For those of you with 'bright' children, do you take the credit for it ....

[sandyballs]

..... or believe it's pot luck. I'm sick of hearing about a friend's 'genius' child and how it is all down to her parenting.

I know we can help by encouraging reading, blah blah, not constant screens etc, but it is pot luck isn't it really. If it's not how do you explain very different siblings, some who struggle, some who thrive academically yet have been brought up in the same way. This kid is an only btw.

I know it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things but she winds me up and I'm curious as to what MN think.

Hmmm hard one,

Older sister - super creative loves making things and very good and thinking of ideas , struggles with English maths etc left school at 14 but has made a great life and career out of art.

Me .. Extremely stubborn ,loads of common sense and can debate for england and very world smart. Gifted and talented register due to maths and science although if I am honest didn't work very hard for it and got in more trouble than older sister who was v well behaved and actually did try to study just never worked out for her. I am useless at art and dont have a creative bone in my body. Also struggled in English.

My lil sister is average in everything lol better at art and English than me but not as good as older sis and not as good at other subject as me but better than older sis.

My mum can't read or write at all, doesn't do numbers and is not good at art and raised us the same.

I absolutely take some of the credit.

There are, as others have said, two things at play. One is genetics and ability and that we can't influence as parents.

The other is whether that ability is realised.

The strongest indicator of academic achievement is parental involvement.
Even as a baby engagement with your child, singing, playing and making things, reading books together, supports early literacy skills and makes them more responsive to formal education when they start school.

I deliver an early years literacy programme sometimes which is based around those principles, it's nationally recognised and listed as strongly evidence based in the review of parenting programmes. It's also interesting becaus you can see the difference in the babies and toddlers whose parents engage with them more and the ones who for whatever reason don't in the way the babies respond the activities, so I've Ben able to see it directly in action myself.

3 things at play:
Ability (genetic)
Temperament (genetic + environment),
Parental input (environment)

I do take some credit for environment, but none at all for genetic (adopted).

And really no kids are brought up exactly the same, as, even with twins, you respond to them differently. Children get 'labelled' (the naughty one, the playful one ...), birth order makes a difference etc.

Ds1 is brighter than Ds2.
So that's nature and not nurture then!!

Definitely nature. My father was dragged up in a really difficult home environment and had a shit school life. He got a first and had a really successful career - no-one else in his family repeated his success. In his case it must have been a fluke gene (and a gut full of determination to leave his old life behind).

Although I don't doubt that helping your child will give them a good head start to get into a good school and have the right opportunities it definitely won't guarantee that they will stay ahead of the game forever.

I think it's nature...then again, how one does define intelligence? Someone who may be a very good at maths maybe rubbish at something else...

I think it's a bit of everything. The genes have to be there, the encouragement has to be there, the temperament and work ethic have to be there. DS is gifted and talented; DD is top average. DD works harder and makes fewer ripples - I suspect she might be the more successful of the two.

Bit of both. But also I give credit to my parents. My mum read to me all the time - I love reading. I've read to my kids since they were born, and it's important to me, and DS1 is off the scale with reading. But that is also him - he wants to read. But then, why wouldn't he?

His little brother is desperate to read, because in our house it is important.

But saying that, me and DP are writers, so maybe it's generics. Or, most probably, nature and nurture.

Or genetics... Stupid phone.

I think nurture is important is important not only in cultivating specific capacities but in formulating attitudes that foster intelligence. For example, I know that I am perceived as intelligent in instances where all I've done is pay attention; and through paying attention I can retain a lot of information. DP thinks he can't but he doesn't pay it enough attention on the way in, he is too busy listening to his own thoughts, which are usually really unhelpful ones like, "I don't understand this". IME teaching in Universities, many people who struggle to understand do so because they wander into their own thoughts at the very first sign of something not immediately obvious, so instead of paying attention to the rest of the info, start thinking to themselves, "but what does that mean?" when if they were paying attention, the meaning would emerge from further info. While I'm not suggesting this is the definition of intelligence by any stretch, it is an example of a mental attitude that is conducive to developing complex thinking. I really connect it in myself to experiences in my childhood where my relationships and role in the family meant that I was often in observation mode - for one reason or another my siblings required more input from my parents. Piecing stuff together for myself was like a training in developing an attitude of paying attention without expecting immediately to understand what I was seeing, and it's definitely the style of thinking that has led me to appear intelligent in contexts like exams, discussions and research. I'm not sure it is 'real' intelligence, whatever that is, but I experience it as nurtured rather than innate and I'm not sure how you'd directly nurture it in your own children.

Leaving aside the nature/nurture debate about innate intelligence, there is a big difference between parenting and class. Class is a strong predictor of future achievement (or proxies for class, such as mother's educational level, family income and so on); parenting probably less so (if your family is wealthy and you go to Eton, whether you were read to or allowed to watch TV as a preschooler is probably not that much of a predictor of your chances of getting into Oxbridge compared to the strong effects of your social and financial privilege).

