For the purposes of this thread ‘gifted’ has to mean ‘above the IQ cut-off for whatever program declared you gifted’.
It doesn’t mean someone has an usually high IQ score, has special talents in some areas, is usually mentally advanced for their age, is academically successful, or an original or intuitive thinker. There are people who were told they were ‘gifted’ as children and are posting in this thread who were none of those things. Or all.
In my school, everyone with an IQ over 120 was labeled gifted and enrolled in the school’s Gifted and Talented program. There’s nothing special about most people who can test with an IQ or 120 or more. And yet all of us can say we were identified as ‘gifted children’.
Science seems to support this. Children who are praised or rewarded for integral qualities like intelligence, artistic talent, or good looks; learn that how they are is what is special, which seems to teach them that their innate ‘specialness’ is the main factor in what they can achieve. Smart/talented kids are less likely to develop a good work ethic, and have less confidence in attempting anything that doesn’t come naturally, and far more anxiety about failure. This is a recipe for disaster once they are in an enviroment where their natural talents aren’t so special anymore and they have to know how to apply themselves to keep up (ie college). Kids who are struggling or have fewer natural abilities are likely to give up on improving and stop valuing academics etc, because they internalize the message that if you make mistakes, you aren’t smart. And older children understand that when you praise them for being ‘smart’ or special when other people are much better, you’re a liar.
Children of all abilities who are praised for their concentration, efforts and work ethic rather than their natural talents or the absolute quality of their results, learn to put their best effort into everything they do (even things that aren’t natural talents or passions), and tend to be more successful and self-confident in general.
But in my school, and my kids school - IQ has nothing to do with it - so that can’t be the definition because not everyone identified as gifted was an “IQ cut off.” They aren’t IQ tested. Kids with high IQs are not identified as gifted, kids with average IQs who have different thought patterns are. Some kids are put in gifted programs for only one thing - there are kids who participate in the research project, but not in math pullout. Or kids who do the vocabulary team, but that’s it. Other kids participate in the full spectrum of pull out activities. )
We had a G&T program at my rural KY middle school (6th-8th grade). It took the top six students out of each class, and it took up two of our seven periods. One period was separated by classes rotated between literature, geography, and logic puzzles and such.
The other period, and by far the best thing I ever did in my pre-college years, was Current Events. All three classes were together, and each week we got a copy of Newsweek and assignments for which stories to read. The teacher really made us understand what was going on and made us think and debate about it.
Of course, a few years after I finished they got rid of the whole program due to funding issues.
In high school a lot of people saw me as especially bright, and the principal even talked to my parents and tried to get them to send me to a big-time prep school. I even spent a summer at Exeter. But I had seen some friends of mine go off to other prep schools, and when they came back they were total assholes, so I told my parents I didn’t want to go and that was the end of it.
Where am I now? Finished med school, boarded in internal medicine, now a professor for a rural family medicine residency. I had a lot of trouble in late undergrad and med school that I would attribute, globally, to lack of focus. Part of that was untreated ADHD, which I eventually got treatment for, and the subsequent need to readjust almost everything I knew how to do. Part of it was just that my interests are so broad and I require a lot of diversity in my life, and med school/residency (or pursuit of any upper degree, really) requires a single-mindedness that I never had and wouldn’t have wanted. But I eventually got through and found a place for myself in the world.
Right now I can’t think of anyone whose life I’d trade mine for, and if that’s not success, I don’t know what is.
Thanks for the last few posts, they have been very informative.
I have a question about IQ, don’t know if anyone can answer.
Is a child’s IQ predictive of adult IQ in any way? For example, if an adult has an IQ of 120, is it reasonable to conclude they would have scored 120 or close to it as a child? Or is it more likely that IQ increases or decreases in adulthood? Just curious how that works.
I’m inclined to agree with you about success – I’ve got a relative with an IQ of 140 who’s been less successful in life than some people who’d be considered “borderline intellectual functioning” – but childhood intelligence test scores are a very good predictor of adult intelligence test scores. It’s arguably the only thing childhood intelligence test scores are particularly good at predicting. “Intelligence” isn’t really the same thing as “IQ”, but it seems obvious enough that people do not normally become significantly more or less intelligent (relative to their own age group) as they grow from children to adults.
