Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Did you know?

This is pretty close to our experience. Librarians would come up to us and say variations on "she's so observant."

I'm still dismissing examples of reading as just being cases of knowing picture books by heart. I guess though that's just a stage in teaching yourself. I need to stick some words she knows on the fridge and see what happens.

We baby proofed, but in my family being smart actually makes you more dangerous. At age 3(?) my brother turned on the stove, waited for it to heat up, then put his fingers on the burner. After the blisters healed he repeated the experiment. The reason? He wanted to find out what would happen. He was later banned from cooking for a while when he got syrup out of the fridge early in the morning to make waffles, but ended up cracking the bottle and drizzling it all over the floor.

I think a little bit of it is that she's an only child who stays at home most days, so the only behaviors she can model are adult ones. And she's scary good at imitating us.

Excellent points, totally agree on the attention span and books being clues.

If there was science or math involved both of my kids were mesmerized. It didn't need to be dumbed down or made into a kids show to hold their attention (in fact they quickly outgrew many kids shows). DS would grab university physics textbooks off our shelves for bedtime.

Inquisitiveness was another biggie. The toddler "why" phase was more of a who/what/when/where/and why interrogation phase. Non stop questions as if his life depended on it. Usually going super deep and off on a few tangents. (DS in particular never left this phase - luckily now he can read and has google)

That and their memory. You couldn't flippantly promise them to do something later or next week - they'd hold you to it. Remember when you said..... uggg. I quickly learned to NEVER promise anything I wasn't positive was going to happen.

Not unlike echofuzz, my FOO is clearly not representative of the overall population either. By the time we had children, I had re-calibrated my perceptions somewhat, owing to a few years in my profession, working with a wider range of the population, but left to my own devices, I might very well have seen our children as more or less average, or even a little slow, TBH. As it was, I had several years to learn exactly what the middle 50% of the population looks like, and to distinguish between bright, GT, and extreme outliers, not only qualitatively, but quantitatively, which I found to be helpful for identifying how to focus on the common experiences of parents, while lessening the sensation of otherness.

Because of my own childhood, I think our kids would have had to be in fairly rarefied extreme PG territory for me to be shocked by anything they did GT-wise. Instead of managing my own shock, I've leaned toward building skills for trying to help other parents to be not only not shocked by our children, but to develop more inclusive ideas of giftedness and value in their own children.

I have a daycare story from when DS was around eight months. I had a friend whose son is very close to the same age and was at the same daycare. One day I was a little later than usual at the daycare and our boys were the only ones left in the room. My son was being fussy and the teacher (not his usual teacher) was having trouble getting him to settle down. When my friend came to pick up her son and saw that DS was giving the teacher trouble, she told her to show him a book (clearly she knew DS well). The teacher thought this was crazy talk, but figured she shouldn't contradict a parent of a child in the daycare, so she tried it. DS instantly calmed down and was quiet and happy for the teacher (and for me for the rest of the evening).

When he was a few months older and had moved up to the next room, they had to put his designated nap location next to the bookshelf. Otherwise, he would crawl right over the top of other napping kids in order to reach the books when he woke up.

Yeah, we once left a babysitter with instructions to simply read a book if toddler DS was upset over anything for any reason. She commented, with surprise, when we got back that it really worked.

Not really, giftedness is relative and I just thought that all kids are bright.

Every parent wants to have a child with a reasonable level of smarts so I just stopped myself from reading too much into DD’s occasional flashes of brilliance.

I honestly thought that the ages printed on toys and puzzles were inflated by the manufacturers to make every parent proud.

We knew she was a pretty sharp cookie but that was it.

The DYS level achievement and IQ scores were met with surprise and no small amount of disbelief until she was accepted into DYS (5 years ago now - time flies). Only when I had had the experts telling me Psychologist and DYS - did Infully comprehend her LOG.

lol! i thought the same thing!

that was my boy, too. we had a couple playdates with other kids which were a bit eventful because of it. and more than once were accused of negligent parenting because people didn't believe a baby understood and complied with, "Don't touch. You'll get hurt."

we're also lucky to have a number of teachers as friends who confirmed our suspicions. one of them would babysit him sometimes. one time, when we got home to free her from his clutches, she just gave me this squinty-eyed LOOK. "Do you know your son knows the word 'buoyancy'?" they'd been playing with a toy boat in the sink, and she'd asked him if he knew why it didn't sink. he told her it was buoyant because it had air in it and because it's shape. he was 2 or so. we didn't see it as a big deal, but she insisted that this was not "normal" knowledge at his age. we took her word for it and just kept doing what we were doing.

So, the opposite of movie ratings?

I think we're perhaps the opposite. Hubby and I are both gifted, and expected that our daughter would be too, but while we're on the lookout for evidence of it, it's actually really hard to tell.

She hit all her milestones really early, but she has none of the 'burn to learn'. Almost the opposite. She's seriously opposed to anything that requires sustained effort/focus. But she still seems to accumulate knowledge and skills at a faster rate than her peers.

They gave her a test at school to see if she qualified for the enrichment program, and her scores were all over the place, but the test was given in a foreign language that she's only been learning for a year. So who knows (but they let her into the program anyway - yay!).

We'll test her again when she's older (she's still only 5), and we're also thinking about testing for ADHD. Which we suspect we both have too.