What’s gifted at 2?

[Ellie2015]

Many of you mummies have talked about their kids being gifted on this forum. Just curious to know what could your DD’s do (gross/fine motor, speech, social etc) at age 2 to call them gifted..? (Obviously I have a 2 yr old DD and I am under no delusion to call her gifted :))
Thanks xx

Perfectly possible to be both. Ds was diagnosed as HLP/gifted at the same time as being diagnosed with dcd/dyspraxia and still going through ASD assessment process.

I struggle to remember now as it was 20 years ago but DS first spoke at 5 months and by 12 months was speaking in simple sentences "baby want bishit" was my favourite (that's biscuit by the way!) he referred to himself as 'baby' without me ever calling him that. He asked specifically for a Dalmatians cake for his first birthday.

By two he was speaking complex sentences and asking questions about how the world was made, how rain was formed, who is the oldest person in the world. It was exhausting.

Three was more of the same, speech better than many adults and rapidly expanding vocabulary and an encyclopaedic knowledge of car makes and models.

When he was 4 he brought the local paper to me from the door mat and said "oh dear, a boy with my name died" he was correct and that's when we realised he could already read.

His baseline assessment at 4 he got the full points available which his teacher said she was sure was the only child in the county to do so in her recollection.
He had to go to the juniors class to fetch books to read as the infants ones were too easy for him.
He was at a small village school and they coped well just by making allowances like that for him but by this time his behaviour had nose dived and it was obvious he had behavioural problems. School kept saying it was just because he was bored but he was eventually diagnosed with ADD and autism.
As an adult he has a range of mental health issues and having a giant IQ caused a lot of them.
Being gifted is sometimes a curse.

It isn’t a gift. For our family it tends to bring Sen issues.

I do not think a high intelligence causes mental health issues. Autism or other mental health issues may cause problems, but these can also be suffered by those with average or below average IQs.
Not everyone with high IQs have mo has mental health issues.

I think it's very dangerous and quite wrong to define giftedness as something that can only be diagnosed by a developmental psychologist, since obviously that would massively bias diagnosis to those with other issues - since those are the only kids who ever see developmental psychologists.

My personal believe is that autism / whatever has its own distributions in the general population, quite distinct from any giftedness distribution (although of course I don't think giftedness is anything but a combination of many different abilities all being high) A High IQ of course just a result of those abilities which are included in the IQ, but a gifted child may have intelligence not covered in the IQ.

And absolutely I can't imagine why high intelligence would cause mental health issues, outside of course of how an individual might be treated differently because of it.

Of course those abilities, and mental health have some genetic and often similar enviromental situations, so both can run in families, but again, that doesn't mean they go together always. I also think the medicalisation of IQ tests, which is a good thing to use the sub-tests as diagnostic tools has had the side effect of giftedness being assumed to go with it.

It’s the overthinking, the anxiety that’s why high IQ can cause psychological issues. I’ve seen it in the brightest members of my own family. My husband, who is definitely gifted and my son who at five worries about climate change and mortality. There is a link. I was very average as a child and worried about absolutely nothing! Guess whose lesss anxious?!

Absolutely re overthinking. DS never stops. He has no relaxation time, he's only comfortable when he's under pressure/having to problem solve. He exists on very little sleep, he's never seemed to need it. I worry immensely about his wellbeing, yet he seems happy with his life lived at full tilt. I'm in Scotland, so we don't have 'gifted and talented' programmes in school, but my son would probably never have been put in one .

Then again, Weird, anxiety is also fairly common in children who are not gifted at all.

Out of my 3 siblings, the one who worried most was the one distinctly average academically. Had to work hard to get Bs and Cs, but worried about everything from Russian submarines to the family running out of food (parents in steady employment, middle class jobs, was never going to happen).

I was possibly more of a gifted child, at least in some areas. But I've always had a tendency to plod through life cheerfully on the assumption that everything's going to work out ok.

My ds otoh, while not having any identifiable special needs, was at the bottom of his class throughout primary, but again definitely a worrier. Obsessively interested in world affairs until he got to puberty and then switched off entirely, I think because he found it too stressful.

