To wonder why anyone would put their child forward for Mensa?

[TheDevilWearsPrimark]

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/8026439.stm

Pretty much all of her 'exceptional skills' are basic repetition, which means her parents are pushing her too much, not that she is a genius.

Oh it makes me angry, let her roll in mud and play with toys ffs.

This article about poor little Sufiah Yusof (that little girl who ran away from Oxford at 15 and was found 3 weeks later working as a chambermaid on the South Coast) has a Where are they now? bit at the end about a few notable child geniuses. However, I am sure there are a great many former child geniuses who go on to have unremarkable and happy lives- it's just not as newsworthy.

I can't comment further than the clip on the link but that's standard party trick stuff. My 23 month old knows all letters and numbers and can recite things perfectly. Give me a couple of weeks and I could teach her capital cities. She wouldn't understand what the heck she was saying to me, but I could do it. She would forget it all within a few months though. At the moment she can tell you the name of most dinosaurs but it's just her current interest.

IQs are a funny thing. One of my professors was adamant that IQ tests were only a test of how good you were at IQ tests. And yes, you can get better at them. My IQ comes out as extremely gifted but I promise you, I'm not. I am very good at IQ tests though.

She was very sweet.

But as TDWP says, it isn't basic intelligence, it was repetition, and toddlers are sponges and love to please by parroting things back. And how on earth is knowing all those capital cities at her age going to benefit her?? Her parents didn't come across as pushy on the news clip, just adoring and proud, but they must be reasonably pushy if they've contacted MENSA and taught her all that useless stuff! It made me cross too.

(DH said, sniffily, that it's meaningless to test an 'IQ' at that age anyway, FWIW.)

is the wee girl asd? perhaps savient?

I'd be interested to know what is in an IQ test for a child that young, and how they can measure their IQ.

I look after a very bright 3 year old and agree with the comments about it being repetition. My 3 year old has a memory like a sponge and can count to 10 in Spanish, German, French, Welsh and Hebrew as well as English to 100. I've also taught him to count in 10's and in 5's. All repetiton.

What is particularly good though is that he can count a number of objects (a lot of small children can count but struggle to actually count things) and he recognises the numbers up to 100 - though sometimes says them the wrong way round (ie thirty five for 53) He plays top trumps and knows how to choose the category with the highest number. And we're now teaching him simple sums - 2+3 and 5-1 etc.

He recognises all the letters of the alphabet and is spelling simple words like dog, cat and hop. His pencil skills are behind his spelling though and he is only just starting to write his name - 8 letters and he knows which order too. He is pretty good with his Hebrew aleph bet too!

I suppose the reason I've typed all this is because I, and his parents, are very proud of him and his natural talents, so I can understand the parents of the 2 year old in the news. I don't think we would go so far as mensa tests though. He may well even out with his peers as he gets older but while he is so keen to learn we will encourage it all the way. We don't sit and 'hothouse' him. His learning is all through play and songs and chatting in the car on the school run.

When I was small my mum thought it was a sign of genius that I could say B-A-M-B-E-R G-A-S-C-O-I-G-N-E.

As my ambition was to be on University Challenge she might have been on to something.

However, since I also insisted that if (when) I qualified I would be placed on the top row, she should have realised that I had more awareness of bunk-bed hierarchy than Seventies split-screen technology.

I never made it to university or Mensa, for that matter.

I was head of the Pet Club at school, if that counts.

ps I have high hopes if the BBC ever brings back Ask The Family

I've never been able to understand why grownups want to join MENSA.

DS at the same age could name 54 Thomas the Tank Engine characters from tiny pictures on the back of a book.

I'm signing him up right away

Oh, I have another thought. What is hothousing, actually? Is any shared brain activity hothousing? Crowsswords or scrabble? Reading stories? Or is it as I begin to think anything of this kind that you yourself don't do? Believe it or not, my old dad, who pretty much brought himself up after a messy divorce, loved doing maths in his spare time... no-one made him do it or even encouraged him. Elizabeth I used to translate Latin to relax. I kinda wonder if there isn't a stereotype of childhood - mudpuddles etc - which might actually constrain kids.

Message withdrawn

I was 8 when I decided to reply to an advert in the paper to join mensa. This was done off my own back-although I remember my father being quite disapproving. I filled out the tests and sent them back and bingo! I was a member. Which is laughable now as i'm not really all that bright at all.

I am a bit puzzled to know what a 2 yr old gets out of it-anyone know? Would it be any fun or interest to them?

I don't see any signs of giftedness in what she is doing.Being able to do mathmatical calculations or show exceptional UNDERSTANDING rather than memory wouldbe different.I wonder how they test them ?

Have just read mensa website -apparently you only need to be in the top 2 % of the ability range.If you assume the birth rate is about 1 m kids per year (guess).Then their would be 20,000 2 yr olds eligible for MENSA

The parents of the other 20,000 are probably like me and don't see what a 2 yr old would get out of belonging!