Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion When did you figure it out?

When did you determine your child was gifted and what was it that first made you think that? Did you ever have any doubt after that or were you always certain?

We just assumed he would be, kinda a correlational thing. And then other people remarking about his attentiveness way early on, gave us "Oh" moments. Naps ending around 12 months supported it. ~20 months we were packing to move,
He points at a sealed box and asks: "What's this?"
Me: "It's a box."
Him (tapping it): "What is it?"
Me: "It's a box with blankets in it."
Him: "No. What's this?"
Me: "Well we're moving, have to get everything packed."
Him (sigh) pointing: "This here."
Me (giving up): "The letter A? Part of the word Allied?"
Him....(nodding): "Ahhhh..."

Sold, haven't looked back.

Hmmm. Well, we were a bit slow to catch on to just how gifted.

Both my DH and I are HG+, though, so yeah, it wasn't a big surprise that DD would be gifted. That, we sort of expected.

We might should have known from birth, though. L&D physician and nurses claimed that they'd "never seen" a child so alert at birth. She was definitely hitting milestones early-- as in, in some cases the developmental timeline just didn't seem to apply to her in a linear fashion.

She started wildly pointing and grinning like mad at her "kitty" when she was just a couple of months old (this was our cat who would leap onto the kitchen windowsill to 'visit' with us in the kitchen), and looking back into videos of her, she was clearly using symbolic (albeit garbled... gee, thanks, endless ear infections) language to identify and communicate about said cat from 5-6 months. I picked up on that at about 7 months.

She had this weirdly gentle and careful pincer grasp from about four months old-- I remember this because she used to play with earrings on whoever would pick her up. She was very gentle-- never-- ever-- any tugging.

She was so intensely observant and had an incredibly memory for things even as a very young baby. My mother-in-law got her a tiny Casio keyboard (just a couple of octaves) for her first Christmas, and it quickly became one of her favorite toys. She never 'pounded' on it-- she was very careful. We got her a LeapPad when she was not quite two-- she was always just so careful.

We moved when she was 18 months old-- and left behind her (by then beloved) kitty. At that point, the cat had acquired the habit of leaping into the bathroom windowsill to 'visit' with DD during bathtime and teeth brushing. The two of them would snuggle up to either side of the window-- it was very sweet, and they clearly adored one another. After our move, DD was angry and agitated that our new bathroom window was too small and too high in the wall to allow for her "kitty" to come to her. She was inconsolable for weeks, only relenting when we explained that her kitty was still in MN, living with her old nanny, and promised that as soon as we'd moved into our new house, we'd get her another kitty. From then on-- bam-- she was fine with it, though she pestered us about a "new kitty" pretty regularly. She would still talk about missing her kitty, but without the dispirited affect.

I think that was when we KNEW that she was not just 'different' but maybe even WAY different. Shortly after that is when she started doing things that were socially so far beyond normative that there was no denying it. This was the same child that asked me about God, death, evil, ignorance, racism, prejudice, altruism, money, etc. at every opportunity. I'm reasonably certain now that most 3 yo children are not doing those things. My friends whose kids are contemporaries looked at me like I had three heads when I'd even hint at (or grossly underplay) the kinds of things she was curious about.

She was very interested in learning to read, for example... and knew all of her basic phonemes and blends by about two. My mom (a professional educator) managed to convince us that we should do whatever we could to "prevent" her from reading before kindergarten. We carefully screened her LeapPad selections, removing those which seemed to encourage phonics... Yeah, yeah-- I know. Hindsight. LOL. Yes, a K-3 teacher actually told me to stop reading aloud to my daughter so much, that she was "perfectly normal" and not to worry about her since we were "pressuring her" to do things too early. Sheesh.

When we finally DID relent and teach her decoding, it took about 12 hours and she went on to sustained silent reading pretty much immediately. Within a month, she was reading at about a middle 2nd grade level, and within four months, she was reading anything and everything from our bookshelves. When she was six (and placed as a third grader), the school tested her Lexile (she had been reading about 19-20 months at that point) and it was 1350+. That made it very clear to the school that we weren't making anything up, anyway, but it surprised even us.

I note that last bit because DD's rate of acquisition/mastery has always been-- well, almost superhuman. It isn't that she doesn't need instruction. She's not an autodidact the way some kids are. She's completely Socratic, in fact. It's that she's like a Nuclear Reactor whereas most NT kids are woodstoves. This is one reason why even being PG, she doesn't always SEEM 'that smart' until you suddenly realize that you're discussing _______ with a child who is ____ and give yourself a mental shake. It causes cognitive dissonance in most people because she's always been incredibly easy to talk to-- VERY easy for adults to forget that she's a child because she slowly turns up the cognitive heat until you're sort of seamlessly talking to her the way you would another adult, leaving you wondering "what the heck...."??

