This is an excellent recommendation for me, thank you! I want the best outcome for my child, and the best approach is to learn what I should avoid. Also from my notes of last night, the Well-Trained mind book is on my purchase list.
I couldn’t agree more! 
I’d be curious to hear about your son’s changes in the next 15 months. Testosterone kicks in around age 3 (or so I’ve read) and some kids (mine included) become a total PITA for a long spell. Age 2.5 in particular was really awful. Louise Bates Ames refers to half-years as periods of “disequilibrium”.
My 3.5-yr-old twins seem to be “bright”, though not off the charts. They generally understand and comply with the rules, but at 2.5 they started testing every single limit and changing their requests before they could be filled. They sort of went out of their gourds. It seemed to me a time of intense emotional growth, having fits and dealing with anger and frustration. Their intellectual growth stalled a bit, they seemed to forget some of what they’d learned; but then it picked up quickly thereafter.
I wonder if your ds will channel some energy from intellectual to emotional growth at that point? In other words, you may be coming into a time when he needs to play and fight and struggle with peers, even if they don’t quite speak the same “language”. I don’t truly know, but I think it’s an interesting question.
Seriously? Just let your kid be a kid for now. Play, have fun, read, do stuff, experience the world. Teach him stuff, see stuff, read stuff, play with stuff, experience stuff.
The rest will follow.
If he turns out to be the next Einstein, well, cross that bridge when you get there. He’s not of school-age now, so don’t fret about it just yet.
Seriously.
Maybe you have a prodigy on your hands, maybe you don’t. Maybe you have a highly gifted child. Maybe you have a gifted child. Maybe you have a child with a gift for language but a total mental block when it comes to reading and spacial orientation. Who knows! He’s 2! Worry about it when the time comes. For now, just have fun with him.
I say this as someone who grew up as her parents’ “grad school project”.
Hi, thought I would chime in with my teacher hat on…
You have been given great advice here, read and keep reading! Make sure you spend as much time as possible talking about the illustrations as well. Have your little person describe as much as they can, and retell the story using the pictures. See if he can give an alternative ending to the story.
Carry out experiemnts, grow stuff, bake things and talk about what you see happening, cause and effect etc. Make predictions and justify them. Compare your results with the predictions, how close were you? Even with the simplest of things: "If we put this cake mix in the oven, how will the heat change it? When it becomes cool will it change back to how it was before? How about heating up these corn kernels or frying this egg? Does the same principle apply to water?
The advice I would give you is this: many bright children have great memories. They can memorise books, maths facts, dates, the order of things and so on, but they don’t always understand the process. It is one thing being able to recite the order of the planets, but that isn’t important. What is important is how planets were discovered. How do they stay up there? What effect do they have on the earth? How is a planet defined? What tools do we need in order to study planets?
For example, I had a very bright child begin school in my class. He was three, and had tyhe most difficult time settling inot school. His mum was surprised, she told me “I thought he would love school, he knows all his letters, sounds and numbers, he can add and knows his shapes and colours…” She went on to say “We have watched the video of how (well known small dog) goes to school, how he doesn’t like it at first but stays a while and plays then doesn’t want to go home. He can recite the whole story to you…”
The thing is, although he knew the story, he couldn’t relate it to himself or to his experience. He is a really bright child, but is still only three and only able to deal with emotional things at a three-year old level. Take care not to expect that children can behave much older than they are just because they can think much older than they are.
Ok, teacher hat off… Me hat on…
At school I was put ahead, I was put into a class with children almost 2 years older than myself (one grade level up, but my birthday meant I was the youngest in my original grade level). They didn’t know what else to do with me. I coped just fine with all the academics, but I struggled like mad with the social side of things. I was generally quite shy anyway, but those children were a lot older than me, and as we progressed through school the difference showed even more, you try being the nearly 11 year old in a class of nearly 13 year olds. I was almost as mature as the others but lacked their experience. They talked about TV shows that were on after my bed-time, they were being allowed to play about with make-up and beginning to hit puberty…
Personal and professional opinions mixed I would say don’t go ahead with any testing for now. Teach your child all you can as long as he wants to learn, let it all start with him and and his interests. Make it fun as well as educational. Don’t push, not for a minute. As I said, the advice you have been given here is top-notch!