*I think it’s a lot more likely that you are underestimating your husband’s intelligence as a child than that he became much more intelligent as an adult. He must have learned a lot more as he got older, but that’s not the same thing as intelligence. You say in your OP that he was always in the top 10% of his class in school, so he was performing at an above average level even then. You also say in the OP that he didn’t get the “gifted treatment” and here that he wasn’t a “gifted child”, but what do you mean by that? I was in the gifted program in school but I never got the “gifted treatment” you describe in your OP where I was expected to grow up to produce “amazing masterpieces”. Where I went to elementary school we were placed in the gifted program based solely on IQ scores. If your husband had gone to school with me then maybe he would have been in our gifted program too. Or he might have never been tested (they didn’t test everyone, you had to be recommended by a parent or teacher) and thus never placed in the gifted program even if he would have scored high enough to qualify.
You’re saying there were always other kids like me out there, I just didn’t meet them until I started college at an institution that selected for kids like me? My husband on the other hand, already knew kids like him and therefore has a more realistic perspective of his own ability at that age than I do? That makes sense, and in no way contradicts the main thrust of my argument.
Me, I’m in academic research (a postdoc) in a smallish biology lab affiliated with a Very Famous University with a strong biological/medical research arm. I’m not setting the world on fire, but I’m doing OK.
This isn’t really fair; the alternatives you lay out are not the only ones possible. I think that some of the encouragement and singling out I got when I was young wasn’t necessarily helpful, but by any measure I am extremely successful. I am working on my doctorate (fully funded) in the coolest field ever in an elite program, own my own apartment in Manhattan, and make my own hours as a well-paid consultant in the private sector while going to school. My work is very challenging and I am accountable to no one but myself.
Most importantly, I just passed my fifth anniversary with an extraordinary woman and our son will be born in about four weeks.
I constantly hand-wring about the limits of my intellectual capabilities, but honestly, I wouldn’t trade lives with anyone. It was not easy learning that in reality, I wasn’t entitled to a dream career at 23 because I had some intellectual and academic skills. I needed to have some resilience and maturity, too. Perhaps a lot of people learn that at a younger age than I did.
No, that’s not what I was saying in the paragraph you quoted, but the former must be true and the latter very likely is. Unless you were the single most brilliant child in the world then there must have been other children out there just as intelligent as you were. You may actually have known other children just as intelligent as you were but failed to realize it. Maybe they were younger and hadn’t learned everything you’d learned and so seemed less impressive, maybe they had different strengths than you did, or maybe you had an inflated sense of your own abilities. I don’t mean that last one as a personal dig, it’s just that I had some adolescent arrogance about my own abilities so I figure some other gifted kids did too.
I don’t know how intelligent your husband is or what kind of school environment he was in, but again unless he was very far above average he probably did know other kids who were at least in the neighborhood of being as smart as he was. From your OP it sounds like the more significant difference between your childhood experiences was how your parents treated you, though. Like I said before, I was lucky enough to have a parent with the background to know what my IQ score really meant. If she’d had a less realistic idea of my abilities then I eventually would have suffered the crushing realization that I would never be able to live up to her expectations.
Of course, such an unpleasant realization isn’t limited to intellectually gifted children. There are plenty of parents who have unrealistic ideas of what their children should be able to accomplish in other areas, like sports or even physical appearance. A good friend of mine in college was the daughter of a former beauty queen and had herself competed in beauty pageants from the time she was a baby until she was in her early teens and refused to do it anymore. She was a quite good-looking young woman and was definitely aware that men considered her attractive, but she also had some serious self-esteem issues related to her appearance. She’d been brought up to believe that just being pretty or hot wasn’t enough. “Real” success meant meeting a very specific standard of beauty. Her problem wasn’t that she was good-looking or even that her parents had told her she was good-looking or encouraged her to take the time to look her best, but that she’d been led to believe that nothing short of being judged the most beautiful (with a narrow definition of “beautiful”) was good enough. So there are all kinds of ways parents with unrealistic expectations can manage to make their kids feel bad.
I say with unequivocal certainty that I was arrogant beyond belief as a child. I was an indisputably precocious little snot. I tried to hint at that in my OP when I discussed how easy it is to believe you are more brilliant than you actually are based on how authority figures treat you. What I am dealing with as I go through this thread is the gradual realization that there were tons of kids out there just like me the whole time. I always perceived it as everyone eventually catching up with me, but upon reflection it seems more likely that I just became more aware of the gifts and talents of others as I got older. Keep in mind, I was an only child to a single parent. Not only that, I was an only grandchild for the first 15 years of my life. The world revolved around me.
