Most of the evidence suggests that “gifted” often grow to be exceptional adults, at least in terms of academic and financial success:
So the notion that “gifted” children aren’t any more likely to be successful adults is basically a myth.
No, IQ doesn’t increase appreciably with age. IQ is typically defined as mental age divided by physical age, times 100. Since physical age is the denominator, then mental age would have to increase dramatically to make the quotient increase.
I’ve heard that reaching physical milestones early, like rolling over, sitting up, walking etc. are indicators of the kid having ADHD, and I wonder if there’s any validity there. This certainly seems to be the case with my brother and I who met them all quite early, and were extremely hyper active: I was diagnosed with hyperactivity before kindergarten, and girls tend not to be diagnosed with ADHD anywhere near as young as boys.
If it is true, it wouldn’t be unique in early milestones indicating problems rather than giftedness - it’s pretty well known that being hyperlexic, that is reading really well at an unbelievably young age (like age two and being able to full read sentences in books without pictures) is indicative of autism rather than being a child genius.
As for not ridiculously early readers, a study I read said that they’d been disappointed that three and four-year-olds who could read were tracked at age five most “only” read as well as a typical six-year-old or some typical seven-year-olds. A year is one-fifth these kids’ entire lives, and that’s a not impressive outcome? Sheesh.
“Accomplishment” is a very subjective term. Here’s an example: The smartest kid I grew up with said he wanted to be a truck driver, and was endlessly razzed for it (I wouldn’t call it bullying). He ended up getting an associate’s degree in diesel mechanics, and has taught that subject at a community college for about 25 years. That school probably produces the best diesel mechanics anywhere, and he would have been a dismal failure as, say, a doctor or lawyer.
In many cases, you are right, or they have substance abuse or mental health issues that create roadblocks. They’re just like the other 98%, only with higher IQs.
(I’m a life member. 
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Reaching milestones out of order (like walking without crawling first) often indicates these issues and others.
Uneven development, like feeding oneself early, but speaking late, or reading words on a page that one does not use spontaneously, are the kinds of things that indicate a problem. Walking without crawling is not a problem, though. That was invented by a place called the Philadelphia Institutes for Achievement of Human Growth (the word “Growth” was later changed to “Potential”), founded in 1955 by Glenn Doman and Carl Delacato, which is a place of quackery that claims to be able to cure any brain “hurt” from Cerebral Palsy, to autism, to poor eyesight, through “patterning.” They have people move a child’s arms and legs through crawling motions almost literally all day, if a child can’t crawl, and then have a child spend the rest of the day crawling around an indoor track, and occasionally brachiating or running around tracks if the child is able. It occupies a child’s whole day, and school-aged children in the program usually need to be homeschooled to complete it. Read all about it in a book called*No Time for Jello*.
I have two cousins who both walked without crawling. One has a Ph.D in microbiology, and is in Texas, working on the Ebola vaccine; the other is a lawyer with the state of Illinois. None ever had any problems whatsoever, other than the younger one needing braces, and the older one being a little bit of an asshole, but he’s our asshole, and we love him.
Even uneven development is only something that indicates a problem if it is quite dramatic, then, yes, it can be part of an autistic spectrum, but many other kids are overall average, just not average in any one thing. If they are a bit advanced in language for a while then they may be a bit behind in gross motor during that same time. There is really only so much developmental energy that gets divided into different buckets.
FWIW, circling back to giftedness, my suspicions in early childhood go up more based on being advanced in the never formerly codified humor milestones. Show me a kid who is laughing at things that most kids don’t laugh at until they are older, or making funnies (sometimes a stretch at that point to call them “jokes”) in nature ahead of their age, and that is a kid to expect to have giftedness issues. Likewise in the other direction even if they know their letters on time or early, don’t hit those milestones and there may be problems to come even if they hit the others just fine.
Based on anecdotal experience though, no cite.
Cartoonacy writes:
> IQ is typically defined as mental age divided by physical age, times 100.