Butterscotch, I love you. Your students are lucky to have you. Thank the Dagda, God, Buddha, Vishnu, Loki, Jeebus, Allah and his hundreds of fat nephews for teachers like you.
I think the thing people forget about bright children is that the emotional age doesn’t usually catch up to the intellectual age. YES, these kids can relate to adults and older peers better than kids their age… ON AN INTELLECTUAL LEVEL. Emotionally? They ain’t dere, my little schtrudels. Sorry. Yes, we’d like to make them out to be advanced on all accounts, but it doesn’t work that way.
My personal experience with this is that the spectrum works much like balancing out an equation - what you take from one side, you take from the other… and so on. Say you start out with a given number of points. The higher you go on the intelligence scales (IQ scores mean little, but the standardized test scores can be helpful) the lower the points go on the social (or overall social-functioning) scale. Or on the overall “sanity” scale. Show me a well adjusted genius, and I will show you a fraud. 
All this to say: Don’t push. Right now? Aim for greater span, less depth. Read, expose him to everything. Feed the growing brain. Let him learn a new language (now’s the time!). Expose him to music - let him pick up those skills now, why not! Just don’t push. And above all else, don’t assign him labels yet. Let him be who he is. He doesn’t have to be mommy’s little genius, or mommy’s little prodigy, or mommy’s little anything. He just has to be a Little Explorer who is curious and has a great big adventure, no matter what he does. Right now, that’s what’s important. Comparing him to others, already, will only set him up for failure later on.
Deep breath, relax, and enjoy him. They grow up too fast enough as it is…
It doesn’t have to be about books either.
One of the best memories we have as a family is growing a garden. We each got to pick two things, and we were responsible for hoeing, weeding, and planting. My husband’s cantaloupe vine escaped through the fence and we ended up with cantaloupes in the front yard. We didn’t dig down deep enough and my son’s carrots grew around the rocks in interesting shapes. I’d come home from work, pluck some green tomatoes, and fry them for a side dish with dinner. I found out quite recently the reason we had no blueberries is because the kids were picking them all off and eating them! They invited their friends over for the bonanza and Ivylad and I had none!
Of course, two may be a little young for that responsibility, but he can certainly drop a seed in a hole.
WhyBaby (2) loves to garden! Yes, seeds in holes is good, and the dollar store sells little watering cans that hold about 16 ounces of water, so not too heavy for her. Every night we have to go out to the patio to say good night to “her” tomatoes, and each morning she looks at them from the window and says, “Good morning, tomatoes! Grow, grow, grow!”
Just a few minutes ago, we planted a sweet potato that sprouted in the kitchen cabinet. I have no idea how well it will do as an indoor plant (our pineapple didn’t make it), but she had fun carrying it, putting it into the hole that I dug and then gently patting the soil back around it and watering it.
Even the plants that don’t make it serve for useful, casual, age-appropriate discussions about death, failure and the need to “try again!”
Plus they get to play in the dirt and maybe eat an earthworm or two. It builds up their immunity!
Hey, I thought I was doing that “enriched environment” thing w/our garden, too. They helped me dig and did some planting themselves, put the corn and tomatoes and bean seeds in the ground. We spent all morning getting muddy.
I even thought to toss a couple of bean seeds in an old Jif jar w/some wet paper towels. “Look!” I’d say with great excitement, “You see how those plants are growing in the garden? They’re putting down roots just like these in the jar! This is what’s happening in the soil!” We watched those plants for weeks. They seemed to get it — growth, nature, Mother Earth, hallelujah, it’s the cycle of life!
Gave myself Extra Mommy Stars for that one.
Until the day my son tore the leaves off my Jif beans and broke their stems.
Took him about 2 seconds.
Pissed me off but good.
One minute they’re speaking in elaborate sentences, testing logical statements, and identifying dinosaurs – the next minute, they’re dumping a brand new bottle of Aveeno allergen-free shampoo down the sink to watch it foam (I hadn’t even broken the seal on it) (that stuff’s $5/8 oz bottle!).
Oh yeah. Such joy there is in carefully cultivating your garden, only to have your 3-yo happily hand you a green strawberry–the only one that was on the plant–and say, "Look Mommy, I picked it for you!
