I think my almost 3 year old kid is scary smart. Help.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

We are coming to the realisation that irishkid is smart. Not Stewie Griffin smart, but definitely smarter than the average bear.

She’s almost 3 and and counts to 20 without mistakes, can do simple arithmetic, recites the alphabet, knows her full name and home town, can recognise the letters that spell her name and most colours.
She has a large vocabulary and gets bored very quickly, and is mostly kept occupied with jigsaw puzzles and Nina and the neurons, a TV show about human anatomy for kids.

Not having raised a child before we were just going with the flow, but on reading up, she’s hitting milestones well in advance of where one would expect.
Dopers are smart people, I assume you have smart kids, any advice?

2

Pfft. I can do all that stuff too.

3

I can spell my name with my eyes closed…so there.

4

I don’t have a smart kid, but I have been one. The biggest piece of advice that I can give you is: Don’t Push. Let your kid learn at her own pace. You can provide her with learning options, like a show about anatomy, but if she’s not interested, just let it go.

Also, sometimes parents of smart kids spend all their time and effort concentrating on developing the kid’s brain, when that is the one area that probably doesn’t need the effort. Encourage her to try the things she’s not good at, whether that be athletics, social situations, art and music, or fine motor skills. Parents want their kids to shine, so they may focus on the areas where the kid does best, while the kid really needs help in the areas where she’s struggling.

Also, and this applies to all kids, not just the smart ones, praise for the effort rather than the achievement. Kids who are praised for their accomplishments, especially ones who have great skill in one area, tend to not even bother to try in other areas, because they don’t get the same level of recognition.

5

With all of the technology and info available these days - perhaps kids are just more tech savvy. Why would you consider that your 3 year-old is smarter than the average kid? Seems to me that every kid that has access to technology is smarter these days.

6

Tech savvy, how exactly? An hour of TV a day isn’t exactly being tech savvy. She doesn’t use a phone or computer.

Most kids her age can’t count, spell their names, don’t know the days of the week, and can’t tell you their address. She can.

The Nina show is her favourite- we’d be happy with Peppa Pig!

7

I’d like to echo what Spoiler Virgin said. My daughter wasn’t as advanced as yours, but she was pretty sharp. OK, she still is, but at 26, it’s not as impressive… :wink: We gave her opportunities to try different things - dance, gymnastics, piano lessons, sports. Unfortunately, she gave up on things that didn’t come as easily. I didn’t want to be a pushy mom, but I wish I’d encouraged her to put more effort into new things before quitting. She tells me she wished I’d “made” her practice piano so that she could play today. Knowing what I know now, I think I’d have had her concentrate on smaller steps towards mastering new skills.

Most of all, don’t tell her repeatedly how smart she is - to my mind, that’s as bad as telling someone how good looking they are - the focus should be on attempts and achievements, not on natural talents. At least, that’s my unprofessional opinion.

8

She may not use the tech stuff - but you do. Any chance you are just transferring some of that knowledge to her? Perhaps she is just picking up some of your smarts.

9

Teach her to use a computer if you think she’s smart enough. Hell, try to teach her even if you don’t think she is. I too don’t have a kid but have been a smart one - my parents started teaching me how to use a computer by the time I was 1 year old, (hilarious pictures of me in diapers at my old PC XT keyboard) and I am told I learned to do it well, and I am also told I could speak and read quite early too. Granted, my parents were using an early learning program (which I’d say was quite effective and successful as far as actual teaching goes) but I imagine it can’t be too different for anyone with natural talent, especially if such talent is encouraged.

That said, if you do decide to develop her seemingly high intelligence, also ensure that you balance it out plenty. FairyChatMom is right and making sure she does things that don’t come easy is important. Especially if she doesn’t socialize well with other kids as she grows older - that’s perhaps the most important thing to be sure of. A kid that’s significantly smarter than her peers may find it awkward to socialize with them - I know I did. Make sure she does socialize with them even if she thinks they’re morons (thinking they’re morons is ok, just as long as she realizes she has to interact with morons and learns to do so).

I too wish I had been pushed to do some other stuff earlier on, because I started a lot of things that I just wound up shrugging and giving up on because they didn’t seem easy. Some of them, in retrospect, I’d like to have been pushed harder to do, such as language learning (I can only speak two languages now, would have liked to have continued my early japanese lessons which I gave up on - repeatedly) or art (did some good drawing, especially for the ages I did it at, but never continued and fully developed that) or music (violin for a bit, decently good, again never really developed it). She might never actually be happy you made her do these things, but if you *don’t, *she probably will wish you had.

10

These are signs your daughter is smart, smarter than average, but not scary smart. Don’t push, or jump to conclusions. Keep an eye out, talk, it will all become clear in time. And it’s certainly nothing to be worried about.

11

That’s a little advanced, but not as much as you seem to think it is. My daughter is about six months older than your’s and she was doing most (or all) of those things prior to her 3rd birthday. I honestly can’t remember how much arithmetic she could do at that age.

