Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Pre-school are they truly "gifted" at 2, 3. 4 etc?

I agree, that would be very interesting. It also might be doable, in a way: you'd have to publicise that [so and so] was interested in seeing children who [whatever]; if, on following those children, you found that they were far off the mean on some other criterion, like IQ, it would be reasonable to think there was something going on. You'd have the children seen by a psychologist at the time they were exhibiting the unusually early ability, so no recall problem, and you'd be able to eliminate problems like "does that really count as reading?" and "is that really a word?" by applying standard criteria.

Objections I can see would still have to be dealt with:

- possibly being singled out for this study might affect people's expectations of these children in a self-fulfilling way. If one could think of milestones that everybody agrees are not expected to be correlated with IQ, one thing you could do would be to recruit children early at those too, and use them as a "control group", without telling the parents which conditions constituted your "control group". You'd have to be careful about the ethics, but the problem that seems hardest to me is that I can't off-hand think of any milestone which has never been claimed by anyone to be correlated with giftedness! Age of first tooth eruption might be a candidate, since that's moved pretty firmly into the "old wives tale" category I think.

- in a study that relied on parents self-referring, or having access to a doctor who would refer them and then going along with it, there would be a danger that the parents who actually did refer their children for the study would not be representative of those who would be eligible. E.g. suppose 50% of all children, randomly distributed, meet criterion X, but that hearing about the study and being interested in taking part are highly correlated with education level and IQ. Then you'd expect the referred children to have higher than average IQ, even if that isn't true for the whole population of children meeting criterion X. This I think would be harder to deal with in experimental design, though I daresay a clever statistician could do something convincing to compensate.

I'm really liking the talk about real research, but can't add anything asside from yeah, I read that one, and it was interesting

But, I've been thinking about early IDing, b/c of my DS1yr. To put it plainly, I think he's smart. I am very aware I could be wrong. Best predictor might be the PG father and ?MG+? mother. But he had a run of VERY early milestones across the board (now is a little behind average -- yes that means we had a long period of no movement on milestone charts), and he had/has the "intensity" people talk about in a serious way. And _those_ are the two things that made me start thinking that the way to get him to STOP CRYING might be to treat him like he's really really bloody smart. It worked. If it was the right decision for the wrong reasons, I'd like to know about it, though.

Here's where I've gotten to so far: I think noticing milestones was at best a right thing/wrong reason. I think he may have hit those milestones early because he was smart and trying to cause change in the universe early -- but if so, I think his success was luck and maybe supportive parenting. The intensity thing, I think, is more about personality than intellegence, but personality has a role to play in intellegence, so whatever.

Anyway, I think (I want to think, perhaps) that you can see smarts in a very very young kid, even a baby, but I'm drifting towards the idea that it's not a milestone checkoff, but a range and texture that's worth looking at. I've heard it described that truly PG people have an experience of life that is catagorically different from neurotypical because of the degree to which they are taking in and manipulating ideas and data. I tend to agree, because even being not so smart as THAT, I'm pretty sure I have a categorically different experience from neurotypical, and for that reason.

Outside my groups of mostly really smart friends, I have a huge problem communicating, because people just can't concieve that I might be saying something as fine-graied or specific or whatever as I am. Dealing with DH can be spectacular, since he's a mathematician and I'm basically an artist, so we're both having our intense fine-grained experiences, and although we can keep up with each other in conversation and make things comprehensible, in our heads we're just like two different species. We end up talking for four hours about how to percieve the distinction between air and water, in order to compose a mutually comprehensible versinon of something very simple like "oh, when you added the soap it affected the surface tension." That different experience, almost by definition, must start well before birth, and, well, if it's there there should be a way to see it, right? IF you find the right way to look... and it *should* be different for different types of smarts, right? So the overall picture is going to be complex. And it might be easier to ID by "gut feeling" than trying to come up with any kind of ruberic.

How's that for some woolly-headed exploration to add to an otherwise intellegent thread?

Can you explain this in more detail, what you mean by treating him like he's really smart? What worked, exactly?