But really–I’m a pretty rotten gardener, but I feel that we’re really lucky to live so close to my parents, the Master Gardeners with two acres. Even though I fail horribly, we can still go over there to say hi to the baby tomatoes, pick flowers to press and make into bookmarks, and harvest tons of peaches. The girls love it.
Well thank you! There are many more like me!
I think this is often because those bright children understand concepts and figures so quickly that they aren’t used to things being difficult or going wrong. When you enter into the world of relationships it isn’t so cut and dried and these children often become easily frustrated with others (IME), and eventually the others feel less like making an effort. Why play with someone who is always getting annoyed? You need to remember they may need extra help in getting on with other children, especially ones of their own age, but it is important that they learn how. Never underestimate the importance of social skills!
I’d never thought of it that way, but it’s a wonderful analogy, Elenfair. I was always academically very bright, but socially I was a late bloomer. It wasn’t until my mid-20s that I feel like I developed truly good social skills. I think my childhood and adolescence would have been much happier if I’d struggled a bit more with school but had an easier time with people.
Spoleto, I wouldn’t test your kid now. It seems like you’d be setting him up for lifelong super-high expectations. You’ll love him just as much if he winds up being an average kid who loves soccer and boogers, has a hard time with math, and is sometimes mean to his little sister, right?
I guess I’m slightly confused here… with all due respect, you’re not suggesting I dumb him down? I don’t mean to be offensive, I gain clarity through a process of deduction–just tell what it isn’t, then I’ll know what it is (sorta-kinda). Last evening, my son played with his 3 year-old cousin, who has a very limited vocabulary (3 word sentences, at best); sometimes it’s a combination of baby babble and 2-3 words… when they start playing chase–it’s loud-happy babbling, which my son thinks is part of the game of chase. After his cousin has left and later in the evening, my son wants me to play chase with him, i do and we’re running wild all over the place then he starts that babbling he engaged in earlier with his cousin… it made me stop in my tracks, and I turned and asked him, “what are you saying? I don’t understand you, sweetie” and then he repeated (here’s my best shot–>), “yaah yaah yaah YAAAH!!! blahdom blahdom blahdom! mommy… that’s how tony talks, im pretending to be tony, mommy.” not having time to consider an appropriate response, I just said, “Oh, ok.”
Was it, OK? My gut feeling is that it was perfectly fine, that my son was simply finding a way to enjoy his cousin, and perhaps after his own realization that his cousin couldn’t communciate at his level, he simply reverted to his cousin’s baby babble to still have a fun time with his cousin. I know a few parents who would be shocked and probably lecture their kids all the way home about the “inferiority” of the other child and that playtime with kids having less capabilities is not in his/her best interest. And actually, in a few past scenarios, a couple of the parents have asked me why I’m NOT constantly spearheading my son towards excellence by surrounding with other children of equal or better capabilities… twice I essentially told them, “well, it hasn’t impaired his learning at all, so I’m not worried … if I can see him happy, i’m happy.” Needless to say, i haven’t been invited to as many coffee meets as previously, but they still invite my little boy for playtime with their kids (I guess he’s the one they’re really interested in).
I think this may also be why so many of us don’t get degrees at or near the same time as our peers. I went through most of grade school and high school literally without opening a textbook when I wasn’t at school. I coasted by on my test scores and doing 31 math questions (or other from-the-book assignments) during the passing period or at lunch or in another class. For reading assignments, I’d just listen to the teacher in one ear and skim ahead in the book a few pages while he was talking. I never “studied” (to this day, I’m not sure what that means) because I didn’t have to. As long as the teacher covered everything we needed to know in class during lecture, I was golden.
Same for the first year or so of college. Then it started getting hard, and I got lost. Teachers started testing us on things from the assigned readings that they never mentioned in class. Topics got to a level of complexity that I couldn’t fully absorb or understand them on the first go-around. And, since I had never needed to study, I didn’t know how. Furthermore, since I had never been faced with a situation where I didn’t understand something at first, but learned it through study, I froze. I thought, “This is it. It’s too hard and I can’t learn it.” 'Cause “learn it” for me had always meant: “Read or hear it once or twice and you’ll remember it.”
