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.

We had no clue, DS10 had a speech problem when he was younger, and so at 4 we had him tested by a speech pathologist who stated that he had a lateral slur and that he was highly gifted and that we should consider a private Gifted or HG school. We then had him tested to confirm and moved forward from there. With no yard stick to use we did not see any signs. In looking back there was only one instance that stood out. I was working on a slider puzzle on the computer and I was able to solve in about 2-3 minutes. I was teasing my DW because it took her about 6 minutes to solve. DS10 (Then 4) tried it and solved in under 1 min. At first I thought it a fluke, but he was able to solve them about as fast as I could sometimes even faster. At the time I just thought, he was good at puzzles. It never really sunk in (Even after testing confirmed it) until we had a K party and the kids wanted to play Life. DS (now 5) and I have been playing for the last couple of years. I ended up having to read all the cards and places the other children landed on to them. I got that none of them could read yet, but what surprised me was that when DS and another boy wanted to play battleships, the concept of a grid was too difficult for the other child, but DS picked it up immediately when he was 3 or so. I guess when you live with something you just assume it’s the norm.

I have a theory (based upon a minimal amount of subjects - well 6 to be exact) that girls often "show" their giftedness earlier; and furthermore, even non-gifted girls may even appear ahead of gifted boys.

Like Edwin above, our ds spoke "late" and was very hard to understand. He also bounced off the walls and wouldn't sit still for even a short Disney movie. We have smart friends with smart kids, so we weren't all too impressed with his reading very early. It was more like a party trick. In retrospect, I see a lot more signs. But I don't think we really understood the breadth and depth of his thinking until his speech improved around 4.

Now that I have a dd2.5 who did EVERYTHING early, we're equally hard to impress in the opposite way : sure she spoke in sentences shortly after she was a year- she's a girl after all. AND she doesn't read yet the way ds did. I was pretty excited when I realized she could count to 20 at 18 months. Time will tell how thingss sort out.

We figured it out fairly early. DS always had amazing concentration for long periods from a very young age (especially with books)but when he had a larger understandable vocab at 9 months than some of friend's toddlers it hit us. When he started reading at 2 we realised he was further out there than we thought!

Our dd barely hit the speaking milestone (6 words) at her 18 month check up with the pediatrician. 7-8 months later she was both speaking and reading well. She was obsessed with reading (then and now), and I believe reading helped her learn to speak. (To this day, now 12yo, she makes pronunciation errors due to a huge vocabulary learned from reading.) At the time she was a toddler, there was some fanfare in the press about hyperlexia, and we did consider for a while that her reading could be a sign of that rather than giftedness.

We thought her twin brother ("the control sample") was not gifted because he didn't learn to read until he was 3.5 yo. But it turned out he is too! -- I guessed we figured that out early in elementary school.

When dd6 was about 3 years old when I was asked by two different teachers if she was gifted. Then I research it and it was like an "ah ha" moment because it sure explained all of her quirks! And I didn't realize all of the things she was doing was beyond normal (she was our first).

I've been wondering pretty much since DD was born. On everything but speech, she's always been about 50% ahead of whatever the milestone charts said she should be...

Sitting alone at 4 months and intensely studying and manipulating complex toys, walking at 8 months, paging through books alone by 8 months, "reading" alone by signing the pictures in her books at 12 months, 350+ ASL signs by 17-18 months, knew all her upper and lower case letters by 17-18 months.. Now, by 22 months, I think she knows most of her colors, counts to 3 - one to one, easily does 25 pc jigsaws and helps me with the 33 and 48 pc, knows a few sight words (I haven't asked in awhile), and everywhere we go draws my attention to writing and seems to want to know what the writing says. She also makes a lot of observations that surprise me - like months ago when she asked if my diamond earrings were stars, or when she bit a chunk out of her banana and told me it was a chair. I think that stuff happened before she hit 18 months. She also seems to have a good memory.

But... She's also speech delayed, so all we have is her signs to figure out what she knows and what she's thinking.

I just missed the gifted cut-off at 6, and my husband breezed through school to become a Software Engineer, so I would be surprised if she doesn't at least test close to a gifted cut-off. But at the DYS level? Probably not. It would be great if she could have DYS opportunities, but I don't think hubby or I are that level, so our kids might not be either.

I've been here awhile now and I see myself, my husband and my daughter in so many of the stories on this site...It explains a lot lol.

DD9's cardiologist first noticed when DD was 6 days old - she was having a cardiac ultrasound (her heart is fine, btw ) and she tried to push the ultrasound wand off her chest twice. DH and I were too worried about her heart to notice but the cardiologist was impressed: "they're not supposed to be able to do that at this age."

Fast forward through months of precocious interest in books and comprehended vocabulary to about 11/12 months or so when she could draw faces, and a friend of mine said "you should have her tested."

Then when DD was 16 months I consulted the baby/toddler books to see when kids typically master the alphabet and realized how far ahead she was. That sealed the deal for me, and advanced became the "new normal."

Poor DS came along and mastered the alphabet at 24 months, so I thought he was delayed, lol. Chess at 6 (which I though nothing of - he made it seem so easy - I was stunned when none of his classmates could handle it) and precocious math ability made me think he might have some extra gas in his tank as well.

