When you had your first child, if he/she is gifted, who noticed first? You or your spouse/SO/other family?

I was reading a book, I think it was one of Delisle's, and it said that often it's the mother who notices first and the father is actually often in denial.

That is how it was with us. I noticed when our son was a little past a year old that he was "working" beyond age level. I tried to show my husband all the "signs" that said he would likely be identified later as gifted, but he was skeptical.

Now that our DS (only child) is 4.6, and is very obviously working beyond his age group, my DH finally recognizes that he's not typical. He still can't choke out "gifted", but I'm okay with that.

Neither of us noticed. We were both floored when we met with the pyschologist after her psych-ed assessment. I couldn't even form a coherent sentence, I was that shocked. DH still asks if we're sure the pyschologist was right. Knowing her 2e struggles and learning more about GT kids has helped me to understand why she is so 'underground' with her abilities. DH has done no reading or researching on the subject. He is quite content to let me learn and tell him the highlights. He seems to get it, but he doesn't talk or think or worry about near as much as I do. But come to think of it, that is pretty much how everything else in our life works, too. I'm the planner and the detail person and he does the grunt work and keeps my OCD in check.

I think it would have been at around 18 months I feel pretty sure she would identified as gifted. My husband thought I was mad when I tentatively suggested it. Even though she was reading at 2.5 neither he nor the few family members I'd told thought anything of it. He came round a bit as he saw more and more other kids, but it wasn't until she was tested and he had an 'expert' opinion that he took it seriously. When we told the few family members we'd already been discussing things with her % they said 'oh, of course, we've all tested like that'... So I think for them what she was doing was just normal.

Kathleensmum, I can so relate to your story re you doing the research and DH the grunt work. I laughed reading that as word for word that's what happens here.

We really didn't notice with our first child. We really chalked everything up to "splinter skills" (she learned a little of this, a little of that, but maybe couldn't connect the dots.) Her grandparents were the ones that said we must have worked hard with her make her so smart. We knew we hadn't forced her or been formal about her learning. So we began to think she was "advanced", but it wasn't until she started school and she was SO bored that we realized she was "gifted". Then it was confirmed through testing.

I did at a very early age, and I can remember DH coming home from a deployment ( he was gone from 6 months of age until the week before he turned 2 the first go around ) and said are you sure he knows enough for his age, I think hes a bit behind and I looked at him like he was friggen nutso...boy has he ate his words ever since! He knew DS was smart after seeing him go through the last few years ago school and struggle with fitting in but being way over qualified achievement wise but I think hearing it from the testers in our post conference this summer finally hit home that this is something we need to deal with on a united front and he truly understood what I've been struggling to deal with all along with teachers and everyone with DS due to the levels he learns at.

With ds6 it was his preschool teachers who never stopped mentioning to me that he was gifted. I kept saying to myself, yeah, right, they just like him because he is so cute or because he is well behaved or because the class was full of English Language Learners who didn't speak English so of course he looks like a genius. I found tons of excuses not to believe them until he turned 5.

Dd's first grade teacher, public school, no less- told me I should either homeschool or move her to a private school because our system would never meet her needs. I knew she was bright, but that shocked me for some reason. We've stuck with the system, but it was a struggle until last year when she went almost exclusively on homebound- it gives them no excuse to not allow her subject acceleration.

I noticed when she was 2 and started reading billboards that announced 'Kids Eat Free on Tuesday' at her favorite restaurant. Hubs didn't believe it so we took her to the library and started pulling books off the shelf. And the rest is history...

I suspected pretty early on. For awhile i was just impressed by his smarts but then I noticed other signs. At less than 2 and a half he would sit patiently by the digital clock and wait for the minutes to go by so he could identify the numbers. He would do this for almost 30 minutes. He did this two or three times a day for a week. He learned to identify the letters both lower case and upper case in a matter of a few days just by doing a puzzle. We were using the puzzle to occupy him while he was sitting on the potty when we were potty training him but though he learned the ABCs inside and out he was still not potty trained! He was about 18 month or so. Family members as well as spouse recognize that he is very smart but not gifted. DH is gifted himself and so are other members of the family so they just see him as normal. I work as a teacher so I was more familiar with typical development. DS is now in a gifted program.