It’s one of the things keeping me back from enrolling in school again, which I really want to do. I want to go into nursing. But I know I’m going to have to study, and I don’t know what that means. I don’t know how to learn something that doesn’t go into the data bank all on its own!
Of course it was okay! That is, it was okay for him to play with Tony like that. I think I might say something like, “Oh, okay. But you can use regular words with me if you want.” But if talking oddly is part of the game, how is that “dumbing down”? It’s just talking oddly, it’s not affecting his intelligence or his language skills during other activities.
I agree.
You officially have my permission to look down on those people. Seriously, WTF?
While I know how painful it can be to be excluded as a parent, my general sentiment towards these parents is: “Fuck 'em.” Your kid is more important, and you’ll have the ultimate satisfaction when their little angels are sponging off Mom and Dad at 24 with no degree trying to “find themselves” and using up their inheritance in psychotherapy. (Why yes, I did just describe myself a bit there!)
That’s hilarious! I love this idea too, and my son does the same thing with flower petals… he enjoys them growing but then he says they need trimming and he clips the petals (uuuggghh!!)
A daily ritual we have is to walk to a nearby pond and feed the ducks… it’s a wonderful experience when ducklings arrive and I can demonstrate/teach him to be especially careful around them.
OK, you know what? I’m horrified at this entire paragraph–at the mindset and behavior of these folks, if you’re reporting their attitudes correctly. I’m appalled. Of course it’s OK to play with kids at all levels of development. I would say that it’s a good thing to do. Especially with cousins, who will be there for the long haul!
When my oldest was a baby, I was new in town and joined a mother’s club. One little girl suddenly started walking at 9 months, after about a day of crawling. The mom then withdrew from the group, saying that she felt that the rest of the kids were no longer at her child’s level. The rest of us thought this was pretty dumb, but whatever. A year or so later, I ran into her at a playground, and of course the kids were playing happily and there was little discernible difference between them.
There is pretty much nothing to be gained by getting all competitive and evaluating children to see if they’re worthy of your child’s company. It’s a great way to miss out on friendships and experiences and turn your kid into a snob who is terrified of being ordinary, though.
Holy cow.
After thinking a little more–if it were me, I would seriously try to find new friends. These are not the sort of people I would want to be hanging around with, and I seriously believe that they are going to wind up with very damaged children. (Read Overachievers!) The only reason to hang out with them is to try to show them what normality looks like, IMO. And it’s too easy to start thinking like them and falling into that mindset.
About this little cousin; he sounds like a nice little boy. I hope, for your own sake, that you won’t think about trying to limit their playtime; telling your SIL (or sister, whoever it is) that her little boy is not smart enough to play with yours is a guaranteed method for earning her eternal dislike and causing a rift in the family. My SIL had a good friend who went all supermom when she got pregnant and essentially told her (SIL) that her daughter would not be very smart because she (SIL) wasn’t able to breastfeed. Would you like to bet on whether the friendship survived?
no it is not “OK”… It is much, much better than OK! It is simply wonderful. Your kid is happy, enjoying his cousin, and learning to how be a decent human being in social settings.
Would you prefer that he refuse to play with his cousin, because he , say, prefers to read his books?. How will you feel if your budding genius uses his wonderful language skills to say out loud that “Tony is no fun, I don’t like him. Mommy, take me home so you can read me another book”.
Yeah, that will get you lots of invites to coffee meets.
The important thing is EQ, not IQ. (the E stands for Emotional intelligence)
I’m thinking for a moment of my daughter’s two best friends - one is a year older than she, and the other a year younger. Since this makes them 1, 2 and 3, this is a not insignificant age gap. And you know what? She learns from both of them. She sees the older one doing things she can’t, and so she pushes herself to copy him. She sees the younger one struggling to do the same (copy the 3 year old or copy her), and she learns how to help him. From the older, she’s learned throwing a ball and drinking from a cup and coloring with sidewalk chalk. From the younger, she’s learning compassion, empathy, patience, how to teach someone, how to nurture (change a diaper, feed with a spoon) and how to say “I’m sorry” when she accidentally or purposefully hurts him.
I could teach her all the things the older kid has. But I don’t know how to teach her all that she’s learned from the “inferior” kid.