I'm quite certain neither one are at DYS level... my guess is MG/HG maybe (I'm HG, so there may be a genetic similarity). With DS it's so hard to tell because he has diagnoses (ADHD & language processing deficits) that roadblock him.

A friend of mine had no idea her son was HG until he was tested in grade two - the school thought he had Asperger's (he doesn't). This mom was quite shocked

Isn't it funny how they can all present differently

On a related note: we have an upcoming scheduling conflict between DD9's pull out math gifted program and a class field trip to the airport. She chose math "If I want to know how the airport works I can just google it."

Mmm...purple.

Ah. You have my children living at your house, I see...

I guess I never really thought about it.

Maybe when Mancub was sorting out the baby locks before he could walk (by watching his teenaged sisters manipulate them). OTOH, he was also trying to eat everything from Comet to Vanilla Extract once he'd done it, so it didn't strike me as the most intelligent thing he could have been doing at the time.

I thought it was strange when she spoke two syllable words very clearly way before her first birthday, but didn't give it much thought. She had an unusual interest in books and people said she would probably read early, but I didn't think that much of that either, but when she learned upper and lowercase letters and their sounds at 1.5 and was reading by 2.5, I started to wonder. Her vocabulary was huge, she was able to do hard puzzles with no effort, count, had a frightening memory, could identify shapes very early and on and on and on. She was also intense, actually rather hyper, so we had testing done at 3 and they brought up her giftedness. She has been tested twice but some part of me still doesn't believe she is gifted even though she is performing many years ahead of her grade, but then she will say, write, read, or know something that makes it clear that she is unusually advanced.

Such an interesting question. I didn't really "know" until she was 5, when we had her tested (WISC-IV) by Educational Psychologist that specialized in Gifted Education.

Of course everything made sense then. But I think you know when you have to know. My daughter had gone to an amazing montessori preschool starting at age 2. They let her teach herself to read and write and spell before she was 3 years old. They never drew any unnecessary attention to her "giftedness". The social and emotional support they gave her made her seem and feel that she was always right where she should be even though, looking back, she was light years ahead of children her own age. It was also a mixed age classroom so she had children 2 and 3 years older than her which kept her engaged socially. There was no reason for us to think she was anything except, exactly what and where she should be. They always let her go as far as she needed to, to be satisfied and challenged. They even let her go to the upper elementary to pick up new, more advanced materials in reading, writing science, math, etc. Nothing was age based.

When we sent her to a Private Independent school that claimed to be "rigorous" and promised to "challenge each child at his or her own level" in Kindergarten, we thought we had picked the "perfect" school for our child. We assumed she would be ahead of most the kids as she always had been and that the teacher would differentiate according. We were sooo wrong. By December I thought I would have to pull her out and return to Montessori. She was extremely depressed, yet according to the teacher "the top of the class". The teacher described our child as someone I had never met. She had isolated herself socially, stopped doing the work even though it was things she had mastered at 3 or 4 years old. She had developed severe insomnia. She asked to go to ANY other school except her own and withdrawn herself in every area of her life.

The teacher literally was perplexed at how to engage our child. We then had her tested for her grade level which was 3rd grade month 9 which is essentially a 4th grade level. The teacher was trying to "challenge" our child with 1st and 2nd grade material when she had mastered through grade 3. At that point I HAD to KNOW. Was she really "gifted"? Although at this point we were not surprised that she was gifted but we were surprised at how highly gifted she was. She tested over 4 deviations above the norm and was Profoundly Gifted. I would say at that point we "knew". Meaning, we finally "got it" with our daughter. There is such a big difference between moderately gifted and profoundly gifted. If we had gone on assuming that she was just regular "gifted" we would have never "got it", like we do now.

Looking back after all the research, reading, and education I have done now, if I would have known all that I know now, I would have "known" much earlier. Like when she walked at 9 months. When she showed her pediatrician at 18 months the difference between numbers and letters. When she spelled the words cat, hat, mat, and sat when she was 3 and then read them back and explained the "at" family word pattern. I guess I could have "known" then. But I didn't need to know because before Kindergarten she had everything she needed and more. As long as your child has what they need and are getting academic, social and emotional support above and beyond what they need, labels and testing are irrelevant. Once you need that info to advocate and make decisions based on that information--I highly recommend getting that information so that you can advocate accurately and with confidence as we have been able. But only when you need that information. Based on what we learned we were able to do a full grade skip and it has been life changing for our daughter.
I hope that perspective helps.

Allison

Oh, that is frame-worthy. We are still coming to terms with what it means to be "PG" instead of MG or even HG. We've been more than a decade in letting go of what is "not possible," too. Sometimes those things that serve as niggling doubts (nahhhh.. couldn't be... and yet...) are our only real clues to solving problems.

When we see problems, now, we've learned that it isn't always horses, but we ought to at least consider zebra causes as well because there is no "rule of thumb" for development in a child this unusual. So sure, we can seek advice from others... but the bottom line is that all PG children are their own singularities in some ways. When you've met one PG kid, you've met one PG kid. KWIM?

Once that asynchrony gets just so big, the interplay between areas of strength and personality quirks becomes just as critical in figuring out "HUH??" moments as predicted developmental stages are in most children.

Boy, do I ever wish that I'd known that sooner.