He has since corrected me – he was not in the top 10% of his class in high school. He’s never had an IQ test, and has no interest whatsoever in taking one. He never felt exceptionally bright, and graduated with a 3.8 (weighted) in high school. He got a 3.9 in undergrad and is in a Ph.D. program in clinical psych at Rutgers. He feels completely incompetent in his field right now, but I’m under the impression that’s normal.
I suppose I could cite my own IQ and test scores for comparison, but I don’t want to. I’m a grad student at Penn. No slouch myself.
Fun story about my Mom. When I was 17 I left home and moved in with my Aunt. I had to drive 30 minutes to school via my POS car. One day, my Mom got angry about something and decided she didn’t want me to have a driver’s license. She came into my school and in front of my school counselor grabbed my driver’s license from me, cut it up into little pieces with a pair of scissors she had specifically brought for the occasion, and said, ‘‘I don’t give a shit if you never graduate from high school.’’
It was at that point I knew I had to legally emancipate (and did.)
And when word got out that I was on the verge of graduating Salutatorian, my mother said, ‘‘I might make it, but I might have plans on that day, I’ll have to see.’’ She ended up attending, though she didn’t speak to me or acknowledge my presence in any way, and she called me afterward and bitched at me for using the word ‘‘emancipation’’ in my speech. She told me if I ever spoke to her again, she would sue me. I didn’t hear from her for three months.
For every ‘‘you’re so talented, olives’’ I heard from my family there were ten, ‘‘you’re such a lazy, incompetent, self-centered person. You’re never going to make it in life. You make me sick.’’ Etc.
Might that, possibly, have influenced my feeling that I’ve ‘‘got something to prove’’? Maaaaybe.
Now that stuff just breaks my heart. There’s a documentary called America, the Beautiful and in one segment the film follows an 11-year-old girl who has taken the fashion/modeling world by storm. Though she possesses incredible modeling ability, she is obviously just this spastic, emotionally immature little kid, and her mother just keeps pushing her and pushing her. And you basically just watch over time as her entire concept of self-esteem and self-worth is demolished. At the end of the film all she can talk about is how ugly she is. It’s very sad.
Well, mostly I seem to spend a lot of time alternating between being unemployed and working lucrative consulting or corporate management jobs.
I was identified as “gifted” at a very early age. Read at a level many years ahead of my grade, tested high in aptitude and intelligence tests, good at art (almost became an architect). Went on to graduate from two fairly prestigeous schools with degrees in engineering and business.
The problem with being “gifted” IMHO, is that it can make it difficult to connect with other people. They often don’t “get” stuff. They sometimes act in ways that seem asinine or just don’t make any logical sense. You begin to view them with a bit of contempt and that contempt often comes out in sarcasm or class-clownism.
Gifted students also sometimes have a lot of trouble succeeding in school or work. They get bored with routine and the mundane.
The purpose of schools like Exeter or Choate is to take exceptionally talented students (or students who are “bright enough” from families who can afford it) and develop in them a sense of entitlement that will carry them through their Ivy League (or other similarly “appropriate”) schools and on to careers in investment banking or law.
That’s because little brains don’t really understand what having gifted or genius level intelligence really means. Really I think it applies to anyone with extraordinary ability. As little brains, it is beat into them their entire lives to conform to authority and their peers. They get very confused, scared and resentful if you act in any way outside of what they believe to be “normal”. Your extraordinary talent is viewed as a hobby or amusing diversion, not as something you could conceivable make a living from or define yourself by.
Someone who’s smarter than most and who has some sort of heightened awareness, or an ability to see what others can’t, will often have a hard time fitting into a society that cherishes conformity and mediocrity.
If in addition to this gift you have a strong personality, a good sense for business, are talented in math, IT, sciences and the like, are politically savvy and well connected, you can be extremely successful.
If you are just smart, very smart, in a general sort of way, if you ‘get’ things but don’t have a specific skill set required in this day and age, you’re very likely to end up unemployed or working far beneath your potential.
Then there’s the matter of good parents who love and support you, help you overcome difficulties, teach you how to stick with a task and deal with disappointment…versus all manner of neglectful or abusive parents.
There are so many factors determining your outcome besides your raw intelligence that it’s misleading to draw too many conclusions from the sample here.
In the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, Gladwell talks about two recognized geniuses who ended up on very different paths in life. One ended up working as a horse rancher in anonymity. The other was J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. In spite of their similar intelligence, it was the ability to navigate beurocracy and social skills that made the difference.
“Do you think Einstein went around thinking everyone was a bunch of dumbasses?”
“Yeah…probably why he built that bomb.”
