Very clever child, what do I do, if anything?

[SquarePeggyLeggy]

There’s no way for this to sound not like a humble brag. I’ll caveat by explaining, I have three children, and have not experienced anything like this until the youngest. My kids have several cousins, they are also not like this.
My oldest child is quite bright but quite lazy and uninterested in school work, he wants to do a trade, isn’t interested in further study, which is fine. He also has ADHD. So his marks and school work are all over the place. My second child is quite average, performs straight down the middle, is quite creative but again, not academically focused and nothing out of the ordinary school wise, and did briefly require learning support. In summary, I’m not a crazy person who thinks all of her children are brilliant geniuses.
We have a youngest child who turned 2 in March. So this is very young. She was drawing the other day and wrote a perfect letter e. She called out:”Mummy, look, e!” I couldn’t believe it, so rubbed it out and asked her to do it again. She did, perfectly. I then wrote down a series of letters and asked her what they were, she got them all correct, I varied upper and lower case. We also have read her a book about shapes, maybe 3 times. She points them all out correctly in the environment, including more advanced ones like “diamond”. She knows big, medium and small (but does call them Daddy, Mummy and baby, like baby cow for a calf and Daddy cow for a bull). We do baby dancing, and she knows and correctly does all of the choreography. She anticipates it and does it in advance, she remembers it. They’ve moved her in with older kids at nursery for learning groups and the dancing teacher has put her in the class with 4 year olds.
Is this normal? I don’t think it is. My other children knew their letters by the time they started school, but only just, and they could write their names but not really other words or letters. That seemed to be normal amoungst their cohort.
What should we do, if anything, to support this? Previously I’ve provided toys, lots of outdoor time and we always had a bed time story, but my other kids mainly liked running around, imaginary play and destroying the house.
This child will sit and complete puzzles and activity cubes. She draws and draws and leads through books. She observes what I’m doing and comes to help and she is helpful! She realises the goal of any activity (like taking the washing out of the machine) and does it until it’s done. She watches once and knows how to do things correctly. She can navigate the Netflix to find Shaun the Sheep for example.

I feel as though she could have some support to really extend herself. At the same time, she is a baby in nappies, and I’m very much not a flash card drilling kind of Mum.

My brother is highly intelligent, he was skipped ahead in school and it resulted in a mental health crisis for him, so there’s that.

What do people do in this situation? Maybe learn an instrument? Language class or something? I don’t know. In other areas she’s totally just turned two: still in nappies, has a baby voice and baby grammar, ie sounds her age when she talks.

encourage her, facilitate her interests, keep her options open and encourage hard work

but that's exactly the point - what sort of things will facilitate her interests? what will keep her options open? how the hell do you encourage hard work when everything she's currently doing is coming easily to her?

In our karate class we've had a couple of kids who are quite obviously in the more able group at school - not necessarily particularly advanced, but able to do whatever the teacher asks of them - and without any physical issues so able to be fairly dominant in normal child play and yer basic football kickaround.

It's quite obvious how frustrated upset and angry they get when they can't immediately do the karate stuff well. It's an experience they've not had before.

Some of these children decide they're no good at karate, and give up. Others listen to advice, work at the technique and eventually get it. This second group have now learnt something - not just karate, but an important life skill, one which early-advanced children can miss out on.

(Has anyone done any studies as to whether there's a correlation between the level of push an infant prodigy gets and the likelihood of them still being exceptional in later life?)

Do nothing special. My 2nd was like this (was reading the paper fluently - entirely self taught and we took a while to realise what he was up to- well before his 3rd birthday), and, at 17, is very intelligent, but no genius. Don't treat your DC as special, and praise effort rather than intelligence as they get older.

This type of precociousness is not unusual, particularly in children with older siblings.

I think this is a boy v girl thing. Girls always seem to be born able to colour and draw. Also being the youngest helps as they pick things up.

My oldest is a boy and he was very slow on his development, not slow to sit, crawl or walk, but the rest slow to jump, catch or be able to draw and to speak. He didn't have cousins or siblings to copy. He is still a bit behind, I'd say maybe even a year although he's summer born. My DD is racing ahead too. She opens a book and makes noises like b a g at 18 months, but it's as she see me doing the sounding out reading books with DS as he's in reception.

Your DD sounds awesome, maybe some Orchard games would engage her?

@Jahebejrjr

In my experience the youngest child often appears advanced because they benefit from having older siblings to learn from.