It was my SIL that noticed first, when dd8 was about 6 or 7 months old my SIL kept commenting that she's seen a lot of babies in her time, and babies just don't know the things this baby knows (dd was able to point out things like her belly button and mouth, nose, things like that when asked)

I work as a physical therapist for kids under 3 so I know child development like the back of my hand. I knew each of my kids were way ahead developmentally from the very beginning. My husband and I were both identified as gifted so I kind of expected any of our offspring to be accelerated.

The only one who shocked me by exactly how "gifted" she was was my dd. I thought her older brothers were so advanced and then she came along doing everything more quickly and just had a different approach to everything.

It was pretty clear to us by the time DD was oneish. I'd say we both noticed at the same time. She was a very precocious toddler, though, and looks a little less "out there" now. Her ped also said something about it at her 1-year visit.

With DS, we had the expectation that he would be similar. His early development was slower and his speech was not as startling as DD's, though still very precocious. His fine motor skills well outpace hers at this age. I'm still not sure how he will test. He is not as obvious as DD.

I didn't really even know what it meant to be "gifted". I didn't realize that a child being advanced meant that they were gifted. That label floated around for a long time. I think the teachers thought we knew all these things about our child when we had no clue. Being in montessori was part of this, as she was pretty much able to work as far ahead as she wanted, but it obscured what she was doing versus other children.

I think it was a given that DD1 would be intelligent. DH and I are high testers/underacheivers. She was also very alert and calm from the start, like she was just taking it all in. I don't think we actually considered the "g word" because of the way the schools use it and I didn't want to use it until we had the tests last year...but when she was 2 1/2 exactly, a friend did a psychological test on her and said she was 2 deviations above normal...when he told me her answers to some of the questions, I could see how her mind was working differently...she was also trying to say "no thank you" well before her first birthday, it sounded like "monkey shoes". She also read a billboard out loud and I almost crashed the car, I was so shocked! lol!

DD2 is only 4 1/2 and we haven't had any formal evaluations, but she has a very keen mind for singing and song lyrics. She makes up songs constantly. She's VERY VERBAL and correctly used the word deadfall in a sentace the other day, then confirmed it's meaning and who had told her and where they were...Other favorite words of hers are fabulous and glamorous. She is very "conversational" in tone and people often think she is already in kindergarden (grrr age restrictions, but we are working on that!). She is likely gifted, but in a very different way than DD1.

My DH and I were both in gifted programs as kids, so I suspected that our DD might turn out to be gifted. I spotted the signs first, probably because I was looking for them.

However, I think I was more surprised than my DH at how highly she scored on her assessment tests when the school tested her.

She had not reached many milestones as early as I had as a young child, so I think I underestimated her giftedness. Looking back, I think her giftedness traits follow the pattern of her father's instead of her mother's and so she didn't mirror my own particular development that closely.

Dd was 2 months and we were at the Harvard Yale game in Cambridge and I went with her to the Charles River hotel to wait for the others and get some water. A woman came up to me and was talking about DD and her intensity of looking at her surroundings. I was struck that this woman would come out of her seat to talk to me about it, that it was that unusual. A month later -- you know how you had those car seats that fit into the stroller and the kid faces you -- Dd would not let up screaming as we were doing errands, I finally turned her on her belly so she could see forward. I had to pull the stupid stroller and hold her since I couldn't strap her in. I knew something was up with this kid.

It took my husband, the pediatrician, two WISC-IV tests, and two psychs to convince me. Saying the "g" word only became possible after the 2nd WISC, and it was still said only to my dh --in a whisper and with an apologetic look.

my parents. they both made numerous comments when DS was just a baby and I thought they were just doting grandparents. at 18m-20m is when i understood they were right.

When she was just a baby my mom (a former teacher) kept remarking on it and asked when DD would be old enough for an IQ test. I thought she was out of her mind. It wasn't until DD did get that IQ test that I started to really see it. I just assumed all kids were like mine.