-Rita and Joe “Not Sure” Bauers, Idiocracy
You can be gifted in school but dumber than rocks when it comes to making decisions that affect you financially, such as career choices, networking or socialization skills. I think it’s a big mistake for parents to assume that a child successful in school will find success in the world. For one thing, teachers are not the best source of advice for how to be successful.
Brains are a gift; no more an achievement than being tall, and the mistake we make is to assume employers are inclined somehow to hand out jobs and opportunity to the gifted. Brains may open some doors, but that’s about it.
I was fortunate to have minimal guidance (and therefore no wrong advice) from my parents, have absolutely nothing growing up (not even flush toilets and running water), and enough common sense to realize the purpose of an education was to help get a job–not just score well (although I’ve never scored below the top 1st or 2nd percentile)
I chose medicine at the last moment, had my choice of medical schools, worked hard enough to be the Chief Resident, and was put in charge of a University Emergency Department on completing my training, which included a couple different Board Certifications. While I’ve never been anything but one of the best students in class, mostly I’ve been successful by paying attention to where I want to be and using any intelligence gifts as the means to get there, rather than wandering through life assuming good test scores are the end of the accomplishment road.
I’m not wealthy (except perhaps, by contrast to my roots) but I’ve spent my career making enough money each year to put me north of where President Obama thinks taxes should be raised, and I get offered lots of opportunities to do neat stuff.
While I don’t consider it an achievement to do well in life just because you have been born with smarts, I do think of myself as a gifted child that’s had a good life because of it.
I was a very early reader, reading at high school level by grade 2, which in my elementary school qualified me as “gifted”. My math skills were about grade level, though, and once I got to middle school, I began to struggle a bit with math.
We moved when I was in middle school and I went from “gifted” to “on the waiting list to be gifted”. The new school did not go by grades or test scores for the gifted program: rather, they allowed parental requests to fill the seats and about a third of my class was in the program. I didn’t miss much.
By high school, due to a combination of poor teachers, poor materials, and my own laziness, I had washed out of honors math and took the bare minimum to graduate. I did excel in any class that required reading and memorization, but my lack of interest/ability in math and gym (which counted as a full academic class and impacted GPA) pulled me down to the top 20% by graduation.
I got to college, majoring in something I was only vaguely interested in, at a school I didn’t really want to attend, and with poor study skills since I had a good memory – is it any wonder I dropped out after 2 years? I went back 6 years later and switched my major and graduated with a 4.0, then went to grad school and graduated with a 3.7, after being accepted into several top programs.
I work as a researcher now, which is good for the intellectual challenge for me, and shockingly, with statistics, which math-phobic me would never have predicted. I make a decent living, probably comparable or better than most of my high school classmates.
Ditto here! Gread benefits though, right?
I just wanted to say how cool it was to read all these posts, I can completely relate with so many of them. Thanks olivesmarch4th for starting the thread.
It’s given me much to think about as my child is now showing the signs and I have to decide whether to put him through the gifted program.
I think I will. In mine, we learned BASIC, German, and Shakespeare. I remember it being really fun.
Lets take my workplace for example. I work as a project manager in the Manhattan office of a fast growing Silicon Valley software startup. Everyone I work with has masters and Phds in computers, mathmatics, MBAs from Wharton, Ivy League degrees, prior work experience at Accenture, Mckinsey, investment banks. Basically a job one might expect of someone who is “gifted”.
And I fucking hate it as much as I’ve hated any job.
I would say the main thing I hate about it is that while these people are smart, they seem to be smart in a very specific, academic way. They also seem extremely sheltered as if they spent their entire lives treated like delicate geniuses who shouldn’t have to lift a finger to do anything.
The result is that they are great at coding or giving presentations, but there are no working phones in the office. Garbage piles up and supplies never get ordered because people only work on things they feel are interesting. Managemetn is so focused on serving our clients they never got around to hiring more desperately needed staff. We did hire an office manager/admin (Mensa member FWIW), but that person quit after a few months because they couldn’t stand the pedantic micromangement of our pretentious, ineffectual boss. Heck, they can’t even plan a team lunch without turning it into a clusterfuck.
But mostly I just hate working with a bunch of arrogant, overeducated, pretentious tools who can’t tie their shoe.
Success isn’t just about raw mental horsepower. Unless you are smart enough to come up with your own Facebook or Microsoft, no one starts out as CEO of a company. You have to work your way up. And you can only rise so high if you are unable to work with or lead others, if you are unable to roll up your sleaves and get your hands dirty, or only want to work on things that interest you.