When did you notice that your child was gifted and talented?

[lijaco]

If your child is gifted or talented in a subject is it because you have spent time yourself teaching to your child. For example showing your child how to do something, providing your child with all the necessary resources, and giving your child encouragement by out of school activities. Simple things for example going to the library to enjoy reading. Spending quality time making your child feel good about themselves and praising them. Also having the ability to do all of the above as a parent. This is a good starting ground for any child. So if you don't get any of the above as a child you will find that you may not be counted as a gifted and talented because you have never been shown or spent time with. If a child is shown how to do something it is then that we uncover a gift or a talent. What about those children who are never shown or encouraged. How do we then know who and what is truly gifted or talented. That brings me to how the gifted and talented criteria needs to be changed as every child is at a different starting point due to lots of factors. Every child matters and every child is an individual. This brings me to the point when did you discover that your child was gifted or talented? Was it when you had been teaching your child something? or is it something that you yourself are passionate about? Did you identify it or your school? Was you aware of it?

Yes, yes exactly.

thanks acinonyx. I very much agree that personality has a huge impact on achievement - quite likely more than iq.

Being comfortable in their skins is the best we can wish for any of our children. Achievements may or may not help pave the way towards that end. I do worry that many children seem to underachieve and in doing so rule out possible careers, sometimes that they have their hearts set on. This isn't really a gifted issue though.

Short of truly abusive situations, I think IQ is largely fixed. But what a child makes of that IQ depends on personal qualities, such as focus and determination (which again is also largely fixed) and environment such stimulation, encouragement, role-modeling.

I think nature is dominant but nurture can influence to a small degree.

Agree that EQ is a bigger determinant of success in later life, than raw IQ.

Just to answer the OP in a simple way - as a toddler, because he didn't ask "why" questions (as a toddler), he used to say "is that because ...?" with a little 'theory'.

But I didn't think it was cleverness then, I thought it was just him. I think you only really see these things in hindsight.

I agree snorkle. I have had some amazingly gifted friends who have really struggled to finde a niche - but others who have fantastic, amazing professional lives because they have the temperament and the drive. This is a lesson I have taken to heart in the last decade.

I think though, that there is no such thing as underachievement if the person likes their life.

Brandy makes me very philosophical of an evening

I'm sure there's something the DDs are gifted in but i'm still waiting for it to manifest itself.

Personally blueshoes, I think the tension between behavioural activation (moving toward a goal or reward) and behavioural inhibition (fear of failure or punishment) is very important wrt realising potential. EQ may be relavant (and there are different versions of EQ) but that depends on the anture of the goal.

Sorry Achiynox, can you elaborate?

Gosh yes you are right acinonyx. That is something that has come to me with age and life experiences. I have no fear of failure now (well limited) so I approach people I would never have approach in my 20's, I apply for things with very little concern about rejection (don't know if you don't try etc etc and if I don't get it hey ho I'll apply for the next thing) and I am achieving far more (in terms of what I want) than I did when younger.

I wonder how we can encourage our children to like their lives from early on. I very much like mine, but it took me a severely disabled child and a subsequent complete rewriting of 'things that are important' to reach that stage. I would love ds2 and ds3 to like theirs from the beginning and to not fear 'failure' (ds1 will like his, that is given, he doesn't have angst ). Of course in many cases so called failure is just a setback.

Resilience IMO is hugely important.

I wonder how that can be fostered.

In line with my earlier post I would say resilience is largely inborn. Although, saintly, as in your case, it can come as a result of maturity and widened perspective.

I suppose you can model a positive attitude to your children, a sort of jolly 'oh, never mind, just try again' attitude so they don't become fearful of failure. Also, in your personal life, how you deal with personal setbacks will impact on dcs' attitude to life. Allow them to experience diversity and different models of success and happiness.

My mother was a rather negative character and quite cloistered in her lifestyle and outlook. I was less affected by her than my sister. If my mother was more outward and forwarding-looking, perhaps my sister would have become more confident.

