Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Correlation between early milestones and giftness?

The ability would have been recognized at a young age if someone had looked. And they could have learned a lot faster if they'd had the internet.

Bostonian, I am far from an expert on this topic, but I google really well I like to read the "nature vs. nurture" debates regarding IQ. And I keep coming up with articles that talk about the "plasticity" of the young brain and how the brain changes because of stimuli, skill acquisition and also the "use it or lose it" theory. I also keep reading that for boys, the frontal lobe develops a lot later than for girls (apparently, for boys it develops when they are well into their teens). Considering these factors I always wonder if IQ is really a "fixed" entity or if what we see in testing is what is "visible" during that timeframe to the tester.
Playing violin early (at the age of 6) is being attributed to Einstein's Corpus Callosum being larger and for his right frontal lobe being "significantly enhanced" - and hence he was a genius - according to recent papers from researchers. So, I tend to wonder if IQ is fluid and develops depending on how the child is intellectually stimulated.

HK, my DS has also reached his milestones in quantum leaps - he does not grow into them - he just reaches them one day. He got up and walked one day and the very next day was running very fast. He read and swam and did pretty much everything else in the same way - 0-60 under 5 seconds is how I refer to his acquisition of new skills. I never gave much thought to it assuming that his "perfectionism" was what made him wait until he could reach mastery in anything before attempting it. But, reading your experience, it makes me wonder if this points to a very high rate of acquisition of new skillsets.

There's a lot more heat than light in these debates, to my mind. And no contradiction between g being fixed and studying algebra or French or whatever making you more likely to achieve great things, because it may do that even if it doesn't change g. We may be able to have a nice neat definition of intelligence that's correlated with things and is reasonably stable - people could argue about how stable and under what range of assumed conditions - but what, as far as I'm aware, nobody has ever been able to show is that in the right hand tail, say beyond 2 standard deviations above the mean, there's any further effect of IQ on success (I mean, no known correlation between an individual's IQ above that level and the probability that the individual will make a breakthrough of any kind - it wouldn't surprise me if e.g. the correlation with income still held). Terman tried to do it and got negative results. IIRR, others have found similarly negative results and there's no reputable positive result in the literature (if I'm wrong about that, I'd be interested to get a reference). We do not know what Einstein's IQ was, and there's a lot of "Einstein's IQ must have been stupendous because he was a genius and geniuses have stupendous IQs" in the popular imagination, which gets us no further forward at all.

To my mind the most useful way for parents of the children we talk about here to think is probably "My child's IQ is never likely to be the factor that limits their achievement. So what else matters, and how do I remove the obstacles that might otherwise limit my child?". I think that's what we're doing when we, for example, provide emotional nurturing, enough challenge to help our children learn to tackle hard problems, enough opportunities to give them a good chance of encountering the things they most want to learn about, etc.

Yes.

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Interesting. Feynman, also a physicist, became an expert at fixing radios as a child (and earned money doing this; that was in 1930s, during the depression). *Practical* interest in 'how things work'.

Exposure. DC was *very* clumsy - until he started going to a good gymnastics program (not rigorous by any means, just good - for everybody). He is now better than many of his age-peers. (And now off-the-topic: *absence* of exposure matters a lot - sorry, I do not want to derail the thread.)

It was actually hilarious because he was so "perfect" behavior-wise and a straight-A student, but couldn't seem to stop himself. He broke into his high school a few times at night, and he also broke into the large corporate bank building that my mother worked in. I sat in the car and watched him do it. He wasn't trying to steal anything or mess anything up, it was just for the fun of it. My mother was horrified when she found out.

Unfortunately, for some, the child's IQ does become a factor that limits their achievement, because our society may only be interested in teaching to a different strata.

Ah, that brings back memories of Ted the Tool's MIT guide to picking locks.

Yes, I agree that IQ shouldn't matter or other test scores, except it can limit their options or opportunities. Already I've faced barriers with my pg 2e ds8 from being in DYS and other programs. I don't have a qualifying test score yet I have a portfolio and many, many work samples to show his prodigious talents - which DYS has approved and shows pg.

So what else matters and how do I remove the obstacles that might otherwise limit my child? Well, these are my questions too.

Matters - I'd have to say the rate and speed that they're learning or going through material; my son had global developmental delays. Most kids are not picking up college level textbooks. They're not plucking out and getting excited by quadratic equations. They're not devouring books like potato chips. They're not so intense, so curious, so probing, or wanting to go into such depth or breadth.

Stereotypical mathy/physicists clumsy geeks - Put my grandfather, great uncle, uncle, and now my son in that column. Probably loads more in my family as well. They all have had an intense desire to see how things work and take things apart.