Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Pre-school are they truly "gifted" at 2, 3. 4 etc?

so do you think we can really tell if our children are gifted at these early ages? It has appeared my daughter was gifted since she was a baby, and she has had testing, comments, etc. that suggests she is, just as the other little ones on here have had, but do you think we can really tell if they are gifted and how gifted at this early age? I am familar with RUfs guidelines, but are there every kids who are performing and doing simply amazing things, with little or no teaching, and then just fizzle out?

Of course there are sad situations where a child gets sick, or injured or abused or stops being compliant enough to take tests.

But for the most part I think that really what happens is that a large enough number of the kids who are hard to perceive as gifted in the preschool or elementary years suddenly 'grow into themselves.' I'm guessing that this is why the DSY program wants a 150 for the WPPSI, and only a 145 for the WISC. And kids in the middle school years can 'run of test' to really show how unusually gifted they are. So there is a very real reason that IQ scores tend to be less unusual as the child ages past 7 years of age - but the child isn't less smart, only 10 to 20% less unusual, see?

((Could a number fan actually ballpark what the real numbers above should be. I pulled 10-20% out of the air - I tend to be quite intuitive with numbers, but please don't quote me!))

But given what you have described about your babies, TT, don't expect having 20% more company to change your daughter's LOG.

As for fizzling out, if a child sits in a classroom that is so far below their readiness level that it actually shames them, and the make an internal promise to themselves to totally hide their gifts at school and concentrate on the social side, but spend their time at home pouring all their intensity into some activity that isn't societally appreciated - are they still truly gifted? I would say yes. Did they fizzle out? Sure. That's why we work so hard here to find fun and challenging ways for our kids to learn how to learn and learn how to handle challenge - so that when they finally get in a situation that suits their readiness level they will have the basic skills in place to work well there, and the comfort level with working hard to persevere.

Some people mentally simplify this question by talking about 'gifts' vs. 'talents.' A talent what one gets if they truly develop their gifts well. That's why it is the 'Davidson Institute for Talent Development.' All the kids there have gifts, because that's how they were selected. Will all of them develop societally recognized talents? Certainly not. Why else would there need to be a group to promote this?

I keep saying societally recognized talents, instead of talents, because how many of us have developed our general gifts into being talented parents (many) and how many of us get much external recognition for it? (far fewer than is deserved)

Parenting is a hugely important thing, both personally and to society, and being a good parent is a fine way to use prodigious gifts. Do we live in a society that agrees with me at this exact moment in history? Not that I can tell. Do some of us who identify as 'just a Mom' feel like we fizzled out? As my grandfather used to say: I wish I had a nickel for everyone who said yes to that question. I know that if I didn't have a job outside the home where people tell me I'm clever every day, and you dear ones, that I'd be seriously confused about my talent of parenting - and I'm an amazing parent.

LOL@me! How did I get this far off topic?

Love and More Love,
Grinity

My wife read a lot to our eldest son, and he taught himself to read before age 4 without any formal instruction. Early reading without formal instruction is one marker of giftedness. We entered him in kindergarten a year early, and as a 2nd grader his SCAT scores qualified him for the CTY courses in both reading and math.

So yes, I think giftedness can be identified in 3 and 4 year olds.

Well, in my opinion, some kids make it very obvious very early that they are gifted. Some kids don't. And I don't think it's as simple as Ruf's levels. I don't think there's an algorithm that can tell you conclusively whether your preschooler is gifted. I don't even think the WPPSI will tell you that conclusively. But that doesn't mean that you can't know in some cases.

Now, whether you can know the LOG of your child in the preschool years is a bit sketchier IMO. So much depends on personality and exposure. I think it is possible to identify some HG+ preschoolers, but I think that is pretty rare. I have called my DD "likely HG+" because I don't think she's so, so advanced that it is conclusive at this point (though there are areas in which she performs at the level of a child more than twice her age). I don't think I'd think it was conclusive unless she were doing college-level work.