Hi lijaco - I too have noticed that you have started a lot of threads basically criticising G&T
I dont get it and frankly find your attitude really quite upsetting

I didnt give birth to my ds and think "Hmm Im going to do everything possible to ensure this kid is really brainy!"
He was a challenging baby, diagnoesed with aspergers at 5. He could speak fluently by 2yo and taught himself to read a few years later

Yes we have encouraged and nurtured his interests but regardless of what we do he is by definition G&T. His school ignore this however.

Although he is a wonderful child much of the time being a clever kid with Aspergers isnt something he enjoys a lot of the time

Many many children (most imho) who are G&T were born that way and very often their parents would rather their child was average because being G&T can tbh be very difficult for the child and family concerned

I suspect a lot of my resilience has come from my parents. They always did the old 'doesn't matter what you get, you only need to do your best' (and meant it). I think I always knew I could never disappoint them.

Coping with ds1's issues - just increased confidence I guess whilst really highlighting that it was OK to feel passionate about the things I already felt passionate about.

It's something I do think about with the younger two. How to make them happy with themselves.

I think resilience is very intersting and there is very little research on it - we really have no idea how it might be fostered.

But there are some interesting studies. For example, resilience can be partly viewed as the ability to face stress. Rats that are inattentive in their mothering produce rats that are very susceptible to stress (changes the expression of some genes in the brain) and this can be reversed by cross-fostering. So there is some indication that nurture may be important wrt resilience. OTOH, some kids with horrible nuturing are naturally reilient so there must be a variation in inborn capacity.

Stress has been modelled as the balance between activation and inhibition which makes sense I think. You want to get something but you're afraid to - hence the the anxiety and stress.

Activation and inhibition are largely, but not entirely independent - so you can have a lot of both, one, or neither. High activation means you have a lot of drive, tend to be reward oriented. If you have a lot of both - well that can be difficult and has been implicated in e.g. bipolar disorder.

Of course EQ (of whatever type) is useful but some goals need it more than others. If your goal is to produce a best-selling computer game it may not be that essential but if you want to be a top TV interviewer it probably is essential.

I agree that no matter how intelligent someone is they won't get anywhere if they don't use their intelligence the right way.

Some claim that Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is a better predictor of "success" in life than IQ. Others claim that EQ isn't even an "intelligence", it's about social competiencies and behaviour. However you look at it, those with both a high EQ and a high IQ are the ones most likely to make the biggest contributions to society, to paying for tomorrow's state education/SEN budget/hospitals/pensions/unemployment/disability benefits etc.

You can't give someone a higher IQ but you can do something about improving EQ. And investing in them now is a sound long term investment. For all of us.

Many children with very high IQs have trouble fitting in, socialising and developing emotionally. They need to develop a certain level of EQ if they are going to make anything of their IQ. And for that they need stretching and challenging; they need to recognise that hard work is sometimes required; they need to work in groups with others of their own ability because out in the world there are other people of their own ability they will have to compete against; they need to learn to aspire, to aim high - to aim to succeed rather than just letting grades/success fall into their laps. They need special treatment that very few teachers are trained to provide.

To help children who have high IQ + low EQ takes early recognition and proper provision not an attitude of "they're doing OK academically so we don't need to teach them much". Use that approach with gifted children and even those exceptionally high IQ children who are motivated to work hard and achieve ...could gradually lose interest.

Many teachers need to get some Intelligence!

competiencies? There you go, new word!

"no idea how accurate this is but interesting anyway. Certainly I would prefer my children to score highly in EQ than IQ. "

Mrs T, that Goleman paper from 1995 has been torn apart by others in the field. According to them, EQ is more a personality measure than one of intelligence. And, apparently, it doesn't predict success (there being flaws in the previous research and all).

If I had a child with a low IQ I wouldn't love them any less but, without disrespect to your DS, given a choice of low IQ or low EQ, I'd choose the low EQ as that's something I could always work on changing.

