When my first child was entering kindergarten, I suspected she was gifted, but I was afraid to say so. It sounded so pretentious and loaded. So, I skirted the issue. In our own small classes, I took a front row seat to her excited drive to learn. We taught her to multiply in kindergarten, construct geometry proofs in first grade, and her reading level skyrocketed in second grade. In a multi-age classroom, she learned history, science and Latin well beyond her grade level from a buffet of interesting content. After graduating eighth grade, she enrolled in a traditional high school and found herself disheartened that teachers “spoon feed” information instead of giving her an opportunity to make the connections herself.
With my second child, I had the same inclination. As early as age four, I knew he was thinking deep thoughts when he confidently declared, “a shape must have more than two sides.” I enrolled him in our school as well, and his test scores show him above grade level in every subject. But is he gifted?
Years ago, a second grader enrolled in our school who had memorized the atomic numbers of each element, the diameters of every planet and investigated college level math for fun. His cognitive ability was “off the charts.” Another student learned Spanish, Greek, Latin, French then Esperanto for fun on her own. If these children are the standard of giftedness, there’s no comparison.
Now that our third child is entering kindergarten, we're asking the same question. We were shocked that she could write her name at age four, but did she really know all the letters? This motivated a deep dive of research: what makes a child gifted?
We landed in the pages of the gifted educator’s bible, Growing Up Gifted by Barbara Clark. Written and revised from the late seventies until 2012, it contains a wealth of research and guidance.
I assumed that a child was born gifted, but Barbara Clark demonstrates that “nurture” has as much, if not more, to do with it than “nature.” We parents have great influence over not only our children’s physical and emotional health but their mental capacity as well. In both genetics and environment, the term gifted, by its very nature, is something a child receives passively.
We’re all born with the same basic wetware in our heads, 100,000,000 to 200,000,000 neurons ready to connect to one another to make sense of the world in what ends up being our own unique way.
Imagine an elevator that takes the same exact amount of time to get from the ground floor to any other floor. Push the 30th floor, wait 30 seconds. Push the 18th floor, 30 seconds. Push the 2nd floor, 30 seconds. The first 10 seconds are the fastest part of the ride, then it coasts slower and slower to a stop when the doors open. It’s very fair, if inefficient.
Likewise, in the first four years of a child’s life, her brain achieves around 50% of her adult capacity for intelligence, 80% by six, and by eighteen she’s about as intellectually developed as she’ll be for the rest of her life (with some room for improvement or decline over the long term).