We did, but we chalked it up to bias. Our son's daycare teacher came up to us and asked what are we going to do about him?

when she was an infant, I was surprised, even startled, when she said "bigger" words very clearly. I actually thought I was hallucinating since it never occured to me that an infant could repeat words the way she did, but I didn't think of it in terms of intelligence yet. At about 18 months, it was hard to ignore that she was making big leaps ahead of other kids (knowing letter sounds, complex shapes, one to one counting) and by 2.5 she was reading, began writing, drawing. It was starting to be clear that she was a bright child, but I think it was at 3 that I started to think she might be gifted. Even now, at 5 years 3 months, I go back and forth between denial and certainty. Even with testing clearly showing she is gifted, there are times I think that isn't accurate and that the test was a fluke.

A lot of people in this thread have indicated that it was normal within their families to be gifted. This goes against my limited understanding of genetics and intelligence, but it may make sense given that this forum acts as a selection bias.

In general, my understanding is that the offspring of people who are exceptional within their populations will regress toward the mean of their population norms. So, for instance, if a bunch of people with IQs 2+ standard deviations above their population average were to mate, on average their offspring wouldn't have IQs as high as their parents. But, some of the offspring would have IQs just as high or higher than their parents (due to variance) and those are the parents represented on this forum.

If this is correct, then I think it may have an important impact on what expectations these parents may have regarding their grand children.

If this is wrong, someone please tell me why.


Oh, and as for the main topic of this thread, I'm the one who first considered that my daughter may be exceptional. She hasn't been tested or anything, so we don't have absolute confirmation... but her daycare provider has spoken to us about our daughter being a "little adult" who speaks like children years older than she is. I'm also the only parent who seems to be terribly concerned about the special needs that may be associated with her intelligence. But that might be because I was cold-stored (opposite of hot-housing)by my parents and in school.

Always happy to poke a hole in a stereotype... I was the one who noticed, and I'd have to say the very first time I noticed she was different was in the delivery room. Every night before my DD6 was born I'd read aloud to her and my wife, and I'd always start it out by saying her name in the same tone, so she'd recognize me when she came out. Then came the moment where she was placed, swaddled and screaming, in my arms. I said her name in that same tone, she stopped crying immediately, and her eyes were perfectly focused on me and tracking my relative motion as I rocked her side to side. The books said she shouldn't be able to track moving objects for another few weeks, so that wasn't normal.

At two months old we couldn't get her to wear anything she hadn't picked out. We had to hold her up to the closet so she could rifle through and make a selection. That wasn't normal.

At six months old we figured we'd come up with some baby signs to make things easier, but by the time she got there she already had words for everything she needed, and more besides. Her first intelligible word was "Doodlebop." That wasn't normal.

Later on, my wife started teaching her first colors, then shapes, then letters and numbers, so she'd be ready for school when the time came. When DD was 3 and already beyond all that and working on letter sounds and writing, I kept asking my wife, "What are we going to do with her when she gets to kindergarten?" She just shrugged her shoulders and wondered why I thought there was anything unusual going on.

DW vehemently avoided the "gifted" label even when DD was being screened for it in kindergarten, but now that we've been dealing with the school system for over a year now and she's taken some time to do some reading on the topic, she's a lot more comfortable with it... especially since it explains issues we've had with emotional intensity and perfectionism.

It's wrong, or at least, it's misleading because it has hidden assumptions that are incorrect. No time right now to write a long post, and writing a short one may be even harder, but let me try...

I think the easiest way to see that there must be something wrong with the general argument In general, my understanding is that the offspring of people who are exceptional within their populations will regress toward the mean of their population norms. is to ask yourself "which population?". Suppose you took a two humans who, considered as humans, were perfectly average - let's take in height, since we're dealing with a general argument not something specific to giftedness. If you consider them as members of the population of humans, you expect their children to be, on average, the same height as them, since they're already at the population mean. However, you can just as easily consider them as members of the population of primates, or mammals, or if they happen to be Danes (so they're below the mean height for that population!) as Danes. Depending on which population you consider, the "population mean" to which you expect their children's height to regress can be quite different. However, the children are the same people with the same inheritance, so this is obviously nonsense. Hence we should be suspicious about the original general statement.

