Are there any "IQ" tests for toddlers?

Factual Questions
1

I know most parents think their kids are little Einsteins, but we’re told by other parents with slightly older kids and also two sitters (both of which are early-elementary education majors) that our child is “advanced” and “so smart.”

Letters, numbers, colors, problem solving, puzzles, conceptual connections (i.e. If toy “A” can do “X” and toy “B” has a similar feature to “A” then toy “B” can also do “X” - if that makes sense). He’s learning his alphabet (he’ll name the letter or pick it out if asked) for about half the letters so far and he can count to 10 (if he sees the numbers in front of him) or to 5 unaided. He seems to have little problem learning new toys, even ones that are recommended for kids 2-3 years older. He’ll be 2 in a couple weeks.

I’m not bragging because this may be more normal than not(especially for the progeny of Dopers) but these are the types of things which we’re told are “advanced.”

Are the any objective measures at his age to estimate intelligence?

or

Are there any parents with smart older kids who have experience the same types of things when your children were this age?

2

I think most IQ tests are limited to children around 4 or older - tests before that age are more developmentally and less intelligence based.

Your son probably is developmentally advanced, however that doesn’t automatically equate to genius status in adulthood. I had very similar development at 2 years - ie. knew the whole alphabet, good communication skills, potty-trained, etc. and my adult IQ is about 140, which isn’t stupid, but I’m not Cecil Adams, either.

Al.

3

Al - I’m not really trying to see if he’s a genius, but I am curious if there are tests that differentiate development and intelligence, or just measure intelligence at his age. Option three would be more subjective (the reports from parents of bright kids) but still interesting to hear.

4

All I can offer is anecdotal evidence, but here goes.

My oldest sounds a lot like yours. Before he was two he knew his letters, number to 20, shapes, colors, as well as the name of many cars on the road, which he would point out from his little car seat. Differing from yours was that he walked late (17 mos), was almost four before being potty trained, always behind in gross motor skills. He is now ten, and is very bright. He scored way above grade level on his last round of Iowa Basic Skills, some as high as 7th grade.

Kid two…well, she was different. She had and has little interest in thing acedemic, and, after 1st grade is a halting reader at best. We are having challenges with her, as she will sound out a simple word (that e.g.), and will not remember it in the next sentence, or after 10 more occurences.

I don’t know if there is any connection between early recognintion and future sucesses or not, but from my admittidly limit point of veiw, there seems to be.

5

Most of the test that are available are for school-aged kids or older. However, you can get more infomation from http://www.gtworld.org/gttstinf.htm - in particular, the KABC - Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children sounds like it could be what you’re looking for.

However, most of these tests are for developmentally DELAYED children, rather than advanced children.

al.

6

Well I was a pre-school teacher for 5 years during college and into grad school. I have seen all sorts of oddities, wonders, short-comings and genius in toddlers. We are talking children just under two years and during that second year. We all know kids differ in developmental stages, some children express wonderful language aquisition, yet learn fine motor skills slower. Or Vice the Verse. Some kids walk at 10 mos. and others not till they are close to 17 to 20 months. All children are different. It sounds like the OP has an intelligent child, how much more intelligent than the mean? Most likely you won’t find out for a couple more years.

The childrens center I worked for was a Piaget Learning center. If you do a google search on Piaget, or Montessori you will find a wealth of information on young childrens intelligence and growth as well as where they should be at certain stages. This could be a good place to start.

Genius is very hard to find in very young children. Alot of times a child has to work with two things to become a genius, A)good genes. B) Optimal learning environment. [there are thousands of wonderful learning environs that could foster a genius]

Mainly, I suggest you keep up the good work and nurture the gift your child may have. With all the eccentricities and disease in the world, having a child who shows penchant towards learning and gaining knowledge, is a true blessing…[from the universal oneness of course] :slight_smile:

7

Yes that sounds advanced but why do you need a test? If you found a psych who would test (and at 2, I think the testing is primarily gonna be the psych’s gut instinct ) what would you do with the information? At 2 if one suspects one has a gifted toddler, then enrich the environment, and don’t dumb things down.

If your child is profoundly gifted, then the need for testing will become apparent. Other than that, I don’t think it is wise to test this young. The WPPSI-R is for four and up IIRC. Low ceilings and doesn’t give all that much info which is going to be practically useful in day to day life. There aren’t any objective routinely used tests to evaluate high IQ in two year olds. Al mentioned the Kaufman battery - it’s primarily designed for kids at the other end of the spectrum as are the Weschler tests. Also testing is expensive. I’d save the $, wait until the child was old enough for the WISC III and go to an experienced tester. If my child began reading and doing maths unaided I’d do a phone consult with Linda Silverman of GDC and then decide when to test. IQ tests can only be done once within a span of a couple of years. When you do test, you want an accurate as possible result.