Most of her class was right there with her. Also, some parents work harder at those things than other parents. Just follow your instincts and I’m sure she’ll be great.

12

My son was the same way. And in first grade, some things he’s miles ahead and some thing he’s on average. All of his teachers (and myself :D) are thrilled with him.

Just love your kid. Expose her to new things. Make learning part of your life. Explore.

When I was three, I was already reading, and I’m clearly no genius as an adult. :slight_smile: I will tell you that the mistake I made as a parent was pushing my kid too soon. I expected him to read at three. He wasn’t. He didn’t read with much comprehension until seven…yet he he’s basically a walking encyclopedia. At the age of five, his favorite show was How the Earth Was Made.

Oh, and I disagree about telling your kid they are smart. Go ahead and tell them. Every single day. When things get hard for them, they may need it.

13

Answer the questions, as many as you can. Let your kid know that sometimes you have to find the answer. Let her see you looking it up, especially if you’re online and have to check your sources.

Absolutely give her wide experience with music, sports, arts etc. Do stuff with her that you’re both crap at, just for fun.

My kid has a brilliant sense of humour that kicked in about that age (it’s apparently one of the signs of potential giftedness, like pitch is a sign of a potentially gifted musician) and it was hysterical while she worked out how jokes worked.

Have fun.

14

Don’t just answer her questions: give her the tools and know-how to find the answers herself. At 3, she may or may not be reading yet <I was, but that was 40+ years ago, and I don’t have any idea if that’s unusual now) but even if she isn’t, find an encyclopedia set with lots of pictures, and when she asks a question, say “Let’s find out!” and head there. Even an old set will work, and she’ll probably find other interesting things to look through in there. As she gets older, Google is going to be her best friend, just like the library was mine when I was growing up. <3

15

This, this. I think I read this in NurtureShock and it really rang true to me as someone who was constantly praised as “smart” and, once there turned out to be something I didn’t know how to do (in college), got really scared and retreated into a shell. If I’d been praised for being “a hard worker” or “willing to try until you figured things out,” I think I would have been much better off. I mean, there’s nothing wrong in reassuring a kid, I think, that s/he is smart and that s/he can do things, but it’s bad when the kid’s self-esteem starts being reliant on that.

It’s probably not-even-stealth bragging to say that my kid-who-will-be-2.5-in-July can count to over 100 (we all got bored before we figured out exactly how high she can count) and sound out simple one-syllable words, but there it is. She just happens to be interested in those things. However, as we all know, present performance is not indicative of future results (for just one example, she never wanted to do sign language when she was 1, when all her compatriots were doing it-- I was a bit worried her verbal development was slow at this point!) – but yeah, I wouldn’t call my kid crazy smart, either, just rather interested in verbal/arithmetic subjects at this stage of life.

One thing we’re trying to do, besides try to bolster her development in other areas to the best of our ability as other posters have mentioned, is that, now we know she has this good memory, to try to give her interesting things to learn – like I recently bought her a puzzle with the 50 states, and we talk about them sometimes.

Oh, and I try to point things out to her, like the slug we saw on our walk yesterday. It worries me sometimes that she isn’t all that explorative – in my experience, the really smart people are not the ones who have a crazy good memory and have a huge vocabulary, but the ones who are willing to say, “Why does that work like that?” and that’s what I want to try to cultivate (though I’m not sure how good a job I’m doing).

But yeah, it always weirds me out when I see kids who are four and don’t know their letters or colors. Although, you know, I definitely know people who didn’t learn to read until age 6 and went on to go to top-rated universities and professional schools and are now having super-amazing careers, so there you have it.

16

Damn. You scary smart, bro.

17

Be smug, but not too smug–that’s my best advice, as another parent of a smart kid. At some point I saw in a parenting book that your kid ought to have a vocabulary of at least 50 words by the age of two, so I made a list of my daughter’s words, and around 200 I thought, “What the hell am I doing?” and stopped.

There’s my stealth brag, and I’ll stop there so I don’t get too smug.

18

this. I was reading by three and I turned out to be nothing special. Don’t get wrapped up in this whole “my kid is gifted and a genius and better than everyone else’s kid” bullshit.

19

Don’t let your kid post (or read) here. You’ll ruin the fucker for life.

20

I didn’t understand, until I was well into adulthood, that my ability to grasp things so quickly was unusual (and I realize that sentence contradicts itself LOL)

Both my kids learn very quickly. My 2 yo (she turns 3 in August), when I asked her yesterday to come put her bum on the change mat, came over with her magnetic letters, spelt B U M then walked away again. She’s a smart Alec at least.

My older child, we don’t dance around the fact that she learns quickly. But we also use it as a talking point, that the things that don’t come naturally are very valuable for learning how to learn. Frustration with difficult tasks can be more of an issue, because they have less practice with the process.

We encourage their strengths, and their weaknesses.

Honestly the only real issue I’d say we have is regarding school. We do a lot to challenge our 9 year old at home, because she wants it and doesn’t get it enough at school.