As far as whether gifted kids can "fizzle out," I guess that depends on your definition. I don't think that gifted kids become neurotypical. Of course they can lose their ability to perform at an advanced level due to physical issues, or they can lose their desire to perform at an advanced level due to emotional issues.

I agree with no5no5. Some gifted kids are clearly gifted as preschoolers (solving simultaneous equations? -- gifted) and some are not. (This also ties in to what Grinity said about the gifted group getting x% "more company" as the kids get older.) This may partly reflect the primitive state of our knowledge of how to test giftedness, but it may also be just a fact of development.

About "fizzling": One thing that may happen is that kids with a narrow skill may start to show their limitations as they get older.

For example, people tend to get very excited about musical or artistic talent at a very young age, but those kids almost certainly aren't really being artistic in the full mature adult sense. They may, for example, just be extremely good mimics of adult performance. If so, as they get older they may not mature as artists any more than any other kid.

Another example might be a kid who is extremely gifted in math, but only math, and maybe also has fairly severe 2e problems that don't become apparent until later. Such a kid may appear to the adults to have "fizzled."

In both these cases, though, I think it's not that the kid really fizzled, its that the adults developed excessive expectations based on the child's early skill.

Myelination is a huge deal in the central nervous sytem as well. So it's conceivable that early myelination could be a general principle in some people that causes both early motor control and early brain development.

This is also something I've often wondered about - in fact, I drafted a post months ago but never got round to posting it. So here it is - it has one study, not exactly about GTness, but it does correlate IQ with early motor development. Don't hold your breath for the size of the effect though....

I've often wondered what was really known about the relationship between a child's very early development and their later giftedness. We have a lot of parents here who mention that their children were early to stand, walk, speak, and are later clearly gifted; we also have a lot who don't fit that pattern. At the same time, people who find their way here are clearly not representative of [any!] population, and so we would not expect their children to be, so just looking at patterns here is not very informative.

[Example, and I hope noone who recognises themselves minds, there have been several even while I've been reading here: a parent of a child under 1yo comes here and says their child is already doing X,Y,Z and they don't know of course but they're here because their child may be gifted. In discussion it emerges that the parent is gifted. At that point clearly yes, it's quite likely that the child is gifted, but that may or may not have anything whatever to do with doing X,Y,Z early, because it has everything to do with having a gifted parent! Somehow, when later it turns out that the parent sticks around and the child is gifted, we've all had reinforced in our minds that early X,Y,Z suggests giftedness, even though that could be a totally bogus association.]

Anyway, so I finally got round to looking for research on this, and here's a reference to one paper I found interesting in case others do to. (The domain I was looking in was peer-reviewed research in reputable journals, involving a large-enough sample of children and not relying on recall of infant development milestones years later after the child's intellectual level is known. These constraints imply, of course, that the research is not likely to relate only to gifted children, and this paper doesn't, but it does include them.)

The paper's interesting, and in a nutshell, it says: yes, there is a statistically robust relationship between early standing, walking, and speaking - but the effect is very small, far too small for the age of milestone achievement of an individual to be useful at all to predict later IQ. They have age-of-milestone against later IQ scatter graphs with best fit lines which are just barely off horizontal: as the abstract says, each month earlier that a child learned to stand corresponded to half an IQ point later. On average, across the population - for an individual, of course, this effect is completely obscured by natural variability.

Now, of course, even this is on only 5000 and some people, so the <em>highly</em> gifted are not that well represented - it's not out of the question that a more striking pattern might show up if you could somehow study just that population. However, for convincing results you really need a prospective study, and of course, for a prospective study to end up with significant numbers of highly gifted children in it, it would have to have a truly huge sample size, so it's not likely to have been done or ever to be done.