And in the long run, testing is expensive, stressful for both kids and parents and not all that accurate. I wouldn’t go that path unless it was going to make a difference for the child. Or unless you suspect severe giftedness in which case God help you ;).

8

At two!? As others have noted other than the common sense, dead reckoning of “Hey he seems pretty bright!” No not really.

However, if you are truly concerned about your toddler getting the proper motivational stimuli I might suggest “box learning” per the link below.

http://www.somethingawful.com/spam/icq/colleen/index.htm

9

At two!? As others have noted other than the common sense, dead reckoning of “Hey he seems pretty bright!” No not really.

However, if you are truly concerned about your toddler getting the proper motivational stimuli I might suggest “box learning” per the link below.

http://www.somethingawful.com/spam/icq/colleen/index.htm

10

As others have mentioned, there are early tests available. I was first tested at age 3 or 4 in preschool. (My parents were university students and I attended a Child Study Center.) I’m not sure that there is any value in assigning a numerical score to children of that age.

I will, however, strongly suggest that you read The Hurried Child, by David Elkind. My mother-in-law, an early childhood educator, pressed this book on me when our first child was a toddler. Actually, she gave me her copy and extracted a promise that I would read it. (My husband and I were both “bright” children and it was clear that we had produced another.)

The basic message in this book is that there is value in allowing children to be children, that it is not necessarily always a good thing to make it possible for our children to do everything as soon as they are able. Much of the focus is on children growing up too fast, both socially and emotionally, but the concept can extend to intellectual growth as well. The fact that a child can learn/understand a concept or skill does not mean that it is necessarily beneficial for him to do so.

I have known children who actively demanded to learn things and that is certainly hard to ignore. But it can also be hard to avoid unintentionally pushing a bright child to do more, because you, as parents, get so much positive reinforcement when a child is “successful.” And sometimes kids get into a pattern of pushing themselves, not because they are driven internally to do so, but because they get so much reinforcement from their parents. Remember, that innate intelligence isn’t going to disappear.

11

I was a “hurried child”. As one of only four “gifted” students in my grade (beginning after 3rd grade SRA testing), I was subjected to any number of silly activities to promote higher learning. We were pulled out of class for special assignments regularly, we missed recess every Friday for a math problem-solving class, we missed free time on Thursdays for a literature class, our Saturdays were spent traveling around to different schools in the county for classes with other local students, evenings we were involved in drama productions, and summers were filled with computer classes at a local university. It left little time to be just kids. As a result, I and all three of the other girls suffered major burnout.

I, like most people, think my kids are incredibly bright. :slight_smile: My four-year old can write the alphabet, do simple written and oral addition/subtraction, and is beginning to read. My three-year-old isn’t far behind her. I am thrilled, but I absolutely refuse to force them to go through what I went through. I wouldn’t have mine tested this young, either. But that’s mine, and yours is yours.

12

I sure as hell hope there aren’t IQ tests for toddlers.

I was raised in the same stultifying “gifted kid” environment as jane_says, and I can only begin to imagine the rush of pushy, competitive parents going to get their widdle darwing tested. I can’t think of one good reason to test the IQ of a toddler.

13

Gotta go with the majority here and say that even if someone has designed a purported “intelligence” test for children under the age of four or five, it’s likely to be worthless. Aside from any other considerations (such as the potentially harmful uses to which the results of such tests would be put by many parents and educators), the human brain at that age is still very much a work-in-progress; neurons are still being wired up in ways that are very much dependent on environment and experience, as well as genetics. By any objective measure of brain development, there’s too much changing all the time to make any reading at a particular point in time useful for the future (even if the future in question is only a few months).

Enjoy the cool things your kid’s doing, keep giving him new, fun things to try, and don’t rush him. If you want to really understand what’s happening (and appreciate why attempting to measure intelligence at an early age is pointless), see if your local library has a copy of What’s Going on in There? : How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life by Lise Eliot. She brings both a neurobiologist’s expertise and a mother of three’s perspective to her detailed, thorough explanation of exactly how the brain develops from conception through early childhood, and on the complex interplay of genetics, environment, and experience that forms a child’s mind.

14

alice_in_wonderland, you may be interested to know that an IQ of 140 puts one in the 99.6th percentile, i.e. quite high.

15

There are in fact IQ tests of sorts for toddlers, because my child had one. My youngest son (2 years old) is notably lacking in his speech development. The doc’s opinion on this was that he was either (1) hearing impaired or (2) mentally impaired or (3) just plain stubborn. Hearing tests were done, and a specialist visited the house. At this age you don’t get a specialized IQ test with a specific number like you do at an older age, but there are many milestones that they can use to measure the child’s cognative abilities, such as do they recognize colors, do they stack blocks, do they put words together in sentences, do they use adjectives, etc. I don’t recall the details of what the specialist asked the child and tried to get the child to do, but they are able to get a pretty good idea of exactly how smart the child is and how far along they are mentally with their development.

