hit the sheep. Gifted? Well, maybe, but not as easy to spot as walking at 6 months or reading before 3. Probably not something I would have posted in the "Ultimate Brag Thread" although it gave me a good laugh at the time.

That, and what lucounu said, are also part of it for me. So many other parents exaggerated what their kids were doing that it made me less aware how atypical my dds were. Some of what I was hearing sounded like bs to me like the parent who told me that her kids were speaking in sentences @ 18 months and whose kids I was around at that age and who were barely saying a few single words, so I doubted that, but other things I had no basis for having information on and I assumed that their kids were actually doing whatever they claimed. Plus, my oldest was late with gross motor skills, so having other babies who were walking at 11 months when mine wasn't walking until 15 months seemed to cancel out her areas where she was ahead of them IMO.

By the time I was realizing that my oldest was gifted, I was getting more and more clued in to the fact that parents who were telling me that their kindergarteners were reading at a 3rd grade level when I had just seen them struggling to sound out the word "dog" and whose parents shared that said 3rd grade level was a DRA level 8, for instance, were really far off in their estimations. However, until I realized the inflation that was going on elsewhere, I figured that they all had their areas where they were ahead or behind -- just like my kiddo.