Graham K. Murray, MD, Peter B. Jones, MD, PhD, Diana Kuh, PhD, Marcus Richards, PhD
Infant developmental milestones and subsequent cognitive function
Annals of Neurology vol 62 no 2 pp128-136, May 2007
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ana.21120

Abstract

Objective
Developmental delay is associated with a subsequent diagnosis of learning disability. However, the relationship between the age of reaching infant developmental milestones and later intellectual function within the general population remains unresolved. We hypothesized that earlier attainment of developmental milestones would be associated with better subsequent intellectual performance throughout the range of abilities, rather than confined to extremes.

Methods
Developmental data were obtained at age 2 years in the National Survey of Health and Development, a representative sample of 5,362 children born in the United Kingdom in 1946. Data on intellectual function and educational attainment at ages 8, 26, and 53 years were also obtained. Multiple linear regression and logistic regression were used to analyze the effect of age of reaching developmental milestones on subsequent cognition and educational attainment.

Results
The age of reaching developmental milestones was associated with intellectual performance at ages 8, 26, and 53 years; for every month earlier a child learned to stand, there was, on average, a gain of one half of one intelligence quotient point at age 8. Speech development had a small but statistically significant effect on subsequent educational attainment (later developers were less likely to progress beyond basic education); this effect was not apparent for motor development. Effect sizes were reduced when the slowest developers were excluded, but many effects remained significant.

Interpretation
The association between later development and poorer subsequent intellectual function is small, but it does have theoretical implications; we suggest it is secondary to suboptimal cortical-subcortical connectivity.

Some kids are pretty obvious, ie reading by 3.

Others, not so much, especially in minority communities. A lot of parents do not follow the kid's lead, so the kids will catch up when they get into school, if it is a good school. And many people are not perceptive about kids' behavior.

If a kid's parents were smart, but were castigated for it, and them developed bitterness towards intellectual activities, then they more than likely will share that "wisdom" with their kids.

Intelligence is like a seed. It needs a good environment to reach its full potential. If it finds drought and poor soil, then it will always remain stunted.

Early development of intellectual faculties is the "early development" one would look for. Learning to walk early may be easier for high IQ kids, if that is something they want to do. But wanting to sit and read a book will not build coordination. A GT kid will have more interests and spend less time doing gross motor stuff.

Again, given the risk factors, IMHO GT is something doctors should screen for and talk to parents about to ensure that parents get the needed info.

That's an interesting study. I do think the milestones they are looking at are way too limited, though. Most parents (assuming they are not overwhelmingly hothousing the kid) allow kids to play pretty freely their first few years of life. That means that kids are going to do what they are interested in. Some might be desperate to walk/run early and do that while others might want to stack block and work on their fine motor skills. So it shouldn't be surprising if even many normal developing children could be ahead on certain milestones (like walking, for instance).

However, I think it would probably produce better results if they looked at a wider range of milestones and see if there is some sort of correlation between children hitting many of those milestones early (but not all of them, necessarily, considering they might not be as interested in some of them at a young age). It would be quite a bit tricker because parents would have to keep track of a lot more. However, it seems to me you'd have a better chance of predicting giftedness. Just look at these boards on the threads about what your kid did as a toddler/infant. You see a lot of people mentioning various milestones that their kids hit quite early on but those are never going to be the same for each individual kid.

One thing I do find interesting, though, is that the earliest milestones seem to be fairly consistent i.e. that as just newborn the child was very alert, could hold their head up/smile/roll over etc. early. I wonder if that would be more consistent because children at that age simply do not have many options on how they can interact with the world.

I think another study that would be worthwhile doing was to look at kids that are specifically WAY ahead in milestones (not just slightly advanced but years advanced). So look at the kids reading at 2 or speaking 100 words at age 1. I'd be pretty surprised if they don't find a high correlation then!

One obvious thing that is worth repeating is that these studies have to be pretty culturally specific. For instance, I've seem some developmental trackers that have said my daughter should be rolling a ball back and forth at a certain age. We've never actually shown her that because balls are meant to be kicked (we're soccer fans if you couldn't guess it :D) so that would also skew results. FWIW, we did show her awhile back and she started doing it that very day...