I am asking because even though I have three older 2E kids and I'm sure my three younger ones are very bright (hopefully without the 2E two of them are under 2 y.o.), it's hard to imagine parenting them any differently in the young years just by knowing whether or not they are really really smart (besides, LOL, at this point, kids who talk on time seem gifted to me).

I definitely go by gut feeling. I can't even begin to imagine what educational situation we'd be in if I didn't follow my gut, but that's another story.

Not trying to be flippant, but from observation of what works for me and for lots of friends, I strongly suspect that treating them as though they are really really smart is a strategy that works well for kids in general, not just the ones who are really really smart!

I think it is possible to see/hear gifted in toddlers, but
I believe that is not possible to determine their level of giftedness. 150 & 120 IQ often look the same or close at <2, but by 7 the gap is more dramatic.

Sorry, this is long and a bit roughly written...

One of the biggies was long-form versions of standard baby ammusements. Another was showing him how things worked really carefully and looking for signals about what he wanted to see more of or didn't in a different way from what you do with most little ones. I remember him "asking" about colours when he was about 5 mos old, by going to everything he could find that was green, and when I got it that he was doing a colour category, he started checking how far the edges of the categoy went, and then he went on to yellow, and then I think blue or purple. Anyway, it went on for about 3 hrs, and then we had to go, and he stayed on colours for several more hours, though not as intently. Telling him what to be interested in never worked, "fair trade" when he wanted to play with a particular not-toy is/was almost always a failure... you have to explain to him, in a way he can understand (which, thanfully, is starting to be most english), why he shouldn't play with it, and what he _Can_ do to satisfy his curiosity. He also had a period where he would cry if you didn't read any number in his sight to him. Expecting him to choose activities and interests that took a long time to work through, or that were generally waaaaaay out of his "developmental stage," (or at least not expecting him not to) was important for not missing his cues. He had a real interest in live storytelling for about 4 mos that was hard to serve, because babies were generally not allowed in. I think starting to read chapter books (pooh, Freddy, now Thora) at bedtime helped that... originally his father was reading them to me (I was going squirly over the length of time it took to get him to sleep), but he started demanding it when we skipped for a night. He's more into music now, and that one's a little easier to find for him.

I remember that at 3 mos, he started learning to read signs, so telling him in sign language "I'm going to change your diaper" was hugely important to avoiding a crying fit. We had to work at finding ways like that for him to communicate, at least receptively, very early on (he hasn't been fast at speaking etc), because he really responded badly to not being informed of things. We still have some troubles keeping up with him on the future-plans front. Today, he absolutely refused to fall asleep for a nap, I think he probably understood us when we were planning the day and decided that I would not come with them to the science center... and that I would leave after he fell asleep. As it got later, I finally said to his dad, "at this point, you'll only have a few hours before I come and see you," and he perked up, and almost imediatly fell asleep.

Not correcting his use of toys and materials is a big one. If he's sticking the wrong side of the magnet to the board, it's probably because he's working someting out, and showing him the "correct" approach is just getting in his way. But if he's having trouble flipping it over, he wants help. At this point he has a reliable yes/no, so we can just ask "do you want help?"

Letting him choose his own clothing for the day helps a lot, and when he refuses to wear an overshirt, and I've said it's cold out, he almost never objects to a heavy jacket, but he does if I don't let him know it's cold... that kind of thing. Similarly, if food is too hot, he still wants it in front of him, and he really will test before he jams it into his mouth if we warn him, but if we try and put it out of reach, he gets mad.

I have a bit of face-blindness, so he recognises people faster and better than I do, so if he makes for someone at a museum or whatever, it's best to trust him and go, half the time they greet us by name before I clue in to who they are (oops). He sometimes reminds me to take my keys when we leave the house now... and is livid if we have to go back for them when he pointed them out. But isn't if he didn't try to point it out, etc. (he's also starting to accept an appology, ocaisionally)

Basically, he knows a lot about what's going on around him, and he knows he knows, and he wants to be taken seriously.

