Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Infant Alertness

LOL.

Mr W was only an infant for 4 months - and after being born premature to boot.

He is 3y10m now and spends hours learning "big words" - ie capture, embarass, cacophony, and playing the SET game.

One day he is a little boy and the next he is a little man. And sometimes tells us he wishes he could just be a little boy. He has recently asked about death and told us he never wants us to leave him.

The hardest part for me when I was a bit older than him was realizing how powerless I was and how much I needed my parents and how fragile they and life were. It was terrifying. This may be the hardest part of being precocious.

And its hard to watch him realize this, too, so young. There is nothing I can do to shield him from these emotions or his mind in grasping reality.

When he was about 2 months old, several people mentioned to me that my son (now 2 yrs) didn't have a baby's face but looked like an old man. We've called him "little man" almost since birth. He refers to himself as Mr.(his name) when playing. I was recently looking back at his baby pictures, and alert is definitely one of the ways I'd describe him.