Hi Everyone,

I have a 15 month old daughter, who is my first child. I know, try to hear me out before rolling your eyes at another person who thinks their baby is exceptional!

I will start with my main goal and then explain where she is at, and hopefully you can tell me how I can achieve balance with her. I am hoping to avoid any hothousing while making sure that she feels stimulated and challenged by her environment based on her interests. At this point I am just using my intuition as reaching out to many sources including my pediatrician has proved not very helpful.

At her 9 month appointment was the first time I thought something might be going on. If you asked her, she could tell you the sounds a dog, sheep, cow, and snake say. The nurses made comments about this, and I just thought it was cute. Fast forward to her first birthday, and I was making one of those chalkboard signs with a spot for their words. We along with her childcare provider started writing her words, and was surprised that she had over 100 words before she turned 1. This seemed cool to me, but I was encouraged by our child care provider to start looking into what is average.

As recommended on other posts I have read Dr. Ruf's levels of giftedness and have been astonished at what she can now do as compared to those who have tested gifted in the book.

What has me wondering what to do next is her love of letters and the alphabet. We put those foam letters in her bath and noticed that she knew quite a few of them at 14 months. I showed her all of them, out of order and at 14 months she could tell correctly say the name of every letter in the alphabet, as well as 5 numbers and 3 shapes.

She is now 15 months and can correctly identify all lower case and upper case letters of the alphabet, count to 10 (although sometimes she skips 5), identify the shape star, square, triangle, diamond, rectangle, moon. What is really interesting is that she looks for letters and shapes all over her environment. Signs in the airport, things printed on the wall at a restaurant, numbers on the curb, etc.

As a first time mom, it has been very strange to engage with other moms of kids the same age. Sometimes people ask me what classes/flashcards I have her doing, sometimes people ask why I don't just let her be a kid. It's really frustrating! I am a school counselor, so I definitely work with kids - but high school kids so my knowledge of early childhood education is mostly just from research and instinct. We do let her watch some videos with ABC's and numbers on them from youtube, but they are only a few minutes long. I truly think she just is very interested in letters and numbers - and sees it as a treat to go into her bath so she can visit her letters.

Here are the basics:
Very empathetic - would cry when another baby cried from birth to today.
Rolled over at 4 months
Crawled at 5 months
First word around 6 months - hard to tell because of babble.
At 9 months could say 4 animal sounds...
Walked at 9 months
about 75 words at 11 months
Over 300 words at 14 months
Currently at 15 months - can identify all lower case and uppercase letters of the alphabet
Knows about 6 shapes
Knows about 4 colors (this is the one she is working on the most)
Can count to 10 and identify numbers out of order up to 10.
Flips around numbers and letters to make other things (9 to 6) etc.
Says 3-4 word sentences such as "all done milk" and "oh no dropped it", "off sleep sack please" that kind of thing.

My question is this: should I be exposing her to the sounds that letters make and taking her to the next level of literacy since she already knows all the letters? Is that too much for someone her age, or am I just meeting her where she is at because of her interests? I'm not interested in being a tiger mom or hothousing her, but I want to find the balance of exposing her to the things she's interested in and also just letting her be and explore her world.

If it matters, she will be starting daycare next month at 3 days a week, and will be home 2 days a week. I do think she will get some exposure to early learning there, as well as learning how to be in a group, share, control your body etc. which I think are valuable.

On the weekends and days she is home we normally read, do puzzles, go to outings such as the library, swim lessons, playdates, we have a zoo membership which also has an aquarium, go to the park, etc. She gets a lot of child-centered interaction, I just want to be sure i'm not pushing her too hard.

My mom taught me to read early, and is pushing me to start teaching her - so that's part of where my question comes from.

Thanks so much for listening - this is a lonely business!

Welcome to the group!

You DD sounds gifted to me :-).

My DS7 was very interested in the alphabets about the same age as your DD did. All he was interested was alphabets. He learned all his alphabets from the kids shows and iPad apps teaching alphabets. He also learned phonics on his own. He even started drawing the alphabet in characters (like in the kids' videos) and bubble letters when he turned 3. What we did was to follow his interests. If he liked an app or toy that was related to alphabet or phonic, we let him have it. He was interested in geography mostly US and the World maps when he was 5. We provided resources for him to learn on those. We never pushed him to learn these. He just picked it up himself.

So I say just follow your DD's lead. I think the activities you are doing with her are great. You are already exposing her to different things. She'll ask for more if she's interested in something. You don't even need to ask :-)

It is definitely a challenge raising a gifted kid, and you've come to the perfect group for advice and suggestion.

Welcome!

I would say no amount of pushing is ok. Pushing is a desire of others for the child to learn something. Follow the child's lead... s/he will let you know what s/he is curious about and interested in learning and doing.

