Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion You know you're parenting a gifted child when...

I told my 2yo to take a timeout and count to 100.

5yo coached the 2yo to count by 10's.

....when your 8 year old informs you that she will no longer call you momma because it sounds too childish. She will now use mother or maybe mom. I guess I'm just glad she doesn't want to call me by my given name.

Your 14-y.o. makes jokes about Marxist "false consciousness" and Freudian "resistance" (and uses the terms correctly).

Was that a binary joke?

There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who get binary, and those who dont.

When your 3 year old recently enjoys pretending to be a baby. She pretends she can only crawl or is just learning to walk and in a cute baby voice she says her name, mama, dada and her sisters name as if she is proud she is learning them....and then proceeds to spell her name and some other easy words and say the abc's in her baby voice too......because don't all babies know how to spell?

When your almost 10 year old watches BBC's version of Sherlock Holmes with you and understands how Sherlock feels about being bored with normal life. But assures you she will never turn to drugs to ease the boredom. (Thank goodness for that at least.)

When the violin teacher asks your 5yo whether she can count in a foreign language (our family's native language, really), and the child hangs her head and says in shame: "yes, but only to 900".

Or when your 7-month-old baby boy lines up 5 baby food jars along the wall, crawls back a bit to inspect the formation, then makes adjustments so that the jars are equi-distant.

There are so many of such fun memories.

You particularly know you have a science kid on your hands when...

Your DS2.7 is awaiting his first balance bike's arrival in the mail. He's excited and was discussing overcoming any upsets and latent fears of falling off the bike: "Riding your bike is a great way to stretch your amygdala. It's also a good way to use your cerebellum."

As he was drifting off to sleep, he came up with this: "Mama, do you know what a funny word is? Lacrimal caruncle. Ha ha ha, caruncle!"

One project we're doing this week is a life-size diagram of the different systems in DS' body. In planning the design, DS specified explicitly that he wants "pretend mannequin eyes" and "everything MUST be made of cells."

This all in the 5 minutes prior to bed. I know people here will sympathize.

Oh the anatomy phase. Yes, I do sympathize although I think I had it a lot worse. Anatomy class was not my shining moment in college as I could not memorize all these random names to save my life so DD thought I was completely uncool for months.

I feel really bad that DD stopped being interested in anatomy after I told her that we had to put everything anatomy-related away to host playdates. She got the idea from there that it's socially incorrect to not be terrified of skeletons and organs.