If you are very clever, how did your parents help make that happen?

[rainbowfairylights]

Background: I have been with my DP for a couple of years now. Whilst we are both intelligent people with careers we are proud of, DP does seem to have a bit of an air of... I don't know, she's definitely more clever in the sense that she knows a lot.

There are huge differences between our childhoods - I was raised in a family of borderline neglect, didn't have any extra-curricular opportunities and went to an inner-city low ranking school. DP went to one of the best schools in the country, had a variation of extra-curricular going on from sport to music, and their family spend a lot of time doing things like general knowledge quizzes, playing board games, etc etc. I left school at 15 with a mix of grades, DP left at 18 with straight A's at the highest level possible.

I suppose I'm trying to figure out how much of a difference the things DP's parents did with her made, vs how I was raised. We are both successful now and I actually have more higher education success, but as I said, DP is definitely still the more intelligent one. If you have a similar type of intelligence to my lovely DP, can you pin it on childhood experiences, is it a luck of the draw, or more of a mix?

I agree that cultural capital is important but that its importance varies between jobs. For instance, cultural capital really helps when it comes to media jobs but it will be less important in jobs when technical slill and knowledge is important.

I saw a few posts from people (including OP) about reading non fiction versus fiction. Yes, non fiction will help you in a quiz but there is now research showing that fiction readers show more empathy. I say this because there is a tradition of dismissing reading fiction as less important because it's something that more women read and write.

rainbowfairylights Sounds as if between you and your DP will bring lots of assets to any child(ren) you have.

Also, just to add, it wasn't militant or fact based. He didn't care about recall or test scores, he was just showing us how to take an interest in things, and equipping us with the skills to work things out for ourselves- like after talking about steam and Lv, he would ask why we sweat when it's warm, and see if we could apply the knowledge.

My parents totally neglected and abused me and did nothing to help further my education, taught me nothing.
Despite them I got an excellent degree, worked right the way through university and have had a wonderful career. I did it to spite them, anger can drive you to great heights, I wouldn't recommend it though.
I find people who are given everything on a plate often fail but parental support and encouragement is very important for most children.

If someone's family is doing a lot of educational stuff with their children outside/before they start school, of course it's going to make a fair bit of difference compared to children who don't get that.

For instance my mum did a lot of things to help me read, improve my vocabulary etc.

Also if the family have books around that the child can get into reading as they grow.

Buying stuff for their education, books etc.

All this is part of why middle class children tend to do better at school than those from deprived background on average.

Also I suppose nutrition will play a part and also if someone is experiencing trauma/neglect it can effect their development as their mind/body is dealing with that whereas a person from an average background is just developing as is appropriate for their age.

Trauma can freeze you a little at certain ages until it's dealt with- well, the person mightn't learn stuff such as emotional regulation as easily. All this also makes it harder for them to do further learning etc.

EMDR therapy can help a lot.

I had a boyfriend when I was 20 who was good at everything.

This was a mix of being bright naturally; going to private school, his dad had died when he was young so he learnt to do practical things around the house.

But some people are just naturally talented. He was good at music and sport - and either you are good at those things or you aren't, although you can obviously be better with lots of work.

I wasn't neglected at all and my parents did talk to me about "intelligent" topics, but I spent most of my childhood reading. I did like non-fiction so I did learn things, especially about geography and history, but spent a disproportionate amount of time reading Malcolm Saville and Enid Blyton.

As for having books in the house - well you can lead a horse to water and all that. We (DH) read to ds every night, we have books everywhere and ds still prefers computer games by a long way. He reads about one book a year! Although he is quite well informed so he obviously reads a lot online.

Definitely from reading! Anything and everything! Even comics or reading on the ipad. I would also recommend the DK encyclopedias (depending on the age of your children). My mother actively discouraged me from reading, which made me more determined to read as much as possible, but I wouldn't recommend that . I would also suggest taking them to as many museums and art galleries as you can. They're usually free as well. Just let them explore whatever they're interested in and the rest will follow. Just don't pressure them in any way and make it fun!

As a side note, it's also important to give your child plenty of physical affection, especially when they're very young, as this builds connections (synapses) in the brain.

Talk to them
Read to them
Listen to them
Don't say 'I don't know' but 'Lets find out'
Follow and support their interests

Start with intelligent parents (tick).
Womb work - listen to lots of music, do lots of happy.
Give vast amounts of attention, from the womb onwards. Breastfeed (more brain cells) and co-sleep (security. Intelligence without security is dangerous to self and others - trust me, I know).
Talk, and listen to your child, from birth. Before birth, actually. Notice. (eg mine in the womb would respond to the sound of a baby crying. They're listening).
Show, tell, explain everything to your baby. Listen to detailed news and current affairs programmes and discuss them. Read good newspapers and discuss. Compare the same event reported in different newspapers, encourage critical thinking.
Yes to books. Mine had 64 before birth (I thought that was a lot, I learned that it wasn't) and was demanding new books from a few months old. Hers had hundreds of books before birth. Reading together during the day as well as at bedtime (dgd still has bedtime reading with both parents, at age nine).
Be autistic. My family all are.
A good independent school helps. I did all I could for dd but her school had more resources in terms of highly educated people with different experiences than me to refer to.

