Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion When did you know...

We only "knew" when we got the test results just before he turned 7. Like other posters, we had been impressed by how quickly he picked up concepts and how deeply he was into the "flavor of the day/month" (garbage trucks, dinosaurs, space aliens, myths, puzzles, etc.). He's quite verbally adept and was from a young age, but didn't take off with his reading until early K (our other child is doing exactly the same thing). Was doing multiplication and division at age 5. We chalked it up to an enriching environment (Montessori plus home resources). We are also from pretty "smart" families so some things that seem markers now didn't seem all that odd at the time.

Then we had a disastrous first grade year (think: no acceleration) and a dear teacher at the school took us aside and suggested that he might be highly gifted. Voila, PG.

Even now, we still wonder at times, because he can be so asynchronous...

As for sleep, we used the Baby Whisperer and later, Toddler Whisperer (Traci Hogg) approach. He really needs his sleep and once asleep, is hard to wake. However, getting him to sleep has been an on/off challenge over the years. After reading Tigerle's post, I realized I'm the same way as far as needing to calm my brain in order to fall asleep!

With ds8 at 5 years 9 months when I got the results. I noticed he was a bit different at about 4.5. Sure childcare people had been telling me how bright he was but he was no different than the rest of the kids in my family. He doesn't do anything amazing to prove he is PG really. With ds6 I knew earlier. He is more verbal and temperemental and had earlier milestones physically. He is EG.

We didn't for a long time I was bought into the myth that everyone has the same level of intelligence and achievement differences were merely a function of economics (opportunity) and motivation. Plus, doesn't everyone think their kid(s) are clever?

DD was bright but so was everyone, right? Wrong!

She picked up arithmetic rapidly and intuitively by 5 but We never thought of this as unusual. She developed OEs so we investigated 'giftedness' as a possible cause and we got her tested. Results came back but we still didn't get it. Only when she was accepted as a DYS did we really understand that she was objectively different.

We did a WPPSI-IV test when DS was in his mid 3s. We thought he was bright. There were a few earlier clues (many from the lists of "characteristics of gifted kids" you can find out on the web).

We tested more to rule giftedness out, but the results came back as gifted. It was pretty shocking because he seems pretty average in a lot of ways. It's still early days, and IQ can move around, but the gifted school he is in seems like a very good fit.

DD seemed very bright very, very early on, but so were other members of the family...we didn't think too much of it. By the age of 2 or 3 people started commenting...about her speech and vocabulary...the fact that she could read very, very well already (we actually used to sometimes hide reading material from her in public, because discussing it was just awkward). We were probably more concerned about her sensory sensitivities than thinking that they were related to her possibly being quite gifted (which in retrospect, may have been OEs). She seemed to also have unusual interests (astronomy, paleontology and history of the earth) and would find piles of books during her trips to the library to learn MORE. My mom and I would observe some moments of "what did she just say/do???" and would occasionally speculate about just how bright she might be (at times we were a bit shocked at how well she understood complex ideas). When she started school, we were amused that her homework seemed better suited for her baby brother, who was three years younger, but we figured it was probably somewhat easy for all of the students. Then came school testing for the gifted program and she scored VERY high on every required measure. We decided at that point to investigate further and we had her take the EXPLORE test as a very young 3rd grader. We were pretty blown away by the results.

I guess we were in denial at times.

Our experience with DD helped us pick up what was going on with DS sooner.

It's hard to say exactly. Given that DH is PG and I have an uncle who is PG as well, and my brother & I were considered gifted in math. It didn't seen entirely likely to look for giftedness in my children.

The movement I really KNEW DS was gifted was when he was a bit older than 2 years old. He loved floor puzzles at that age. I had purchased a Thomas the Tank puzzle for him online and it had just arrived & unwrapped when I received a phone call. Fifteen minutes later I finish my phone call to turn around and he had completed it himself.

That and when he started reading at 3 without much help from us except that we filled out house with books and that I was working hard with his older sister who has reading challenges and at 7 was still struggling to read.

I'm the jerk who kinda always assumed that my kids would be gifted. Its definitely a trait on both sides of the family and does seem to be inheritable somehow. But I didn't really start looking into the traits and research until kid #1 got kicked out of preschool at 2. Reading up on asynchrony really showed that there was something different about my kid.

I managed to ignore all symptoms until DS was tested at age 4 and I had to acknowledge the giftedness because of the numbers in the testing report staring me in the face. But, my husband is not convinced even now and he thinks that the testing numbers could have been an anomaly - because my son has asynchronous development, has a very atypical way of reasoning, has a slower processing speed than his parents, has poor motor coordination compared to his parents and is very different from the stereotypical gifted child. So, his giftedness is obvious only to his tester, his math mentor, his music teacher and his mother while even his father dismisses it because superficially it is not obvious.
But, the extreme giftedness rears its head occasionally in social and academic situations much to the shock and amazement of the disbelievers in my family.
As for the pediatrician, ours always ignored my queries about giftedness and I stopped asking! She did say that in order to help the sleep problems, my DS could either be medicated (melatonin or benadryl to make him drowsy before bed every night) or that he could be tired out to such an extent that he fell asleep. We chose the tiring out option and involve DS in very rigorous exercise everyday (sports, play, biking, running etc) and we get close to 7-8 hours of sleep from him.

1.) DS was at 10 months when we joined an infant cognition research study (just for fun/extra cash). They explained that he was WAY ahead of normal milestones of his age-peers and I should be highly attuned to his needs and enrich his environment. This was after a fMRI, PET, and cognitive assessment. Later, at 14 months he followed up with an EEG and another cognitive test. He had another MRI and EEG at 16 months due to concern for regression. Come to find out, it was a pseudoregression because he was putting all of his efforts into learning cool new tricks like side-stepping, hopping, running, and going up and down stairs in different ways. He was assessed as somewhere in the range of MG-PG, but being 1.5 he's still too young to get an accurate assessment. He ticks off a lot of the typical boxes for gifted characteristics. He has always been a pretty stellar sleeper though. Always takes at least one nap per day and sleeps 12-14 hours at night (unless he's sick or in a growth spurt) - so I can't really help you with your #2 concern.

As a Pediatric nurse, I can tell you that having a routine that starts about 30 minutes prior to the target. Figure out if your kiddo prefers a nightlight or dark, white noise, music, or silence. Do they like sleeping alone or not? Do they need a comfort object? I still have my DS 1.5y in a sleep sack, which seems to keep him from crawling out of his crib and seems to be a consistent comfort object. He knows how to unzip it, but only does it when I enter his room in the morning or after a nap. I still put him to bed with a bottle. He doesn't take a pacifier anymore and he throws the sippy cup, he just prefers to sip on a bottle to go to sleep so we let him. That's all I have to help you, which you've probably heard before.

It's really hard to tell with the very young ones. With ODS, I wasn't sure until age 3.5 or 4, because I assumed other kids could learn the same if given the same opportunities. His rate of learning is what made it so clear he was advanced.

With YDS, I had the advantage of experience, but until he started memorizing words before age 3, I couldn't say for sure.



I have a great sleeper (ODS) who often complains about being woken up by our bad sleeper (YDS). With the first, I thought I totally knew what I was doing and could solve anyone's sleep problems. I realized how wrong I was with YDS. Where ODS needs more sleep on average, YDS needs less. No advice just sympathy.