It hasn’t been defined that way for a long time. It’s defined as fitting the scores on an I.Q. test to a normal curve. This is done so that someone with an average score on such a test would get a 100, and each standard deviation is equal to 15 points. The effect is the same though. Someone is compared with their peers. If you’re 5 years old, you’re compared with other 5-year-olds. If you’re 10 years old, you’re compared with other 10-year-olds. If you’re an adult, you’re compared with other adults. On average, you don’t expect your I.Q. to go up or down as you age:
As another anecdotal data point, my daughter did not crawl at the average age for it. She seemed eager to move, but just couldn’t figure it out. She was also a little behind in her gross motor skills, her fine motor skills were more than adequate though. She went from not crawling to walking right on time. Some people seemed alarmed by this, but she just inherited my total lack of sport talent.
What she got from me was the talent for languages (multilingual from the start, and ahead of our peers in vocabulary and sentence construction). We both also learned how to read well ahead of our classmates, and could bullshit our way out of not studying, most of the time.
Judging by where it led me, most of her classmates will catch up in high school, and she’ll become a smart person, though definitely not a genius. I am fine with that. 
This makes total sense to me. Humour is based on juxtaposition and incongruity - in other words, it’s based on understanding the connections between things, and actually creating connections, rather than just having a handle on the things themselves. It makes a lot of sense that kids who are making spontaneous connections at an early age would turn out to be smart.
Hyperlexia of autism is usually an isolated skill, and as such, it presents as a savant skill: children who have it are often behind in other areas. They also often obsess over written words: they can’t, for example, walk past a PSA poster without reading the whole thing, and it makes taking them out difficult. I knew one kid who recited the letters and numbers on every license plate and read every bumper sticker if you walked him through a parking lot.
The kicker is that usually these kids don’t even understand everything they read. They may be able to respond S-T-R-A-W-B-E-R-R-Y if you say “Spell strawberry,” but not pick a strawberry out of a bowl of fruit.
So it’s pretty easy to spot genuine prodigious reading from hyperlexia of autism. Kids who are early readers because they are bright (or because an older sibling was very determined, and sat them down and taught them), can actually use all the words they can read, and if they ever come across a word they don’t know, will immediately want to know. Hyperlexic kids lack curiosity about what they are reading.
Now, there are plenty of bright kids who do not read early, and catch up to the early readers, but IME, children who read early generally remain good readers. They may not remain prodigious readers, and may not read several grades ahead for the rest of their school career, but they will probably remain at the top of their class as readers.
Single data point: I was an early reader who continued to read about two grades ahead, but I loved reading. I didn’t try to be a good reader-- it was natural. However, there were other kids in my class in school who read as well as I did who were not early readers-- they picked it up very fast in first grade, but didn’t read in kindergarten.
I was taught to read by my older cousin, who brought her readers homes, and just basically clued me into sounding out words, and then let me read her first grade readers. She also helped me out with sight words-- the words you just have to memorize. Once I could read about 80% of a text, I could figure out the rest.
By third grade, I was a very good reader, among the best four or five in my class, BUT, I don’t think any of the others had been early readers, and we were indistinguishable.
I thought of this when I saw a news piece the other day about a 12YO freshman at Cornell. He said he is used to having older friends, but only if they like math. It seems likely he is less socially developed than his cohorts, and far less socially developed than the typical freshmen who are 6 years older than him. He’s not even physically developed yet; casual group sports (softball, volleyball, soccer, etc.) are going to leave him mismatched relative to his classmates, and he’s not going to fit in at the typical raucous college-student parties. If you’re 21, you might get into some trouble for providing alcohol to an 18YO, but you’re going to get into a shitload of trouble for providing alcohol to a 12YO. Not to mention the porn and/or explicit discussions of sexual topics that crop up from time to time (“Let’s all watch 50 Shades of Grey; Jeremy, you should go do something else for a couple of hours.”). He’s going to be socially isolated, far more so than a typical college-age genius would be.
