Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion When did you know?

When my firstborn was young I watched him carefully for signs of giftedness. I had some issues growing up as a gifted child, and frankly I was hoping that he'd end up "merely" bright -- but failing that, I wanted to be prepared to support him in any way he needed. So I was relieved when he showed no signs of early verbal ability or other language-related precocity, in fact he had some language delays.

But as he headed into kindergarten his interest in numbers was obvious, so on a whim I got him some Life of Fred books to read together. (I still remember joking about "putting underpants on your head before putting socks on your shoes is not commutative!") He absorbed the concepts quickly and easily and shocked me by the things he could do in the abstract (multidigit subtraction with composition and decomposition, or feeling his way through an understanding of negatives and infinities.) Around the same time, I started reading The Hobbit aloud to him and he not only showed engaged listening, but each day we picked the book up again he could clearly and concisely summarize the previous day's passage. Finally, that was also about the time that his baby sister (age 4) revealed that she could not only read, but fluently enough to read aloud multi-syllable words with lovely inflection. O_O So...I guess I knew when my first was about 6 and my second was about 4.

In hindsight there might have been signs for both of them earlier. I don't think it really matters though. I would hope it wouldn't have changed how I raised them. I still believe that early identification can have a detrimental effect if it causes parents to focus too much on academic acceleration and not enough on just exploring the world and using the senses and finding their place in society.

NB, my kids aren't tested and I have no way of knowing if they're DYS level or just MG or somewhere in between.

DD is 3Y9M old. When she started speaking all the alphabets in sequence and 1-20 numbers in sequence by 17 months, or when she started speaking in compound sentences and started correcting our pronunciation or verbal grammatical mistakes by 21 months, or when we observed she could permanently register in memory pretty much anything from months ago, or even when we first started noticing what seemed like a strange sense of perfectionism and intense emotions – we didn’t really think much about anything.

Until a few months ago, when I just happened to read, rather accidentally, that there was a concept in this world called “Giftedness”. When I first read about it, a chill ran down my spine. Many of what I was reading suddenly seemed like describing DD. The speaking, the memory, the perfectionism, the emotional intensities, the Overexcitabilities, the intense curiosity that makes her ask "Why" "What if" "What happens if" questions all day along – all of it seemed to just fall in place. It seemed suddenly that we found the jigsaw where all the pieces just seemed to fit in place. Sometime ago, when I asked “What happened, how did you fall down?” just after she fell playing in the playground, she replied “Because I lost my Centre of Gravity. My tarsal hurts.”. And yesterday she got terribly upset when I mistakenly referred to Titanoboa as a dinosaur, "It's a snake. A biiig snake. It smells by licking. It has no venom. It's not a dinosaur."

Understanding DD has been a challenge for me and DW. She cannot sit still – she needs constant persistent movement and gets overstimulated by things which seemed to interest her. If not for the few hundreds of articles I’ve read, I’d probably be thinking ADHD by now. She revels in patterns – she makes patterns out of everything. Even as a 21 month old, during a Play & Music class we took her to – while all the kids were taking Maracas and shaking and throwing, she took the Maracas and started arranging them forming a semi-circle pattern. This pattern-seeking even extends to certain types of repetitive behavior – where, given a standard scenario at home or outside, she would repeat the same words or actions and expect us to follow suit and gets terribly upset if I turn on the lights – while it’s an activity within her daily pattern. Again, if not for all the articles this would’ve put up a red flag for ASD.

But thankfully, I understand her better than I would have done if I had never read that accidental article. But she continues to be a new project for us every single day. In a dire need of constant stimulation, intense physical activities to take the edge off, newer challenges, something to constantly keep her thinking – we continue trying several things soaking in every bit of resource we could find on the internet.

At her age, she is too little to even consider testing. We would probably consider testing when she’s around 6+ years, but not to get an IQ#, but more for us to understand her better, to ensure we know what may work best for her academically and at home, to understand how to help her leverage her strengths to keep her appropriately stimulated and to help us to help her manage her intensities and Overexcitabilities as she grows up.