FYI the hearing test for a toddler is quite interesting too, after all, they can’t just raise their hand when they hear the sound like we do. There are different types, the simplest being that the doc walks up behind the child while he/she isn’t looking and drops a metal basin onto the floor. If the child doesn’t react, then you know you have a major problem. For more subtle tests, they put the child in a dark room (on Mommy’s lap in our case) that has 3 of those annoying toy monkeys that move and crash little cymbals, each with a light nearby. There are speakers next to the monkeys on the left and right. The speaker makes a noise, and when the child looks towards the noise, the monkey bangs and the light flashes. Then, the monkey in the middle (why you need the 3rd monkey) bangs and the light flashes, to focus the child’s attention back to the center, and in a short time the child is trained to look to the left or right when it hears a sound. When the child doesn’t look, you know the sound is too faint for them to hear.

The end result in my case was that my child hears fine, is mentally fairly bright, is definately somewhat stubborn, but is also lacking in the speech development area of his brain, and is now undergoing speech therapy.

16

my mother taught me to read when i was 3, because i was turning into a brat. she worked out i was bored.

then she just took me to the library and let me pick out books. now, the great thing was that i didn’t know that it was unusual at all…until i went to school. and i was bored stupid in class.
i wasn’t moved up, but was given additional reading material. and i got the pick of the school library.
when i did the SAT when i was 14 i got an 800 verbal.

which you wouldn’t know from the quality of this, or any other, post.

now, the best i can say is, don’t push WORK on you child. do the educational stuff he enjoys. if he likes toys for 5 year olds, fine, give them to him, as long as they’re safe.

an IQ is just a number, don’t sweat it. just be aware that he’ll get bored if he’s not constantly given something to do, and then you can expect tantrums and brattishness.

the thing is, i am, and never have been very competitive or perfectionist. i never had to be. i got good grades without working for them, and my best was never required of me. this lead to laziness and bad study habits.

however, i knew if i wanted to get into the medical school i wanted i had to work, only the best was good enough. and that, my friends, was a boot up the ass.

my sisters, however WERE moved up in school, and have always been perfectionists and very hard workers, because they were academically stretched.

you need to consider the pros and cons of your situation very carefully.

17

Is that why you don’t use capital letters to begin sencences?

18

I have no intention of pushing the kid or making him “hurried.” (I’d rather he get a basketball or football scholarship to a major D1 university, so chastise me for that if you want! He’s tall, coordinated and loves to play ball, so maybe with his smarts he’d be a good point guard or quarterback?)

I just wanted to know if there’s an objective intelligence measure at his age. It seems that if one even exists it wouldn’t be too accurate, so I wouldn’t bother.

Someone above mentioned good genes and a good learning environment. I’m assuming he has the genes in place, so I’d want to be sure to continue that he learns new things and doesn’t get bored with the toys, games, puzzles, books that are supposed to be for his age. I thought an outside or objective measure of intelligence could help us balance his early-education so that he’s challenged to learn but not pushed to excel.

19

I agree that it’s hard to say much beyond “Well, she seems pretty bright.”

My personal theory is that during the toddler years, kids focus on different things for different reasons. As a result they advance in an uneven fashion. For example, my daughter (who “seems pretty bright”) knows the alphabet pretty well as a result of watching Sesame Street. Her cousin (who also “seems pretty bright”) doesn’t watch Sesame Street and doesn’t know the alphabet as well.

As kids start elementary school, they are being exposed to and learning a more universal “canon” of knowledge, making comparisons more easy (although still problematic).

20

The recommended ages for toys, games, books, etc. are just that: recommendations. Aside from safety concerns about certain types of toys, your best guide to what works for your child is your child himself. Give him the opportunity to experience a wide variety of stuff, and let his interests and abilities do the rest. Keep changing things around and trying different things, because kids change and develop so fast at that age that what was right for them yesterday may be “baby stuff” to them today – and something that was baby stuff yesterday may have something new to teach them today, when they’ve developed new skills or abilities in a particular area. So you really needn’t worry much about challenging him, unless the alternative is putting him in a closet eight hours a day.

The most important thing to try to remember (and it’s impossible to do all the time) is to resist the temptation to compare them with other kids at or around the same age. Nearly every child under the age of six or seven is learning and developing at an incredible rate, but each individual is learning and developing different knowledge and skills at any particular time. Kids vary wildly in their abilities at your son’s age and for years thereafter, but the vast majority even out as they mature, so advanced or delayed ability in a particular area means usually means little or nothing until they’re quite a bit older.