Reading to your child, and pointing to the words as you go sounds great. If the child wants to, s/he can participate without prompting by holding the book, pointing to words or pictures, turning pages, asking questions, and/or saying words.

Even little kids can be great at initiating, and this helps them develop a sense of internal locus of control, an important building block toward acknowledging responsibility for their choices and actions.

Sounds like you have a lovely little girl. Indigo's advice is also spot-on.

Formal teaching at this age isn't appropriate, but a love of books, words, and numbers is easy to foster.

Pointing to the words while reading is great advice, and that was sufficient for my youngest to pick up words as a two-year-old. Rhyming books are lovely for that age (Monkey Puzzle with "No, No, No!" was hugely popular here), as are conversation-type books (like Elephant and Piggie) that often use interesting effects to highlight words.

Clearly, what you're doing is working for your child, so you can ignore any naysayers (this skill will come in handy in the years to come).

Daycare indeed has a different focus, but I find play-based learning at preschool brilliant for my boys. Academics are a strength for these kids, so getting to work on other areas (fine motor for my oldest and social skills with agemates for the youngest) has proved tremendously useful, since non-academic skills are very important both in life and later schooling.

My biggest piece of advice is to avoid any academic based preschools. By the time she gets to age 3-4 it will be super boring for her and she will be way ahead of all the other kids. I can't tell you how annoying it will be when she gets to that age and you have no where to put her and they do the same things in school year after year after year. Kindergarten is a repeat of all the letter/number nonsense. Research options for early entrance to K or just skip it altogether. DD skipped K and it didn't matter in the slightest.

Thank you all so much for taking the time to respond to me, and for the extremely useful advice! I think I will just tell my mom she doesn't need to be pushed to read right now

We just enrolled her in a Reggio Emilia based children's center at our local children's museum. It's very art and play based, and they will move her around to different classes based on her needs.

I work at an independent school that has a preschool program starting at age 3, so at that time she will come to school with me. They use the primary years program from the IB programme, and teach Spanish, learn to swim, and are happy to meet her needs wherever she is at. I work closely with the counselor for the preschool, and she has said that they have had kids like my daughter and outlined their plan for them.

One more question - my daughter LOVES apps and videos having to do with letters, but I worry about screen time. I know the AAP have lifted the zero to 2 screen time ban, and many say it can be good for kids - but what are your limits with your gifted kids? She could watch them for hours if I let her. What do you think is a good limit? She does indeed learn a TON while watching.

Thanks again, really appreciate your insights!

This is incredibly helpful, thank you so much!

I would get normal toys as much as possible. If she loves letters, letter alphabet puzzles (that are not a choking hazard), leapfrog toys, board books, etc. Toys where she needs to use some fine motor skills other than using an index finger to point at things. DS loved the tupperware shape sorter that looks like a ball that opens in the middle when he was that age, or a month or two older.
when schools tell you "we have other kids like that." I see that as a red flag. No, they do not have other kids that are reading fluently at age 3, and can do math computations, or it would be unlikely. When I told DS's preschool teachers he could read they were just like "that's nice" then about 5 months later they said "Did you know he could read? he read a picture book in the library out loud, do you have this book at home?" Trust me when I say that they don't get it. It's nice that they try to differentiate the instruction, though. But it's not like they are going to be able to send a 3 year old to a third grade class.

Ha!

This happened to us with DD's daycare. I mentioned to her teacher that she was starting to pick up some sight words at about 20 mos... and her teacher said "yeah, it's pretty normal for them to start identifying things on a page"... A few months later she was reading a counting book and DD counted backwards and her teacher mentioned that "she does that every time and it blows me away! did you know she cant count backwards?"

I just said that DD is running out of ways to surprise me.

I too would question an abundance of 3 yo that can read fluently, unless the program is a magnate for gifted kids, which is possible...

As far as your daughter, as others have said, follow her lead. Let her play on tablets/leap pads... I do with my daughter and I have seen her work out some motor issues and frustrations with it. Too much will be based on your child, though encourage a variety of things.

One of the things we did in our home is make sure that all the bottom shelves of book shelves had children's books. There are 6 book shelves in our house, one in her room, one in ours, and 4 others around... any room she goes into has reading material for her available and accessible. I don;t consider this pushing, as a request to read is one I get several hundred times a day.

I hate the idea that there is a prescribed amount of anything that is just right for a child. Parent the kid you have, not the one people think you do.

she sounds awesome.

Although a common misconception, AAP has not lifted the zero to 2 screen time ban.


See it here: https://www.aap.org/en-us/advocacy-and-policy/aap-health-initiatives/pages/media-and-children.aspx

Further, they recommend less than 2 hours a day of total screen time for children and teens.