Actually I think it is perfectly possible to give children experiences that mean they can improve their performance on IQ tests. I think some people might change their minds about what IQ tests tell you if they had the chance to actually see them in detail. For example, one sub-test of one of the most popular IQ tests used in the UK asks general knowledge questions. (e.g. Who was X?). Success on this is obviously partly to do with whether children have been exposed to books, museums, stimulating teaching etc. Another sub-test asks children to put pictures in order to tell a story. But the pictures are based on typical western experiences and so have an obvious cultural bias. Other things like what toys children have been exposed to before doing the tests (e.g. has the child mainly played with imaginative toys or jigsaws, or toys such as lego etc) can also have an effect. Some toys are very similar to the sub-tests. Some of the tests look at "verbal" skills (e.g. what does X mean?), but children's knowledge of vocalary is often directly related to how they are spoken to by parents, teachers and carers.

I am not denying that some children seem to pick up ideas quicker than others, or that some children seem to have a natural talent in different areas, but it is ludicrous to suggest that prior experience does not play a sigificant role in effectiving IQ scores.

My son is very severely disabled DadAtLarge. Measures such as IQ & EQ were not designed to describe his abilitie. I was talking about my other children wrt IQ versus EQ.

Having a severely disabled child has given me the privilege of meeting a whole range of people with various IQ's from very low through to normal through to high. And that is a great privilege. Probably the most rewarding part of my life has been discovering the existence of the learning disabled community. Attending Oxford allowed me to meet people with supposedly high IQ's. It didn't teach me as much as the learning disabled community tbh.

The idea that those people with high IQ's as a group are contributing more to society is laughable. Unless you measure contribution purely in financial terms (and even then there are going to be a lot of high earners without high IQ's). Yes, some (certainly not all) will be earning a lot and so paying via taxes - whether this counts as a large contribution to society is open to debate. It's my belief that those working at the coal face make the biggest contributions. The people I can think of making most contribution to society are not on the whole the people I attended Oxford with. Although indeed many have gone on to become very successful in their particular fields (which in many cases seems to involve making lots of money for other people - that is a general measure of success in this society).

But I suspect we would see life success as something very different. For me life success is about having fulfilled life. My very severely disabled son with his unmeasurably low IQ (except the bits he's brilliant in but still can't be measured genius or not) can still have a successful life. A life that is as successful as his brothers and equal to theirs in every way. I doubt that's something you can ever understand if you judge people's worth and indeed abilities on artificial scales such as IQ.

I hope that ds2 (who is certainly shaping up to be academic) and ds3 (no idea about him) take time to think about what they want to do. The curse of being academic is that you can end up on a treadmill which leads to a profession. If that's what you want, fine. But I hope they take the time to find out whether there's something out there that they really want to do before they're stuck on that treadmill. Whether it's teaching learning disabled kids, some sort of research, training horses or indeed climbing the ladder within a large corporation I don't think it really matters. But their lives will be more successful if it's something they want to do.

DAL- Sometimes chaning the EQ is not as easy to do - especially with children with other issues (aspergers etc) I would love some one to come and get my son to cope with the normal world around him and the associated emotions. It will happen but i expect not necessarily in the next ten years and only with a lot of hard work and effort. The biggest issue for me is not that fact that ds is G&T but that he is Now obsessive about learning. It is getting to the point of excluding food and sleep. How do I put the child into perspective and get him to enjoy life. His dad reports that he really enjoyed his school visit - ds says it was boring as it was too easy.

Whether or not a child is G&T is not the biggest issue The biggest issue is emotional health. If a child is happy and enjoying life IQ is irrelevant. Most of the happiest people i have met have suffered from DOwns SYndrome. I actually envy the fact that they can take life as it is and find everything can be smiled at. I personally find that smiling at life is very hard at the moment and would love a little of the isnt life great perspective.

