Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment What to tell DD about being G - help!

I like this

I will not ever ever ever show my kids a bell curve. And only partly because it still scares me to think of how many sds from the mean they are.

I don't think it's a practical picture for them to carry around in their heads, that here's the world, and here I am, way over in the the 99.99something percentile.

Firstly, the world they inhabit is not a random sample, and doesn't follow that distribution. My husband and I don't know our IQs, but we can infer that they're fairly up there. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins are all also up there, with grade skips, tests "off the charts" and other indicators dating back three generations. Our friends and our friends kids are all probably fairly far to the right as well. My kids are not that far out of the ordinary in their daily lives, and they have at least a few kids in their classes with higher IQs than them.

Secondly, I feel like phrasing it as a difference of aptitude, interest, pace, and readiness is very much more practical. We all encounter people whose IQ might be way lower than ours but who know things we don't know and have skills we'll never master. I want to teach my children to appreciate that, and them. And even if someone is less accomplished and knowledgable than you in all ways, they can still be fun, or interesting, or whatever.

You can think that IQ is a meaningful quantity and is normally distributed and still share the above sentiments.

Agreed. Kids raised and educated in the company of intellectual peers may be more fortunate than most gifted kids. Forums are filled with painful experiences of gifted kiddos (especially PG kiddos of the DYS variety) being rare in their classrooms and schools, causing these kids to be outliers, aware of their differences in learning, interests, making connections between concepts, etc. In such cases, these gifted outliers may incorrectly believe there is something "wrong" with them, and having information about IQ and/or normal curve may help them immeasurably... possibly first and foremost by realizing that they are not alone (even though they've not had the experience of being surrounded by intellectual peers IRL).

Gifted kids who are raised and educated in the company of intellectual peers may never experience the sense of being outliers and therefore may not have the questions which outliers have.

DD13 expressed a lot of pain and disappointment at the pace of her classes, feeling that the teachers were going too slowly for everyone. I used rarity numbers to explain that the pace might be too slow for her, but was almost certainly not too slow for everyone. Likewise, we explained her low scores as rarities. Even in an area where the average is 1 SD up, she probably gets new ideas faster than anyone else in her grade, but is the slowest in the room at getting it down on paper. Knowing that she was an outlier helped her be kind to everyone she finds at school. She doesn't expect a perfect fit anymore.

I can, but if I show a child a picture of a curve and they are waaay in the bit where it's virtually flat they are going to remember that picture and attach significance to it. If I tell them with a shrug that they are doing the right math for them, and it just happens to have grade whatever on the front of the book because that's the most common grade for people to do that work it is much less dramatic. (and hopefully will make less of an impression)

Indigo, I'd still prefer a child think they're just the unusual one in their school rather than realising exactly how many schools you'd have to go through to find another.

I drew a bell curve roughly and said of the kids who did the test most were here and you were over here. I only said here as in the tail part not the tip of the tail.

DD has discussed basic statistics and even bell curves in math class, so we talked about that recently. She found it very interesting. She's been in a gifted school for a long time, so her frame of reference was off (like ours!)

With DS, who is younger, we've done the basic "Some people are good at drawing, or soccer, or singing...you've good at school things, like reading and math. You have a very speedy brain."

I did explain that she knows a lot of people on one end of the bell curve, and also that IQ tests are totally flawed instruments and measure only certain things. And I also brought up cultural bias in IQ tests, and then she started looking bored with me.

For testing, I just told my DS we needed to see what he's good at/what he's not so good at. His temperament is different from a lot of other kids -- he never hides who he is (probably his 2E causing this). He is usually eager to share information, so I did not share his test results with him (because of no/very little filter). He does know that he did well on most of them. His school does not have gifted ed. So, all he knows is, yes, he can learn things super easily. I think, for more socially-savvy gifted kids, it may not be such a loaded label.


My kid has questioned why he is sometimes slow to complete worksheets, but has been able to easily fly through that exact same worksheet when asked verbally. I think some gifted kids are also motivated and driven, and school tends to be easy for such kids. For other kids, who have 2E issues, and are not as motivated by subject areas that they know already, school is challenging. His music teacher seems to think he is excellent -- he loves music theory (it puts me off to sleep). He also loves learning languages. But nothing bores him like mundane worksheets do