The consensus among researchers is that the best outcomes for children, especially young children, come from traditional, free form play. Think blocks (you can make anything!), dolls (you can pretend anything!), paper (you can make and pretend anything!), coloring (you can draw anything and then pretend any story!) combined with interacting with real people (they have feelings and won't always do what you want!).

Additionally, IMO, there is good research based evidence that some children may be more vulnerable than others to negative impacts from environmental factors. Sadly, there is not currently any way to tell if a specific child will be impacted and the negative impacts may not be visible for years. I haven't seen research on it, but IMO, screen learning for small children may also delay learning how to learn from live human teachers.

With my own DD and her friends, we saw that screen time had the most impact on what they weren't doing instead. No building imperfect doll houses out of bark, or having pretend picnics with fake food made out of dandelions, when you can sit in front of a screen and have someone else do all the heavy lifting of imagining the story for you. Also less reading, less lego building, less talking to real people, when the entertaining screen is so much easier. The kiddos with less screen time were much better at imagining a story and finding things to do.

I have a 15 month old too. 😍 He is not verbally inclined so I'm completely fascinated reading about your baby's language interest and ability!! There's plenty of evidence validating that a parent's gut instinct is very accurate in identifying gifted children. Trust yourself!

As far as screens, I'm not okay with passive consumption of media for myself or my kids. no television here. (game console for occasional DVDs and rare Minecraft play for my oldest).

My 15-month-old loves touchscreen games he can manipulate. Daddy is teaching him to play Clash of Clans. 🙄 My guy loved the Smart Baby sorting games for iPad, but he has moved on to physical puzzles, trying to put lids on containers and extend his bath by putting the drain plug back in. He enjoys Little Write iPad app, although he can't yet trace a curved line on his own and loses interest. When he is sleepy he enjoys Starfall ABC's app. We cuddle up together, he picks the letters (totally random) and I sing/talk along. Sharing the names of the apps because I had a hard time finding anything decent.

Screen time is limited to rough bedtimes when he would rather fight sleep and scream. Screen babysitting if I'm stuck running errands and he's fussy. Or any time I have patience to deal with his tantrum when screen time ends. 😂. so not very often. Mostly because he gets bored with the apps and starts getting into the wallet section of my tablet case!!

This would be mine as well.

Also, we didn't have great experiences with skipping ahead in classrooms before pre-k age. There's so much social and emotional stuff going on before 4 years old. I regret allowing DS's preschool to skip him ahead by a year when he was 2.5. My daughter will stay with her same aged peers until 4.

My son was ready for academics at 4 and we did find a great "transitional K" with gifted peers, just by chance, and that year of pre-k may end up being our favorite year of school ever. We're only on 1st grade though!

When it comes to screen time, I think it's all about balance. Prior to having my daughter I was of the mind that there'd be zero screen time until she was two. That went out the window. I have tried to limit it, but we have some better days than others. There are days my kids have watched way too much Sprout. But, I'll say that my five year old, screen time having daughter has an incredible imagination, a creativity that blows me away, is a stellar reader who LOVES books and will always choose to go outside over watch a screen.. I think the CONTENT of the screen time matters greatly as well. We do almost all educational programming for the most part. My daughter does watch some My Little Pony and what not now, but it's mostly educational. She's allowed to turn her brain off at times though, as we should all be allowed to. In all things - BALANCE! Relax, enjoy your unique little one and just follow her lead.. She'll show you where she wants to go.

You have received some excellent advice! Couple of additional thoughts to consider. In consideration for preschools. I have heard that the Reggio preschools sometimes are not as great for the off the charts kids as you might think. The projects are determined by what most of the kids want to do and they don't go as deeply as your child might want to go (they cater to the average class). You didn't mention Montessori...I have heard there can be great variability in approach and some gifted kids find they have too much repetition and rigidity. We did play based and Dd was still bored, but did gain a lot from the daycare even though they had no idea what to do for her lol. Last thing, most likely your little one will read early...if she doesn't, don't be alarmed. She will read when she wants to. Dd knew the letters at 20 months, but would not admit to reading until she turned 5 and then mastered it fairly quickly.
Good luck and try to enjoy the journey😀

My son picked up his letters from me reading the Dr. Suess ABC book. Not sure when exactly, but he knew them all at 18 months when I bought him magnetic letters on a hunch he knew them already. Around 20 months I sang that song the popular fridge toy sings (the b says buh, the b says buh, every letter makes a sound the b says buh) for each letter and DS picked up all the sounds the first time I sang them. After that I made a few words with his magnet letter and sounded them out for him. I never asked him to do anything, he watched and listened to me because he was interested. Next thing I knew he was spelling words with his magnets on a daily basis.