You don't need to be very bright at all to worry about mortality or climate change aged 5: even not-very-gifted children find out about these things at about that age and if you are naturally anxious, you're going to worry.

Looking back at my extended family, what I can see is something similar to what sirfredgeorge suggests: distinct strands that combine in different ways in different individuals.

There is, in our family (not counting my adopted db who has a brand all his own), three different kinds of giftedness: one is verbal/associative, one is mathematical/analytical, the third is musical. Some individuals have one of these, some have two, some have none and one person at least (my db) combines all three.

There is also a trait of anxiety/depression which can be traced back for at least 4 generations. This is inherited by roughly half the family, but not in a way that correlates with giftedness: some are gifted and have it, some are gifted and don't have it, some are not gifted but have it etc.

It's like my grandmother's distinct nose: inherited by some but not by others, quite regardless of whether they have also inherited her short stature. Or the joint disorder which some of us have also inherited.

On the other hand, there is no autism or ADHD in the family anywhere and even my highly gifted db shows no trace of it.

This link is a very interesting read about the kind of giftedness I think we’re talking about:

www.gifteddevelopment.com/articles/what-we-have-learned-about-gifted-children

I think it’s about 10 years old and this area of studying has moved on rapidly but it explains a lot about personality traits, why some show them more than others, frequency of giftedness and lots of other stuff.

It was an interesting read, especially about difficult birth. My ds had difficult birth, ended up in me having emergency c-section. He was born half dead. I always thought his issues are related with his birth, deprived of oxygen during birth.

DS had a difficult birth too, but not so bad as that. Forceps and I ended up with a fistula. He was fine but I needed 6 months and 3 operations to recover. I remember the health visitor saying he would probably be very sensitive and clingy because of it but I thought she was talking nonsense so dismissed it.

When DS was 2y5m he knew all his books off by heart and would recite them to me. On his first day of school his reading was described by the deputy head as 'phenomenal'. He's now 12 and is very bright but by no means a genius.

I Would agree with the birth hypothesis, won’t bore you with the details but I was utterly
Traumatised for a couple of years and my son was whingeing and clingy but I don’t know how much of that was me being an inadequate and unresponsive mother (I really was ). Luckily we’re best of chains now so so long term damage I hope. He’s also anxious.

Ds isn't doing his timetables at 2 years but I sometimes wonder about things he can do at 27 months

• can hold a pencil properly and draw a person with round face , eyes,nose , hair , arms , legs etc
• can count objects accurately to 10 and can recite numbers to 30
• recognises some letters and hears initial sounds in words
• recognises numerals to 10
• is very creative for eg used a twig , attached leaves to the end , filled his water tray with petals and said he was fishing and the fish ( petals). Constructed a 'river' out of a rope and got his animals ' to cross the wavy river' and pretended some were swimming and some were drowning etc
• has been able to name shapes since around 15 months and knows difference between a rectangle and square and is constantly pointing out subtle shapes in unusual places including 3 d shapes
• has got quite extensive vocabulary for his age , uses specific language for types of birds , dinosaurs , trees, etc

Probably not gifted but I think he's quite bright

I think vocabulary is often a big indicator. Again, because it says more about the way they think about things.

I think 2 is too young to know but it’s plenty of time to read up on what to be aware of in the future.

The biggest problem with the gifted developments site definition is giftedness is that it is I think not one many people would ascribe too, the requirement to have differences in emotional sensitivity and asynchronous development (which they appear to mean actual not meeting age related expectations in areas, rather than just exceeding in ones where they are interested and others being normal)

Emotional sensitivity is present in lots of kids without high IQs or other forms of intelligence.

The biggest problem with the gifted developments site definition is giftedness is that it is I think not one many people would ascribe too

That’s the description of giftedness that I feel a lot of people on here are describing and discussing. That’s what a psychologist finds and what a teacher misses. That’s real giftedness (as opposed to being bright or clever). The article openly states many times that not all these children are the same and they won’t all show certain common traits. In fact they have a whole section on the different presentation in boys and girls.

Emotional sensitivity is present in lots of kids without high IQs or other forms of intelligence.