I have a mensa cert with some high number on. Top 0.5%. I don't know who won the FA Cup in 1974 and I can't do complicated maths. I do know that the safer your baby feels, and the more genuine attention s/he receives, the better equipped s/he will be to fulfil their potential.

And mainly, do what @KateF says.

Some times not very intelligent people, such as myself, have either luck, instinct or perhaps a little foresight to see which path to take in life. I was born in what may now be regarded as a country bordering on being a failed state , where there is hunger, crime, disease, low employment etc; then grew up in another country which now is even worse than the first and is definitely a failed state and in my twenties lived and worked in 2 other countries where in one there was really no future and most luckily of all also manage to dodge total disaster of the last truly completely failed state I lived in for 7 years - now regarded as a lawless rogue state! Lucky me!

TBH I'm more glad I didn't take some of my family's advice.

At junior school the headmaster told my parents I had 'great potential and could go right to the top'. It's not really an exaggeration to say that that statement dogged me for years and caused a lot of problems in terms of what was expected of me. I'm intelligent, but not some kind of genius - but because of what had been said about me at the age of about 7, I was always expected to become some sort of ultra-high-flying career woman or lofty academic, which was never what I actually wanted for myself. (I'm not a natural leader and I value job satisfaction/quality of life way above a high-flying career.)

Meanwhile my dad’s career had been cut short by an accident, and my grandma had a lot of ideas about social status and high-flying careers, so I think my dad ended up feeling he’d let her down. That ambition all got transferred on to my shoulders and it felt very weighty at times.

At various times it was mooted that I try to do the scholarship for a local fee-paying secondary school, and that I try for Oxbridge entrance. Neither of those things panned out and I'm eternally grateful that my parents didn't push me into them.

I'm going to come off as guilty of inverted snobbery here, but I don't care. For a long time I was socially very unhappy at the university I chose, and this was largely a class thing. My background is working class, and I grew up in a working-class town. A combination of my class background and my personality meant that some people (note I said some) of a class background higher than my own treated me very snobbishly at uni and just didn't 'get' me. I was basically treated like I kept coal in the bath by some people, and only really felt at home there (at a uni in my home county, ironically!) once I'd built a friend circle consisting of people from the same part of the country/a similar class background.

Rightly or wrongly I believe there's a possibility that going the private school/Oxbridge route would have exposed me to even more class snobbery and feeling of not fitting in.

The other element of this is that I was never actually as academic as I was made out to be. I embarked on an MPhil programme at one point, with possible transfer to PhD, and had to give it up before I'd even reached MPhil stage because I couldn't do the work. My dad had assumed I'd manage this 'without any trouble', and didn't quite manage to hide his disappointment, which made me feel guilty all over again.

My dad is sadly no longer with us, but I do often find myself wishing he'd either understood me better, or I'd been able to be more the kind of daughter that he wanted. I know he loved me very much, but I don't think he ever managed to shed certain expectations for me (until I got married - when, to my astonishment, everything turned on its head and my parents seemed to assume I didn't have to work unless I chose to. At which point I started to be castigated for saying I did have to work, but that's another story entirely.)

I ended up freelancing in a creative field without conventional 'status' or massive earnings but with very high job satisfaction, and have been way happier that way than I ever would have been in some high-flying professional or academic niche which is just not me.

I guess what I'm saying is that 'hothousing' a child isn't always in the child's best interests.

@peaceanddove

Big difference between intelligence and general knowledge. DH has a high IQ, incredibly gifted at maths, went to a very good university - but his general knowledge isn't great, because he's only interested in scientific stuff.

I also have a high IQ and went to university, but have also read voraciously since a little girl (and retain most of what I read). So, I beat DH hands down at Trivial Pursuit and was a member of a very successful pub quiz team for years.

Out of curiosity, how do you know you have a high IQ?

Im not suggesting you don’t, it’s just that you generally have to pay to have a full IQ assessment done privately.

When people say they’ve got a high IQ, I always wonder how they know……

mensa will do you an IQ test for 25 quid or a taster one for free

My sister is naturally clever, while I'm not so much. My parents helped me with school work at the start when I was struggling until I got confidence, while my sister was left to get on on her own. She rarely studied, yet got good grades. I got good grades due to hard work. So, ultimately genetics, ime.

I got very good exam results at school but because of a lack of ‘cultural capital’ I went into nursing - which wasn’t a graduate profession at the time - instead of medicine.

I eventually went to university as a mature student and have done very well since but nowhere near as well as I would have done if I came from a different background.

My experience was also complicated by emotional and physical abuse in the home which led to some poor choices in my relationships and further held me back.

For example I became a parent at a young age, then went through a horrible divorce and custody battle all of which prevented me doing a PhD at the time.

I eventually became a university lecturer (now retired due to ill health) and have the time for writing, both of which were early ambitions, but I had no idea how to achieve either of them.

Everything I did was driven by my own ambition and by voracious reading. My family were very ‘meh’ about education.