DS didn't actually start reading until around 3, presumably when all of the aspects of reading readiness were sufficiently developed. He would get all into reading for a time... and then completely lose interest. Each time he would start reading again he would be ready for a new level of books. Other than encouraging him to finish a book if he started it, he's mostly been in charge of his own reading progress other than me telling him the sounds and showing him how they form words that one day.

We didn't have any electronic toys when he was little and he never even saw a screen on in our home until 22 months when I got a tablet for Christmas. He loves screen time, but now, at 6, it's still pretty limited. Once a week he can watch a movie and other than that we alternate days he can use the screen with days he plays outdoors after school. Most days he gets no screen time.

Around 18 months his favorite toy was Keva Planks and he build all sorts of things with them. He also loved Play Doh, Duplo, and puzzles. I took so many pictures of the things that he made (green poop with play doh!?!) and I'm very glad we spent that time playing together without screens.

There's nothing a screen can teach your child that you can't teach better. Building with blocks is an especially excellent time for presenting new vocabulary that they pick right up on because they are engaged. They learn physics and geometry without even knowing they are learning anything.

BTW, I too was told the class they had for my son for K was full of "smart kids just like him". Total rubbish. They had no clue where he was really at. Even at the pediatrician where they know him well and his file includes his IQ results (along with info about his disabilities) they get all bent out of shape about the least impressive stuff. Last week he was getting measured and they asked him to take his shoes off and he insisted on taking his socks of too because he was concerned about the measurement being completely accurate. They couldn't believe he said accurate. This was so unimpressive to me that it took me a moment to understand what they were fussing about. I guess I learned that most 6 year olds don't use that word, but I still find it hard to believe.

I guess what I'm saying is that it doesn't matter what your child is doing, how many times you have told someone they are doing it, or what test results you have in hand... it's like all of that info just hits a brick wall of incomprehension. Then they act so surprised when your child does the least of what they can do. We found a tiny all gifted school where they totally get it and he fits right in. We will never look back. Hopefully you guys will find your place as well. Good luck

A few things to echo others:

1.) Don't worry about teaching. Follow her lead. If she's interested, then"teach". But at this age the learning is very self directed. Only now that my DD is in K are we doing anything that really seems like teaching, because I'm trying to supplement her education primarily to keep her happy and challenged.

2.) There may be times of plateau. My DD knew all letters by 18 months but it's not like she started reading immediately after. Dont worry that she's sliding back to normal or anything. These things go in fits and starts but most likely she'll always be advanced. She learns more quickly than other children, so she will pick things up in a fraction of the time.

3. Stick with reggio. I can't emphasize that enough (unless you eventually choose a grade skip). DD is in a reggio program and although we do some after schooling as well to keep her engaged, she's not being asked to do things that bore her at school. We're also very lucky that our school understands her abilities and is willing to hear us out for future grades, but that varies by school and the level of giftedness in the child. DD hasn't been tested but she presents as a g/mg kid. Hg+ kids have more challenges in school, even in a play based one. So your mileage may vary.

4.) I combat the flashcards accusations on two ways. First, I make it clear in social media that I'm a fan of play based learning and i don't believe children need to be reading at 5. So others' knowing that insulates me a lot. Second, in response to others, I just say something like, "if this has anything to do with my teaching her, I'd patent it abnd become a millionaire! This is all her and she continually surprises us. We just follow her interests and support her whether that's math or Barbies"

Oh forgot one more: we're pretty liberal on screen time. Their iPads are always available to them... But because of that it's just another toy so often they'll do something else instead. Helps that I have back to back kids so they always have a play mate. Now that they're older they also both know that I believe too much screen time, like candy, is bad, and they know I'll take it away if I think they use it too much. So they adjust accordingly.

When they were younger I still let them use screens or watch TV though... Just for my sanity having 2 under 2. I did monitor it a bit more, but bottom line is don't beat yourself up if she's on a iPad more than you'd like. Nothing is ever perfect, and at least for my DD she honestly does learn best with apps.

Just adding my 2 cents on Reggio. And I'll start by qualifying that I am sure each school is different. My twins spent 3 years at a Reggio preschool a few years back (they are now 16 yo). One twin was a fluent reader by 2.5yo, and we found it worked well that the preschool did not have an academic focus. They thrived on the art, music, make believe and play. They did do group projects, and that worked well too, because each kid was allowed to contribute in their own way. (One year their big class project was to write and produce a play. Dd's contribution was to design a program to hand out to the audience. She had seen some examples from the local theater to get ideas. Her program was great and even included some very funny fake ads -- she was still really into dinosaurs then, and one of the ads was for a diamond shop for dinosaurs -- "Giant Jewels.")