This thread from about 8 years ago, on a similar topic, may be of interest: First signs of giftedness.

We expected it from birth since DS comes from a family with many talented people. One grandfather has a math formula named for him and both parents are smart.
1. It stood out around 6-9 months (don't remember exactly but it was before he started walking at 9.75 months) when he made us spend 30 minutes repeating the specific pronunciation of animals in a book. He was sitting on his mom's lap and moved her finger from picture to picture and then looking at us for the word. We thought it was random until he started going back to pictures we'd already done and trying to repeat the sounds. Then after 10 minutes on one page, he turned the page and started again. Then he went back and forth between these pages working on getting the sounds right. It was so focused and for so long it caught us off guard.

2. We treated everything as normal. Ds has older gifted cousins and we have a skewed sense of normal.

3. We don't know for sure but we're pretty confident he is.

For my son, he was always ahead in developmental milestones by months during infancy, then during toddlerhood was significantly farther ahead in numbers and letters than same age peers. He was also very creative and could problem solve, at times better than us (at the age of 4, he broke the wing on his plastic dragon which we could not fix, so he traced it on a piece of cardboard and matching paper, cut it out, glued it together, and somehow used a mangled paperclip to connect it, it truly looked fixed!). He was identified as gifted by the school in first grade. My daughter, who is most like brighter than he is, I never thought would be above average during her toddler/preschool years. She was not creative, did not appear to be ahead of the curve, etc. But once she started school, she thrived and is further ahead of where my son was at her age. I have never had their IQ's tested, (pertaining to question #3), so I am only going off of what their school has said. However I would feel more confident if I had actual IQ scores.

My DD18 is an only, but here are my answers--


1. She was 'different' by the time she was 2 or 3, from our perspective-- she was more rational and thoughtful than any other children her age, and moreso by far than a good many 3-5y older than herself. She had these social reasoning/understanding skills that literally wowed when she explained herself (which wasn't that often). She outstripped adults in terms of her emotional regulation. At three. She was just, so... so... self-assured/self-possessed. Perfectly autonomous, but in a quiet, non-confrontational way. VERY determined, resourceful and purposeful, though, when she was motivated. What motivated her was unusual, too. She was actively concerned for the welfare of other people around her at 1-3yo. I didn't really appreciate that she was HG+ at that point, though, since she wasn't doing anything that seemed all that advanced... then she learned to read. Well, we taught her decoding skills just before she turned 5, I mean. She already knew phonemes, etc. from about a year old. Once she realized that decoding was a thing that worked for any text, though-- she took OFF. It was surreal. She went from BOB books to Harry Potter (and beyond, I suppose) in less than five months.

2. Absolutely. MG+ is the norm in both families. Both parents, and more than 50% of extended family are HG+. Looking back, from birth she was different. It was most striking in childcare settings, and carers (and medical staffers) noted it even in infancy. She just quietly and unobtrusively did things that were developmentally impossible, no muss, no fuss-- she was just doing her, if you see what I mean. She's NEVER done anything for "show" at all. Ever.


3. Within a year of learning to read, her comprehension and decoding skills were basically adult-- and she read faster than most adults by the time she was six. That's when I knew. When my 6yo wanted to talk about the problematic characters of Iago in Othello, or Jim in Huck Finn, there wasn't much of a way to deny it. Looking back, though, she was alert and following along in lab meetings when she was 6 and 7, too-- asked about a figure legend on a doctoral student's slide once, as I recall. I shushed her-- but the student thanked her for noticing that the units were inconsistent.

People always commented that my daughter seemed more "alert" than other babies, but I thought that was silly. She seemed like a usual baby to me. She talked on time, walked a bit late, her motor skills were slow. We had no real "clues" until she started reading. That started as soon as she could talk. First it was logos and urls she would see on TV or on the backs of books. Then my mother and sister swore she read a chiropractor's sign while they were driving in the car with her. She could read the digital guide on the TV and small books. It was something my husband could do as a baby and I honestly thought his family was exaggerating. It scared me, so we really just blew it off until right before preschool. She was three and a half and could read handwritten notes and cursive and just "knew" how to add and subtract in a first grade workbook a grandparent gave her.