Sadly, I think it is true that children with innate potential from less advantages backgrounds fall behind others who are less bright but who are more socially advantaged. That's a very different thing though from largely middle-class parents wondering if more or less TV or ballet lessons will make a child brighter. Access to educational and social opportunity allows a child with potential to realise it - lots of children who are naturally bright just don't encounter the opportunities to develop their talents.

No I don't think it has much to do with anything I've done.

Traininthedistance unfortunately I have to agree with you, class & money definitly does help less bright children advance when it comes to career time when in high income professions it comes down to who you know to get your foot in the door, apprentiships, prestigious work placements in top firms etc.... A bright lower/middle class applicant who may be more able for the role simply may not have the social connections to reach it's full potential....

I don't think you can parent someone into being a genius

my paretns treated me and my siblings the exact same.same love,same care,same trying to do things with us when they could attitudes.we have all turned out different in every way.
things can help a child along but unforseeen and sometimes terrible things occur that we cant predict and changes them or the dinamics of a family forever.its then you have to rally round and its then i think will determin how they then get on with things.
its troubles and how we cope that leads to where we will be.

You have to nurture the child you get- there is no predictability in the genetic makeup of your child.

DD has got a mind like a steel trap. She just gets stuff.

It's DH's genes.

All my attempts to get her to use her good brain to advance herself academically are just pissing in the wind.

With reggards to class, there is certainly a link between it and educational achievement. But of more impact is hard cash.

A bit of both. Mostly it's in the kids themselves but parents help.

I like to take credit for everything good about my kids and blame my DH influence if they are naughty seeing as my DH is brainy and I am less so no one seems to believe me.

I think pushy patents can make kids do very well in school. I think the kid has to be reasonably ok but, over the years, a parent can have a massive influence.

I think it's pot luck if they are exceptionally bright but if they are average then parents can help push them up to a higher level by working intensively with them at home and being supportive/ pushy. My dm constantly did educational activities with us as children and lots of reading, I loved reading, my dsis did not. However, when she showed an interest in more science based subjects dm really encouraged that and dsis achieved very highly academically. Neither of us was particularly intelligent and our school was not great either.

That said my DH is extremely naturally intelligent but a complete under-achiever because he was never pushed enough and is lazy.

Ds2 is our "genius" child he has two siblings one of which is higher than average for her age and another who isn't testing as well in school mainly as he hates it but does well if we do anything at home with him and I say it is all down to genetics. The other two from day one were different both have had speech and development delay they seemed to go through the world in a cloud whereas ds2 was always alert and interested from the off paying attention to faces etc whereas the other two took a week or so to establish eye contact.
He has very limited common sense mind

I feel very sorry for your friend's 'genius child' who will probably get pushed hard all their life. My dad was pushy that way, I got a good education out of it, but never appreciated the constant hyper-criticism. Think of all those poor sad sods being pushed through uni at age 11 with no friends.

My view is that we could all get through uni at age 11 with right environment and best education- education has gone a lot faster in the past.

I do believe there is a certain amount of natural talent involved, but it is perhaps 10% of the whole. Think about your daily life - you mostly use learned or trained skills, not native ability.

I also think Our education system focuses on rote learning, not using the natural ability to think. I was never encouraged to use my thinking ability at school, it was all just 'where's the homework'.

ds does have a genius level IQ, could do a level maths at 8, was assessed as being about 7 years ahead of his peers at one point etc. etc. I never, ever, ever boast about him. I will talk about him if people ask, but try not to - no one really wants to hear and it makes me uncomfortable. He is the way he was born. He has so far, never had to work for anything except his friends and it is those I take greatest pride in and which are his greatest achievement.

dd on the other hand has some attention issues and at one point was drifting towards the bottom of the class. We have tried hard to improve her concentration and her sense of self worth and, to a degree, this has paid off and she is now on top tables for everything. I am very, very proud of what her efforts have yielded her. I would not make a point of telling people what she has achieved, but if they ask, I would tell them. She has worked hard for what she has.

There's a lot of pot luck in IQ but also in things like working memory and various processing skills that are on a slightly different dimension to IQ (hence the brainy but scatty stereotype). To achieve at the highest level, even a very intelligent child needs to have struck lucky on those things as well - the ability to focus, plan, organize and so on.

Conversely, someone with a slightly lower measured IQ (flawed as IQ is as a measure of intelligence) may eventually overtake and achieve more highly in their life than someone theoretically more intelligent, by being more naturally able to plan, organize and sustain focused effort in the face of distractions.

This is often described as having a 'work ethic', but it really isn't just an attitude or some kind of moral outlook, it's also related to some of the nuts and bolts of our neurology - characteristics that also have genetic components. (To take the most extreme example of problems in this area, ADHD is highly heritable - and is independent of intelligence)

Some home environments (calm, organized, lots of parental supervision with homework) can compensate for minor problems with planning and focus to some extent, so they may not show at first.

I think it's pretty impossible to unpick the different influences on any individual child in order to assign credit to any particular person's actions or genes.

It's horrible to think of the OP's friend encouraging her son to see other children as 'thickos'.