What is true is that if you:
- took a random sample of adult humans
- measure their IQs
- caused them to mate :-)
- measured the IQs of the offspring
- then looked at the adults who'd scored very highly, and checked the IQs of their offspring;
Then you'd undoubtedly find that the offspring of highscoring parents tended to have lower IQs than their parents. A major cause of this (note hedging wording :-) is measurement uncertainty and error: since the highscoring parents were, prior to scoring highly, expected to be average, our Bayesian expectation of their "true" IQ, or if you like what we'd expect them to score if we tested them again, should not be the same as the previous measurement but somewhere in between that and the mean. Therefore it shouldn't be surprising to find their children in that range - even if IQ were 100% heritable with 100% certainty, e.g. a child's IQ was always identical with its mother's, we'd expect that.

However, the situation is not very relevant to what we see here. Most obviously, parents who self-report as gifted here do so on the basis of lifelong experience of being them, not on the basis of a single IQ test. Measurement uncertainty is therefore not very relevant. It's possible that they have a non-standard definition of gifted in mind, but then, they're likely to apply the same non-standard definition to their children, so this hardly matters.

We *also* have a great deal of selection bias, as you say. Moreover, presence here suggests an unusual degree of interest in optimising the environmental factors affecting children's intellectual development, whatever they are, which might also be expected to play a role in tending to cause children of parents here to have higher IQs than children of parents who were similar except that they were not here.

There may, of course, be genuinely interesting genetic things going on - IQ, in as far as it is genetic at all, is clearly influenced by many many genes, and what you expect of children of people with a given IQ will depend on just which relevant gene variants their parents had, and then what really happens in a population will depend on the extent to which people who actually produce offspring tend to have the same gene variants as one another... no doubt it gets very complicated, and we aren't close (and probably never will be) to really understanding the genetics of intelligence.

Here is a post I wrote about similar issues a few months back.

I very proudly used to point out to DH that he was ahead of all the baby milestones in the books - but I was just more relieved that he was okay and not going to struggle. When I saw him at 10 months crawling to a pile of baby board books and paging through them one after the next (as soon as he could crawl) I knew that no other babies that age that we knew were anywhere near to doing that (or even wanting to do it). I still didn't actually connect it with anything in my mind though.

My MOM pointed it out to me after baby and I went away with her for a week - he was 19 months old. The sheer volume of stuff I took with for him to do was the first sign she needed apparently. The amount of energy I needed to deal with him was another she said. And the verbal development, the fine motor skills, the insatiable questions and the way he just learnt everything so fast were apparently all "not normal". When we got home she gently suggested that I "look into" gifted development of children. Took me 2 weeks to process what she said. Took me another year or so (and 2 VERY awesome in-the-computer friends) to help me accept and deal with it.

Made the second and third babies easier as then I knew what to expect.

BTW - I am also the one that reads and stuff and DH listens as I blather on about it. He has learnt by osmosis I think cause he really does get it

I noticed first, as 'at-home mom'! I had my educated suspicions anyway that they probably would be gifted, given my husband's brain and the history of both of our families - but then from very early, there were the obvious signs. My husband was less attuned, being one of those fortunate 'successful gifted' students within his normal school framework. To be honest, my suspicions were first confirmed by absolute strangers - while I would be pushing both of my tiny children along in a shopping cart at any given store, for example. People would stop and comment on how alert they both were at such young ages. I remember one man asking, "Are they gifted?" And I just replied, "Probably"...! And our Dr. told me up front that my first-born was going to be 'very smart'.

All four of mine are labeled "gifted", as have been dh, former dh, and I. It never occurred to me that my kids wouldn't be-- which I guess disappointed the kindergarten teachers the first time around, because they came to me with this idea that my kids were gifted like it was some kind of a present they were handing me, and I was pretty much "well, yeah, no kidding".
Don't know what that does to the statistical discussion. I will also add that the first three all have had extremely similar scores, even despite being tested at different times, by different people. For whatever that's worth...

Thanks for your concern ColinsMum, but as I indicated, my knowledge is limited in respect to the genetic impact on intelligence, which was not the focus of your post.

We have numerous people in this thread proclaiming that very high intelligence is normal for their families, and even that they expected their children would probably be gifted before their children even displayed any gifted traits. Of this group of parents with high expectations for their children, we mostly have posters from the group that turned out to be right, because of the nature of this forum. The ones who turned out to be wrong aren't posting here, but we should at least acknowledge that they might exist, and accept that these high expectations may be unreasonable.