Yes, I agree with this. People comment on my third child who seems particularly advanced and precocious. Yes, she is bright, but she also has two older siblings who she is trying to keep up with and learning from on a daily basis.

She sounds lovely

DS wanted to know how everything worked from about that age and I found this series of books really good for young children. www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0713662565/ref=ppx_yo_mob_b_inactive_ship_o0_img?psc=1&tag=mumsnetforu03-21&ie=UTF8

I bought loads of others but they were the best.

A lot of PPs seem to be hinting at 'growth mindset', which basically means believing that you can develop your talents through hard work.

So rather than praising a child for being 'clever', praise them for working hard, trying something new, sticking at something which doesn't come easily.

This stops.the dangerous perfectionist mindset that it isn't worth doing something if you aren't great at ot immediately.

I wrote a similar post to you a couple of years ago OP. Like you lots were quick to say that My DD is now 5 and so far looks like she picks things up quickly. For example she watches how things work then does them herself. Her reading is advanced and in lockdown I just gave her the year 1 maths to do (which she did) as she didn’t have any yr R work set. Of course it could all change as she’s still young.

But I agree with the comments about growth mindset and the example a pp had about karate. I notice that as DD finds academic (well as academic as things are in year r) things easy she doesn’t try very hard at things she doesn’t have natural aptitude for. So running she’s very (below?) average at. So she will just refuse to do any races and avoids football etc. She struggled to write as her pencil grip wasn’t good. So she just didn’t do it. Once she started writing she wrote in little sentences so it wasn’t that she didn’t know what to write but didn’t like struggling with the action of doing it.

So rather than work on pushing the things that your DD is good at start to build resilience that’s it’s ok to get things wrong. That getting it right isn’t the aim. That enjoying and improving are the aim. That should put her in a good place long term.

At this age, do nothing much but don't stifle it. Read a lot to her, give her plenty of toys that will enable her to develop the skills she seems to enjoy - bathtime letters counting games etc.

But equally encourage imaginative play and lots of friendly interaction and ball games. IME exceptionally clever children can frighten off their peers and sometimes end up quite lonely so the most important thing is to teach them how to socialise, fit in and be good at sport and games without ever telling them to dumb down. Social skills are incredibly valuable - more so than a string of A*s three years early.

One of mine was like this too - but he was my first so I didn’t really realise . He was a bookworm and liked to know how things worked so I encouraged that . Generally though we spent a lot of time outdoors and playing .

What I will say is that no child is brilliant at everything so you do need to encourage resilience for when they do struggle with something . It’s hard finding something difficult when it’s always been easy. Mine is at the moment struggling with the transition to grammar after being a bit lazy because he could get away with it at a small primary school

She definitely sounds like a clever cookie.

Keep providing her with plenty of opportunities to learn through play at this stage (books, puzzles, games etc) and a musical instrument sounds like a lovely idea. I wouldn’t worry about anything more formal til she starts school and you can be guided by her teachers. At the moment just nurturing her curiosity will be the most helpful thing.

Continue to support her love for learning and I think that adding another language is an excellent idea. Since this is the perfect time to learn another language as their brains are little sponges and you have a certain period of time that picking up a second language comes easily for them, that is a great idea!

Montessori was fantastic because they can go at their own pace, if you’ve got one locally it’s worth a look. They helped dd work on motor skills (which weren’t great) while also letting her teach herself to read, and spent lots of time cuddled up reading with her.

The things I’m glad I did at primary age are exposure to a lot of different extra curricular stuff (she needs her brain tiring out as much as her body, and it turned out that music / chess / dance did that for her better than school), lots of library trips and books, plenty of conversation, backing up the school’s growth mindset approach and encouraging practise and trying things that didn’t come so easily to her.

I’m glad I looked at secondary options carefully and was ambitious for her. She’s thriving at a super selective - if I’d listened to MN I’d have been convinced she was just precocious and would be average by 11!

She sounds lovely! There’s no point debating how exceptional or not she is or comparing to other kids because they’re all different and development isn’t linear. But I wholeheartedly agree with the pps who said that you don’t need to do anything special - just follow her lead and her interests - but also try to praise effort rather than achievement to teach resilience.

I have a bright child and he’s still very young but already I can see he kind of resists doing things that don’t come easily, so we’re working on that.

Also, DH and I are musicians. Highly recommend that all children learn an instrument, but there are no benefits to doing it before 4 or 5 at the earliest. Just do lots of singing with her.