I have good general knowledge - gained from DDad watching all the news bullteins, having Radio 4 in the background. We also watched a lot of TV documentaries rather than game shows and reality TV shit - it was more Horizon and Tomorrorws world.

I also read a lt of fiction - historical fiction from a good author led to me look things up as did sci fic . I seem good at making links something DD1 has - though she's not a reader she makes links between different sources of information - her teachers often comment on it.

DH and I both had parents who did days out at museums, castles, houses ect as well as occaional zoo and theme parks.

I think there can be some sobbery at some mediums - non fiction, TV or you tube when actaully it's much more content and quaility of content.

It's not always been easy to provide all the opportunites I'd have wished for our children - I think one of the hard things about covid has been some of the hard won and fought for opportunites they had gone now looking like for good.

We try and be supportive we tend towards knowlege based you tube and TV days out are simialr to our own growing up.

From what I've observed private schools are often good at building confidence - sports and drama are also said to do the same but I think that depends on the child being interested in them.

Talking as a parent with a "clever" child, we spent a lot of time pre school in teaching him reading & writing, basic maths, etc., so that he hit the ground running when he started school. We then kept up the momentum, making sure he did all his homework, finding extra worksheets etc to print off the internet if he was struggling in any topic, etc. He was never really interested in the "extra curricula" stuff, never did after school clubs, scouts, or anything like that. But equally, he wasn't really interested in school/studying and would only ever do the bare minimum, i.e. I don't think he ever missed a homework either in primary nor secondary school, he didn't mess about in class, etc. Time and time again, teachers said he was a "model pupil". The only problem throughout secondary was that he wouldn't read. He just wasn't interested in books. School English lessons turned him right off. Luckily, he'd find ways to get good grades/marks, usually by reading summaries etc online. In fact, he's lived virtually his entire junior/secondary school time online. He used to drive us mad as he'd be online for hours every day, apparently watching youtube videos and other videos etc, we first thought he was wasting time and harming his education. But, in reality, he's learned so much from it that he's now clever/intelligent in so many ways. He has brilliant general knowledge etc. It's amazing how much geography he's learned from TopGear/Grand Tour! He knows virtually all country flags from playing FIFA for huge amounts of time. At one time, we were getting pretty depressed about how much time he spent online, but now he's proved how worthwhile it can be if you're looking at useful things, rather than constantly playing mindless game apps. (Though he's learned alot about town planning from the city games programs). So, despite not reading a single book during secondary school, it's not really done him any harm. He got mostly grade 9 at GCSE and 3 grade A* at A level and now doing a Maths degree in a UK top 10 University. (Even at Uni, he's still not reading - the books he just "had to have" remain pristine and unopened - he's just got his first year results - 80%, so he must be doing something right!).

I think it’s a good thing thing to stay away from the Mensa/IQ testing/educational psychologist stuff though. IQ is as much a testing construct as anything else; and you don’t want your child investing their self-esteem in it - that can be very damaging. Reading and encouraging curiosity for the love of it is the way to go.

When people say they’ve got a high IQ, I always wonder how they know……

I had the tests done privately when I was little, then on the psychologist's recommendation, my school re-did them every 4 years or so. After observing the upwards trajectory over several years, they predicted what age I would plateau and what my 'adult' IQ would be approximately.

I'm talking 2-day long, 8h sessions each day, tests. Not the quick cheap ones you can do online or buy for £30 off a website.

Just like autistic children, having an official 'diagnosis' and psych ed/ expert pedagogical psych support, helped me understand why I was different to other children and how to manage those differences.

My older DB & I had the same type of education. He was always top of everything, is a boffin at his job, but actually a bit of a buffoon in day to day life. :o)
I always did the minimum at school, went on to do an arts degree, but am a mover & doer & I can organise anything & everything....
Polar opposites.

Parental input is very important, no doubt about it. They instill confidence. Your partner was fortunate to have parents who engaged so well, it gave her an advantage but she still had to put in effort.

However if you've done reasonably well, why worry? It's where you are now that matters.

If and when you have a child of your own I'm sure you will give them every encouragement as well as lots of love.

Just enjoy your life and don't compare yourself to anyone else, you're doing great as you are and will continue to do so. I expect your partner admires you.

The most important things you can do to help your child develop is talk/read/listen to them. Enjoy the time you have with them rather than being glued to your phone.

Kazzy that's interesting! He's obviously found his way, other parents wouldn't have given him that freedom and he may be struggling now.

@irresistibleoverwhelm

I think it’s a good thing thing to stay away from the Mensa/IQ testing/educational psychologist stuff though. IQ is as much a testing construct as anything else; and you don’t want your child investing their self-esteem in it - that can be very damaging. Reading and encouraging curiosity for the love of it is the way to go.

Definitely agree with this, because it varies so much from child to child.

In my case, it was the absolutely right thing to do, because both the school, my parents and myself were getting frustrated not understanding what was happening. By getting assessed, I could put a name to it and my school could access the right resources for me.

In contrast, my siblings also presented very similar traits to mine (so most likely they're also on a 99%+ IQ percentile), but different personalities meant they didn't necessarily require those tests. It wouldn't have changed anything for them, and they're now happy, intelligent adults who have no idea what their IQ capacities are.