All measurement error aside, it seems to me that a family of Danes who have been exceptionally tall by Danish standards for a couple generations shouldn't hang their hopes on having a child that is equally exceptional in height. I believe it is still more likely that the child ends up with a gene combination resulting in less exceptional height than his/her parents and grandparents, because the particular gene combinations that made the parents and grandparents so tall are unlikely to be repeated in the subsequent generation.

DAD22, perhaps it's because I posted in haste, but you've missed my point entirely.

What would you say to a Danish couple who are short for Danes, but tall for humans? According to your theory, should they expect their children to be taller than them (because they regress to the mean for Danes) or shorter than them (because they regress to the mean for humans)?

Undoubtedly some exist, and I accept (and already accepted) your point about the selection bias that reading only things written by members of this forum imposes. These high expectations may be unreasonable, but actually I don't see any reason to think so.

I've already explained why I'm not convinced by your theoretical argument. Here's some anecdata to explain why my intuition is that the expectations you're questioning may in fact be quite reasonable. When I think about couples I know who both work in fields where high intelligence is the norm (and as it happens, I can think of many such couples) I can easily think of many who have children who are obviously highly intelligent; I can't right now think of any where the children appear to be less intelligent than their parents [ETA: on further reflection I can think of one case]. Personally I'm more inclined to attribute the effect to environment than to genes, but whatever the balance there, my experience - as observer, not only as family member - supports the kind of expectation you're questioning. If you have evidence or a sound theoretical argument that the expectation is unreasonable, I'd be quite interested in that, since I know my anecdotes are not data.

ColinsMum, I fully expect Danish parents to have children that regress toward Danish means, not human means, not primate means, nor mammalian means. This effect was observed and quantified in the 19th century.

From Wiki:
"Galton coined the term regression to describe an observable fact in the inheritance of multi-factorial quantitative genetic traits: namely that the offspring of parents who lie at the tails of the distribution will tend to lie closer to the centre, the mean, of the distribution."

What I don't know is how knowledge of the grandparents or even great grandparents would affect the expected outcome. It seems to me that if we know the parents and grandparents were all tall, then the regression effect would be reduced (compared to cases in which we know nothing about the grandparents), but I don't think it would go away.

Regression to the mean deals with random error in the measurement of something. It tells us nothing about that something.

It only applies to measurement, not the particular cause and effect of a given thing you are studying. The cause and effect have to be established before we can measure and then say what any mean is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean

In talking about IQ, we can say someone's IQ is Z and on any given day they will test within X points of it. As they take the test over time the scores will regress to the mean of Z.

As for kids. It has already been shown that intelligence is both heritable and is affected by environment. There is also the Flynn Effect. Thus one would expect that children of highly intelligent and committed parents would also be intelligent, probably more so.

Based on the above, "families" with parents of similar traits do not "slide back" to "average" which is the underlying assumption of misusing "regression to the mean" to describe a particular person's performance.

Another way it could be misused is the "all kids catch up" by third grade. Intelligence is not something that goes away as kids get older all things being equal. IQ remains as a fundamental part of their individuality.

Regression in genetics is different than regression to the mean in statistics. The genetic regression depends on the trait under study. A tall family will have tall kids. They will not suddenly become Hobbits. And regression in genetics is still a way to "account" for things that cannot be measured and hence are "random" in appearance.

All I know is that low IQ runs in families, which is how you can represent multiple generations for the same disability of mental retardation (70 or below, for my purposes).

More precisely, we could say that "g" the theoretical and controversial idea of the general intelligence behind IQ does not normally change. There are several reasons why IQ--attempts to measure g--might change, especially from younger ages to older ages. For example, my own measured IQ changed 24 points between second grade and sixth grade, but that does not mean there was an abrupt change in my cognitive ability.

And by the way, my own set of siblings includes people with IQs in the genius, mentally retarded, and high average ranges, as well as some whose IQs have never been measured.

Mine has teen pregnancies. My grandmother got to become a great-great-grandmother before she died.

Since "crystallized intelligence" relies on acquired information, such as vocabulary, there is a greater environmental impact.