Agree neolara. A quick search found this:

The Chitling IQ test

"One facetious attempt to develop an intelligence test that utilizes distinctively black-ghetto experiences is the Chitling Test. It is a humorous example that demonstrates well the built-in cultural bias found in most IQ tests. The Chitling Test (formally, the Dove Counterbalance General Intelligence Test) was designed by Adrian Dove, a Black sociologist. Aware of the dialect differences, he developed this exam as a half-serious attempt to show that American children are just not all speaking the same language. Those students who are not "culturally deprived" will score well. "

Also

"Other, similar tests have been developed for Blacks (for example, the Black Intelligence Test of Cultural Homogeneity by Robert L. Williams) and for the Chicano culture and the Redden-Simons Rap Test.

The Redden-Simons "Rap" Test is a 50-item, multiple-choice test of vocabulary items typical of "street language" in 1986, in Des Moines, Iowa. On the short version of the Redden-Simons "Rap" test (12-items), "street" individuals averaged eight correct items, and college students averaged only two correct items.

Using "street" norms, any student who does not get at least five items correct is mentally retarded."

And this is the point about my son really. If you could find a way to measure his visual intelligence without using language he would outperform all of us by some distance.

Einstein - a very clever man but very troubled and incapable of taking care of himself!

ds1 is the "G&T" dc in my household. He is extremely mathematical. I suppose the first thing I noticed was actually his drawing. At 2.5 he could draw accurately and with perspective. His drawing is incredible now at 9, a perfect literal representation but has absolutely no emotion or imagination.
He could build huge great big lego star wars models at 4 completely unaided, that were aimed at 11-16 yr olds. His raw IQ is in the 130's but I bet his EQ is tiny.
Ds2 will never be classified a G&T, he struggles with lots of things academically, but to my mind he is infinitely more G&T that DS1, I bet his EG is enormous, he has incredible understanding and empathy and comprehension better than mine. On top of that... he knows every King and Queen in british history
So being a MC parent, yes I've encouraged them but actually their skills are not something I could specifically hone. I imagine talent will eventually out itself, irrespective of parental input.

"The idea that those people with high IQ's as a group are contributing more to society is laughable....It's my belief that those working at the coal face make the biggest contributions."
Personally I'm glad we don't have idiots, morons and imbeciles (all have specific definitions on IQ scales) as our satelite designers and bridge builders and neurosurgeons. The person who solves cold fusion would make a larger contribution to society than generations slogging at coal faces. And the coal digger, for all his virtues, didn't do what Tim Berners Lee did to invent the "www". Biggest contributions? Hmmm. As individuals they may make valuable contributions in a small, parochial, localised way, yes. Big contributions to humanity? No! Do you have to have high IQ to make a big contribution? Not necessarily. But the biggest contributions come disproportionately from the people with high IQs.

"I doubt that's something you can ever understand if you judge people's worth and indeed abilities on artificial scales such as IQ. "
I don't judge my children on their IQ and I don't choose friends on their IQ. Nobody claimed that it's important to have a gifted child or that high IQ is important to a happy/successful life so it's strange that you're trying to counter what's a non-claim. What I do claim is that if a child is already exceptionally gifted then she should be properly catered for if her emotional health is to develop normally. Sometimes that proper catering involves providing a lot of stimulus in the subject of strength and the opportunities to explore and use that special ability. We need to place more value on high IQ than we are doing now.

"it is ludicrous to suggest that prior experience does not play a sigificant role in effectiving IQ scores"
Past experience plays no part in determining IQ (it affects only results of IQ tests). IQ tests are beaten in unreliability only by EQ tests.

"The biggest issue for me is not that fact that ds is G&T but that he is Now obsessive about learning. It is getting to the point of excluding food and sleep. How do I put the child into perspective and get him to enjoy life."
Forcing him to the football grounds every Saturday isn't what's going to solve this problem. Your enjoyment of life may not be the same as his, at the moment he's probably enjoying his obsession! I suspect that the more he works with other children of his own ability the more likely he is to discover outside interests on his wavelength.

"I imagine talent will eventually out itself, irrespective of parental input. "
There is no enthusiasm so keen that bad teachers can't completely destroy.