I'm not sure that there WAS a single moment of epiphany. It was more like coming to terms with just where she's at on the gifted spectrum. I'm still not sure we're all the way there yet. Maybe someday.

Monday, I think.

Y'all can laugh at me about this one, but...

I got a referral to a psych, 'cause I need a paid friend right now. I did a short assessment with someone, who then referred me on... I went on Monday, only to discover a whole whack of Dabrowski (among st other things) at the door. As far as I can figure it, the assessing psych decided what I really needed was a psych who knew a lot about gifted children (amongst other things).



Really, I just assumed, based on DH's reading at 2 and my feeling underchallanged at a gifted magnet, that our kids would be smarter than the average bear. But I don't think I'll ever feel any mroe "secure" about their intellegence than I am about my own.

MotherofToddler, I am assuming based on your screen name and your post that you are a mother to an exceptional child but you have your moments of doubt and your child is too young to get tested to get a definitive answer. If my assumption is correct, then I want to say to you that I am in the same boat. Most days my dd3 simply amazes me and I have no doubt that she is gifted. But sometimes I wonder if it just me, her mom, looking at everything she is doing with a biased lens. Well, only time will tell. For now, I am going to enjoy the ride and not worry about the destination.

As soon as he learned to crawl, 9 months, and walk, 11 months, and could get to the bookcases. He would go over and pull books out all over the place, but when he picked one to look at (these are my books, not picture books), he always held them right side up. He knew which way words were supposed to go. He loved the page numbers, and would sit there and count them, so he knew all his numbers by 18 months. By 2, that was ALL the numbers, because he loved the show Who Wants to be a Millionaire and would holler out the numbers and the amounts of money. He knew the difference between numbers that were just numbers and numbers that were money, and numbers with decimal points, and he would read them correctly. "Six point seven, Fifty dollars and thirty-three cents."

This was also the point at which I first suspected autism of some sort, when he was running around in a circle, counting to himself, and I said, "oh no, my kid is Rainman." Not quite, as it turned out, but he does have Asperger's.

I would have been shocked and dismayed if my kids hadn't been at least normal - you know, like me and DH and our friends...

But my first shock of how different that was from typical was when we tried to join a mom's group who walked every week, at about 8 months. DD was leaning out of her front pack to point at the wildlife. She had just started signing a little and was vocalizing 'bu! Bu!" for bird and "chu!" or "qua!" for squirrel. The other moms really resented it and started trying to prove how smart they were to me. To this day, we sometimes run into one of them and it's horribly awkward. It's not my imagination, they still point out that first day and how dumb she made their infants look.

I'm always questioning how much of a label she would need to be accurately described. She's just so, well, normal. Like me and my friends, who are all way out there. I'm very glad she can do easily find peers, but it makes it hard to set good expectations when we have no clue how far off the published ones are. We just have to follow her rather than really setting goals to reach for.

I had no idea until my kid was in 4th grade. She was speaking in full sentences before she was 18 months. Before she was five she could completely control money (not taxes) but she had an allowance at four. She knew how much things cost and could go to her money and get out for example $17.52 and knew what to expect in change. She was doing 1000 piece puzzles before she was five. I just never even thought about it. I just went along with it. In first grade she told the teacher that she did not know how to do addition because we had never done "addition". In school she was bored out of her mind. She "failed" the gifted screener, COGAT three times. She was the top in her class doing basically self-taught Algebra in 6th grade. She was top in the English class outdoing the curriculum of her school by the end of fifth grade. I thought gifted meant something else... In fourth grade she became existentially depressed. It was a scary time for us. We switched her to a school that placed her immediately into gifted classes and accelerated her math into 6th grade math and her English into 7th grade. One week later and the depression was gone. She had friends for the first time. It was an amazing transformation. We finally got testing from a private person knowledgeable in giftedness and she has scores just shy of DYS levels. As posted in another post..I thought they were just giving me what I wanted since I paid big bucks for it. They told me to have her take the SAT..Again she just missed DYS levels. She is now in an HG which is really an MG program. Currently in 9th grade doing Pre-Calculus getting A's. I STILL DOUBT IT! and as Michaela noted, I do think I doubt my own intelligence. Not sure where I fall on the scale. Wishing to have my own set of tests or something that I could pin over my doubt.

I believe it was when I brought a dozen doughnuts to daycare, and DS was the only child his age to pick a jelly-filled. Everyone else picked glazed ones with holes in the middle.

When they were 7th graders, since that is when they took the IQ test - WISC-IV for my eldest kid and SB-V for my middle kid - and were officially identified as gifted. My youngest, DD8, has not been tested, though many adults and older kids (friends of my older two) keep telling me she is bright. As I have said on other threads, I declared that the middle one was not college material when she was 4 (she just didn't seem so swift).

However, right after they do something that makes me think they are bright, they will do something that makes me think I have had pets that are brighter than them.