I was hyperlexic as well, reading before three.
I have often used the analogy of racing in terms of how I compared to my peers. It’s as if I was a 100-yard dash specialist in a 400-metre race; I was really, really far ahead for a long time, and if the race had ended at 7 years old I would have dusted the field, but it didn’t, so the field caught up and I didn’t even win a medal. At 4 years old I could read when essentially no other kids could. At 7 I could read better than any kid in my school. At 9, one or two kids had caught up to me. At 12, more, and by the end of high school I was not remotely close to being the smartest kid in my school.
Having said all that, I do have a good memory, and
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The vast majority of kids I knew who were intellectually gifted stayed that way, more or less, and were academically successful. The very smartest were the most successful.
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The vast majority of kids I knew who were dull-witted stayed that way.
Just additional anecdotal points agreeing with RickJay …
There were the two kids I knew in my school growing up who were clearly the genius kids. No I did not know their IQs, so take this for what it is worth, but they were clearly the cohort’s outliers. They both went on to have very accomplished academic careers.
In my kids’ classes - in a primary school system where nearly every parent thought their kid was “gifted” there was one I knew of who clearly really was. That cohort is now 30 and that kid did indeed grow up to be highly accomplished and functional.
Again, FWIW.
Heh–I’m six years late to correct a misconception, but better late than never. You mention in that OP that I was a “verified, legitimate child prodigy” at playing violin. I’ve told this story before (there’s an article on child prodigies in a “Year in Medicine” volume from World Book Encyclopedia or something from the eighties, and it’s illustrated with a photograph of me playing fiddle at a street fair), but I wasn’t a child prodigy. I was just small and moppety and unafraid of crowds, and a good photographer happened to snap a picture of me. Definitely not a child prodigy.
There are three related questions here, I think:
- The title of the OP: are genius children notably smarter as adults? IQ tends to be stable over time. Whatever measure you use for “genius” will presumably also be stable over time.
- The first variation: do genius children go on to achieve great things? Not all, of course, but disproportionately so.
- My variation: do folks who achieve great things (obviously this idea could use some definition) have a history of childhood genius? I suspect this is very disproportionately true, in the same way that great athletes tended to play a lot more sports as children than did great accountants.
Your variation is potentially the most interesting to my mind LHOD.
I suspect it is statistically true but not meaningfully so. IOW of those who achieve “great things” there are likely more geniuses than in the general population by some measurable amount but the vast vast majority of those who do great things are not geniuses. Genius is not required for greatness and is insufficient for it as well. A certain level of basic ability (maybe slightly above average but maybe just average) is and then it is the combination of drive, habits of mind (inclusive most of the time of intellectual curiosity), and having the seed planted in the right soil (call it "opportunity’). And to my mind some small element of chance. Inherent genius is lowest on that list. But overall it doesn’t hurt …
I had the fortune of personally knowing some people who really achieved “great things,” including the president of a former company who took it from zero to several hundred million dollars in annual sales. Another had a very successful NGO.
Drive is very important. In the case of my former president, he went through three or four marriages because his work was his first love.
The right combination of self confidence without recklessness, although it may simply be that since we only see the successful ones that may be more of a factor of luck.
For building organizations, then leadership is of up most importance, and the near geniuses I’ve known haven’t been really strong on that.
:eek:
Really?
IQ is pretty well associated with almost every good life outcome and negatively associated with almost every bad life outcome.
On average, you make more money, you live longer, you are less likely to have a failed marriage, you are more likely to graduate high school, you are more likely to graduate college, you are more likely to own a home, you are more likely to finish crossword puzzles, you are more less likely to be incarcerated, you are less likely to be murdered, you are less likely to become addicted to drugs, you are less likely to become a habitual smoker or an excessive drinker. I can’t think of many life results that are NOT positively affected by higher IQ.
I’m pretty sure my IQ started dropping somewhere between the age of 30 and 40.