Giftedness is about being mentally *faster*, not just mentally *ahead*. Think of it like two trains running side by side, one "gifted" and one "non-gifted". They both start at the same time, but the "gifted" train moves faster. After a few minutes, it's clearly ahead. After an hour, it's much further ahead. The lead is constantly growing. (The only thing that can stop it, in my experience, is an overabundance of schooling.)
If it takes a child a week to learn what other kids need two weeks for, that's likely to be the case for the rest of her life. In my case, I was grade-skipped when I was 6, which temporarily improved my situation, but by the time I was 9, I was ready for another skip (which the school offered, but my mother refused for "social reasons", leading to me spending the next few years bored out of my skull). I eventually did skip another grade when I was 15. I then left for university, where I had to take honors classes, load my schedule with the maximum allowed number of courses, and study for two degrees simultaneously in order to feel challenged.
What all this means, unfortunately, is that if your daughter is currently three years ahead of her agemates, in two years' time she may be four or five years ahead of them. The good news is that opportunities for academic and intellectual challenge tend to improve as one gets older, and she will also gain valuable coping strategies in those years. As well, her precociousness might be less visible, since the skills she'll be using in everyday situations will eventually be shared by everyone her age (reading, basic math, etc). But the gifted "problem" does not go away.
Of course, as others have said, all this depends on the individual child. It may be that her interests will skip around and negate some of this, or that she will become less motivated to learn (although obviously no one hopes for that!).
Last edited by zhian; 12/13/09 01:14 AM.