It's surprisingly like when I used to work with stroke survivors who had lost much of their language ability and usually had physical disabilities, but their minds were fine. They spent a lot of time dealing with caregivers who didn't regognise that they were still adults inside, and who didn't honour their wishes and intellegence. The environment we provided for them was specifically intended to recognise their competence despite the disability, and it made them enough happier that as a group they documentably lived longer if they spent some time with us regularly DS just cries a lot less if we honour the competence that doesn't show very clearly when he's having a hard time not falling over, or getting the word "want" out clearly enough to be understood!

Oh, and stuff like shaking a rattle never floated his boat. Stuff like that he "gets" really quickly, and he wants something more complex... like for you to shake the rattle, using interesting rythms, since his co-ordination isn't up to complex rhythm yet, and he started wanting the cool rythms 10 months ago! (Which is a lot of time to be frustrated while waiting for your body to catch up, right?)

And, yeah, this might none of it be about intellegence, it might be purely emotional, or just a question of quality parenting. Hard to say, and, as someone mentioned, if DS shows up as clearly PGGGGGGGGGG+++++++++ and graduates university at 12 with a triple major, two minors and not a mark below 95, that _still_ won't really mean anything about this early stuff... (and knowing his dad, I kinda hope DS goes the MG route. I think being PG really is too much of a good thing, for the most part. But I do kinda hope he's smart enough that I can have a great conversation with him. And that he likes me enough after being stuck with me for a mom all his life).

Uh... yeah. So that's what I mean. That I treat him a bit like a slightly older kid with physical and communicative disabilities, and it works better than treating him like I would treat another kid his age.

I think in some cases you can. And this is just based on my own experiences. I was a bright kid, identified as gifted, and I know my mom said others began to comment when I was about 4 how different I was, and it was suggested by several people including teachers from a local gifted program to have me tested when I was old enough for the gifted program when I was this age.

With DD, she was speaking several hundred words by 1 and combining the words into simple sentences. By 2, she was speaking on the level of a 5 year old, and by 2 and 1/2 had taught herself to read simple books. She started spontaneouly doing addition and subtraction in her head around this time 2. It is commented everywhere we go by anyone who hears her. She was given some placement tests by the school my mom works for right before she turned 3 and she tested on a first and second grade level across the board on all subjects.

She seems to learn by osmossis...hear it once in her enviroment, knows it, and applies it even months later in new situations. She has been identified as profoudly gifted by 2 peds, an educational specialist, and the gt coordinator at my mom's school. She was tested and ceilinged out at 160 on the PPVT and had a verbal age equivilent of 13 at 3 years 0 months old.

i truely don't thinks she will show any sign of stopping being so far ahead. As for early milestones, she really did not have any. She was behind or on target on all things until a year except for verbal when she said her first word at 5.5 months. At about 10 months, it was like someone flipped a switch verbally LOL....sometimes I wish I could shut it off lOL. I don't believe early milestone neccssarily always correlate to giftedness, but I do think that when a child spontaneously teaches themself to read, do math, etc....that is when you can start putting more weight on those signs. Just my 2 cents worth LOL.

Michaela - thank you so much for transcribing what you've been doing with your child. It is lovely. I've often yearned to read something like this, but didn't know what I was yearning for. My guess is that others yearn to read this too, so would you be so kind as to sent a copy of this to the webmaster at Hoagiesgifted.org?

You can say that Grinity asked you to?

I agree that parenting by close observation and starting from the assumption that what the child is trying to communicate is meaningful would be useful to any child, not so much by raising the IQ - although that may happen to a certain degree, but by communicating that 'life is good'- it's save to use every bit of your genetic heritage that points to giftedness here in the world.

I also don't want to give the message that this is the best way to parent, or that people who don't parent that way are harming their child in any way - I'm a firm believer that the way you is the best way for your child. Parenting this way has drawbacks too, actually,and since we're all perfectionist around here, DS13 might be able to tell you about them in great detail!

(Essentially, establishing independence in adolescence from parents who are so 'interested' in one can be 'a pain in the')

Best Wishes to all,
Grinity

I hope nobody minds my revivifying this thread. I read an amazing claim recently that's related to the topic here. The claim was that of the 4-year-olds who score 130 or above on an IQ test, only 25% would do so again at age 17. Reference here.

Does that seem plausible?

BB