Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Precocious climbing, anyone?

DD has been a prolific climber since before she could walk. She is big and careful, not a daredevil at all. She has a remarkable way of transferring her weight and judging her every move.

Question: is physical agility completely unrelated to intellectual giftedness or do any other gifted kids have a similar ability? I have found ***nothing*** on climbing. Mostly what I found is that highly gifted children may also be slow to hit physical milestones.

You know those arched, ladder-type things that go from the ground to a play structure? She mastered those unassisted at 15 months.

Is that a professional opinion, or an intuitive one? The relationship between myelination (not sure about "speed of" it) and IQ seems to be complex, but not non-existent, see e.g.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2008.07.038

The relationship between physical and cognitive precocity is something I've wondered about a lot, because my DS was a very late talker, and in most other physical respects age-typical, but [oh golly, even here I find it really hard to type stuff about him, it feels like boasting - gulp here goes] he is obviously cognitively exceptional. He obviously understood everything very young, and was good at getting what he wanted by non-verbal means, but at his 22 month health check, I remember, I couldn't tick the box for "uses at least 5 words regularly". By 24 months, he had >100 words, and by 26 months, he was talking in 4-5 word sentences; since then, his language has always been advanced. Several of his first ten words were numbers, and he knew his letters before he could talk (he loved Starfall, and I found he could correctly "point to a letter [whatever]" in arbitrary context well before 2). Not typical!

My [common sense rather than professional] opinion is that most practical skills are complex. For speech you need both the cognitive intention to make the right sounds, and the physical control to be able to make them. It looks to me as though for most (even the vast majority of?) children the limiting factor is cognitive, in that the physical ability is usually in place well inside the first year but the cognitive ability is not. However, I surmise that there's the odd child, like my DS, with later physical development, so that that becomes the limiting factor. This is consistent with a tendency for GT children to speak early, but not a universal rule.

Climbing, I would guess, is a less clear case as the physical requirement probably dwarfs the cognitive requirement. Still, the latter will be there. One thing I wonder is how much it has to do with parenting style: I've known a few children climb before they can walk (in fact mine did, though not as dramatically) but I observe that most parents aren't comfortable with this, so most children don't get much opportunity!

For some reason both our kids have been very driven to climb, beyond what makes sense as being normal to me. When ds was 1&2 we just couldn't leave the room without having him up on something. Dd2.5 is the same; I guess my parenting style is to leave a chair in a room unattended for 2 minutes and expect somehow that my kid won't get on the mantle to check out the crystal votive!
(No, I didn't think, oh she'll probably shove that chair over to the table and from there wedge her foot onto the window frame...)
This, to me, is similar to the experimental/destructive "tendencies" they also exhibit.
It's not quite beyond my control but sometimes I feel like I'd have to lock the toddler in a bare room to find a moment's peace. I have not read about this extent of adventuring in my regular baby/toddler books, but maybe it's been too long since I picked one up.
Anyway, something's up!

Lol! Climbing inclination plus the planning skills to enable it even when the means aren't obvious => parental heart attack, indeed. Here's one link on climbing toddlers - don't read while feeling delicate...
http://geoparent.com/ages/toddlers/climbers.htm

Neither my DS4 nor DS6 were climbers or really risk takers at all. DD2, on the other hand, climbed long before she could walk. At 10mo I found her standing on top of a table after she climbed a chair, at 20 months she climbed to the top of DS6's bunk bed, and right at 2 she climbed the rock climbing wall on our play set and got into the tower. Luckily, she generally has enough sense to not try to come back down unless she's sure she can.

She is constantly into things, I can't get one mess cleaned up and she's on to something else. But, she's so purposeful about it and if you watch her you can see that she's trying to answer some question that it's not just for the fun of destructing.

She infers things from her explorations and observations. She learned her ABCs and counting to 11 just by listening. She has an amazing vocabulary, not because she will sit still for stories, but from listening to the rest of us speak. It seems to me that her drive to climb is indicative of a need to learn through exploring and experimenting.

My sons both were very compliant, they get very frustrated when thwarted or not allowed to do things their own way, but it doesn't occur to them to push on and do it anyways or find a way around me. She just can't seem to stop herself. If we put a lock on something, it's like a new puzzle to solve before she can get to the original one. She thrives on the challenge.

Just based on observations, I would say that DD2 shows more signs of being GT at 2 than the boys did. They both reached 4 and blossomed, she's not waiting that long. Whether or not she'll keep surging ahead of them, I don't know. She might just be more "showy" at 2 than they were and she'll end up being even with the boys at 4.

ds7 has always been way ahead in the head and way behind in the body.

(Sweet fancy crumb cake, ain't I the eloquint one?)

I think there is some kind of correlation between early motor skills and G, though not a strong one. My most physically precocious child was walking at seven months and by 13 months was climbing those play tower ladders (and she was petite, about 20th percentile) and sometimes falling through the rungs and dangling by her hands, yelling, "help me!" I could hardly take my eyes off her when we were in the backyard, as she LOVED climbing that ladder. She's a talented equestrian now, at age 8.

Definitely not our case. A few weeks ago I found DYS6 on the top of a climbing wall crying because he couldn't get down (his friend helped him up) while DS4 was happily climbing up and down.

I have early walkers but to me DS6 seems quite uncoordinated doing some things even though he can ski, ice skate, and roller blade pretty well. DS4 is a different story. He just started riding his bike without a training wheels.

I like the limiting factors idea (thanks ColinsMum!) -- it would explain DS much better than any straight measure of bad-at-things to good-at-things. He walked very VERY late... limited, I'm guessing, by a tendency to extreme caution. He talked late, and we found out long after that phase that he had a structural defect (tongue-tie) that was a likely limiting factor.

I think where all these things show up is that once he had mastered the part that was holding him back, his development was explosive. And the predictive value of the early milestones was virtually nil... the late walker can tap dance beautifully. And on the talking side although his articulation isn't great, his vocabulary and sentence structure is. (Bad combination, by the way...)

He still has "artifacts" of his early development (still physically cautious, and still drops sounds when talking), but they don't match up with the rest of his ability... and my bet is that they never really did.

uummmmm.......... DS7 had no conceivable spatial ability when he was about 17 months......... I remember taking him to the playground, they had a two level jungle gym. He was still really unsure on his feet, he would get to the second level.... there were decks for kids to hang out... he would walk up to the edge and walk right off like there was ground under him. We kept a gate on the staircase forever. When he was little he was nortious for walking into walls. We would ask him why, because he would be looking straight at it, he would say, I didn't see it. Recently he has told me he sometimes doesn't know how far away something is, "My eyes do this weird thing and I can't tell how close something is". I have often thought he has a visual spatial issue, now I wonder even more.