Of course. But then you could pick out any single trait they mention and say some kids exhibit it. The point is it takes many of the traits mentioned to flag that there’s something going on, and then the test confirms it or suggests something else is going on.

If you have resources describing what you believe most people think giftedness is I would be interested to read them and compare.

The problem is most people just come to their own conclusion having done no research whatsoever and don’t seem to realise this is a real thing and people devote their lives to studying it and helping kids make the best of it.

The child will still be asynchronous though if they are average in all skills but amazing in one. Ds, despite having Sen, will hit all his targets, with the help of technology, but his reading and maths are still really really ahead of other skills.
If your child is developing everything in synchrony, physically, mentally, emotionally, academically, the child would be very rare indeed, gifted or not.

Very interesting thread, particularly so since I have a 2yr7mo DD. I created a thread before and had excellent responses on there too so nothing but praise from this Dad.

Our little one ticks a lot of the (generic) boxes of early / high achievement. If she encounters new information, she can quickly digest and relay it. Recently though, she seems to have reached a level of 'understanding' in a lot of areas too. This has led to some really enjoyable conversations and her dictating our (and everybody else's!) activities more and more.

Within this progression, it has been the development of subtle qualities which suggest to me she is thinking at an advanced level. Individually, it's hard to pinpoint these exactly in our little one but her sense of humour for example is fantastic and she has a real cheek and charm to her nature. She's compassionate and perceptive. If, for example, the wife and I are bitching about somebody she can sense that tone and thinks we're arguing or upset and seeks to comfort us.

I know a lot of these qualities are vague and wishy-washy and individually do not equate to genius but, as mentioned, I do feel like these attributes are missing pieces in the puzzle and I would like to stimulate discussion of these areas.

I am interested in the experiences of the other parents in here and if anybody can relate to this feeling that your child 'just gets it'.

Apparently a good sense of humour at a young age is one of the (many) indicators. I guess, as you say, that’s an indicator that they “get it”. DS loves word okay and has been coming out with some hilarious jokes lately.

That kind of sensitivity to mood believe is very common as well. DS tends to just go quiet when he’s nervous or upset so it took me a long time to realise how he’d tuned into the mood of our conversation and found it troubling (though it’s the kind of thing we wouldn’t give a second thought). He has always absolutely hated any kind of conflict and gets really upset by “bad” characters in kids shows. He can’t watch all of Paw Patrol or PJ Masks.

The sensitivity to mood/conflict is good in a way though. We were in the car the other day and he was looking out the window and quietly said, “I don’t like that man”. I looked and there was just something quietly menacing about the man. Nothing you could put your finger on or describe about his physical appearance, but I would have avoided him. I feel bad for DS that he finds some things so stressful but at the same time I’m glad he’s got that sensitivity to help keep him safe.

No doubt someone will be along to remind us that many children who aren’t gifted are sensitive too. We know.

Word play. 🙄

To me, what made dd stand out was her very early grasp of things like past and future tense; by the time she was just 2 she could have a perfectly coherent conversation about what would not happen at x future point because y would have happened first. That and the fact that you could have an adult conversation with her at a very early age because she got how other people reasoned.

It did kind of throw me when ds came along and I found that when he was 5 or 6 I couldn't have the kind of conversation with him that I had with my undergraduates because he needed things explaining all the time and didn't seem to be able to pick up on my reasoning. I'd never had to think about these things with his sister.

Iwasjustabout, we are not just saying non-gifted children can be sensitive too; we are pointing out that not all gifted children are. Some are quite brisk and cheerful and pragmatic. My dn is a case in point. Lovely lad, but not exactly introspective. You wouldn't know he is gifted until you took a look at what he can do.

we are not just saying non-gifted children can be sensitive too; we are pointing out that not all gifted children are.

The comment wasn’t directed at anything you’ve said. But yes, as explained above, gifted children are all different. Sensitivities in certain areas are incredibly common in gifted children though.

My 8 month old started walking at 7 months and was standing unaided from 6 months.

He can also say "No" to spoon feeding and calls "Mum" when he is stuck or upset.

Is he gifted? I certainly am not