On the other hand, she couldn't ride a bike until she was 8 and, until she learned cursive, her handwriting bordered on dysgraphia. It was the disparate development that was our first clue that she may be truly gifted.

My questions are these:

1) when did you start to see that your kid was different?

Well before 1 year. High levels of attention from birth, extreme interest in books and new environments, and very early speech were the first clues. The pediatrician commenting superlatively on some behaviour at every well-child visit also fed that view.

2) In hindsight were there things that were "normal" for you, your SO, or your families, but in reality were indications of giftedness that you merely accepted as routine?

Yes. Precocious speech, early literacy, and innate ease with numbers were run of the mill.

3) when did you for sure conclude/accept that your child was gifted?

Haven't done testing officially, so it's not a foregone conclusion. Based on behaviours, though, I suspected I was dealing with a different flavour of child well before 1. When you look through standard baby books and the only milestones that fit are toileting, you grow suspicious.

1) I suppose I really had an inkling the first time around 15 months, when my then-H and I, to kill time at a restaurant while waiting for food, tried to count up how many words DD could speak or sign. We gave up at about 300.


2) From about ages 1.5 to 2.5, DD really looooved the moon, the stars, etcetc. I remember picking up a couple books I thought she'd like and my mother, a 2nd grade teacher, was like, "Oh, she won't possibly understand that." And I was like, "What? Of course she will." When DD was around 2-2.5 we played a spelling game in the car called "What Letter Do You Take Away?" based on the fact that our fridge alphabet set had only 1 of each letter, so you had to take away a letter from one word to make a different one. Honestly I had no idea at the time that this was a weird car game for a 2-year-old. (If only I had thought to teach her that letters have SOUNDS, instead of just teaching her their NAMES, she probably would've been reading by then.)

3) Hahaha. The ol' "Is my child really gifted, or am I fooling myself?" mind game!! For a long time I assumed DD was gifted, but moderately gifted even though, realistically, there were tons of signs that she was more than MG. Like I can go back and look at her Early Intervention evaluation at 19 months and it's clear in higdsight that she was HG/PG. But a million years later when she was 7, I shelled out hundreds of dollars to have formal IQ testing done and FREAKED THE F* OUT when I got the report.


I mean, for a totally different case, we could talk about my 2nd child, who also tests as HG/PG for IQ, except for his processing speed which is just above average--but who also has undertreated ADHD (says last week's tests) and very fresh diagnoses of dyslexia and dysgraphia. Talk about a mixed bag of skills!! He reads above grade level but NOT amazingly above grade level like his older sister. But then again, he's a grade-skipped child with dyslexia, so... yeah. Honestly, if he was my first child, I might not have any idea how gifted he is, and if I hadn't gotten him tested a couple years MAINLY because of his older sibling, I wouldn't have had any inkling that he has a learning disability.

For DS7, we started suspecting earlier but we sort of knew something was up when he was 4 years old and he mentioned that his friend's "hypothesis" was right. Apparently, he had learned about hypotheses from Dinosaur Train and applied the concept correctly to his friend's theory about newborn chicks (that the firstborn would probably be the biggest). And his interest in science continues - he just announced yesterday that he wants to study chemistry in university. Mind you, he "only" tested as MG.

DS6 is a bit more stealth, but he spontaneously started reading fluently last year when he'd just turned 5. And while that's not as early as some kids on here, it seems a bit odd to me that he's never actually been taught to read and yet it just happened. He was reading poems by Jack Prelutsky with perfect inflection yesterday and had no issue reading words like knucklehead. And he rolled his eyes at me when I asked him if he knew what "edible" meant. So we still don't know if he's gifted, but he's at least fairly bright and should have no problem in grade 1.

Honestly, we haven't had too many challenges yet given that their LOG is quite moderate, if at all. The biggest problem we've had is with DS7's overexcitabilities and his intensity. And now that his emotional maturity is slowing catching to his big emotions, he's doing a lot better. In a lot of ways, we're probably very lucky.