My daughter learnt to type while she was still in the womb. Mind you, carriage return was a bitch.
Not necessarily. There’s a nontrivial but small chance she’d turn out to not be a total dipstick. 
I think you should treat her like a normal kid, let her pursue her own interests and not focus so much on how smart she is. I think it’s a setup for dissapointment. I don’t think kids should have to deal with that kind of pressure - they’ll just become miserable overachieving perfectionists like half the people I know.
Maybe all her friends are just dumbasses. 
mmm
I think this raises an interesting question about the significance of being a super smart kid. I started a thread on it a while ago, asking gifted children where they are now. Generally speaking, the super bright children were doing about as well in adult life as the kids who were always intelligent but not exceptionally so. Parents for some reason seem to think their gifted children are going to become rocket scientists or something. I was a damned smart child and I grew into an intelligent but not terribly special adult. I also know a rocket scientist, and she’s pretty normal too. I was an arrogant little snot as a child, too, I mean just unbearable. My early years really shaped my view of myself and eventually I ended up establishing an identity based entirely on academics. I even struggled with it as recently as grad school. And what do you do when school is gone and excellence in the working world is defined in a completely different way? I am dealing with that now.
I dunno, I guess I just feel really strongly about this. This is where it begins. Good luck.
Raise her with love, encourage her in her interests, praise her for her achievements, and protect her from those who will inevitably want to tear her down.
And don’t be surprised or disappointed if she isn’t smart at everything.
Nonsense. You’re a remarkable person and one of the better posters on this message board. And I’m not blowing smoke, either. You’re either selling yourself short, measuring your success by faulty standards, or both. IMO.
I think smart kids (and especially “scary smart kids”) will take care of their own education, if given half a chance. The chance would be access to information, which today, with the internet, is a breeze. But that holds only up to a certain point, IMO. The earlier the better, but at most somewhere around 13-14 direction provided by teachers and the environment where the kid is in contact with other kids that are at least as smart starts to be necessary in order to promote further intellectual development.
I got lucky - I was reading very early, and was voraciously self-educating, my parents sent me to school a year early, and I just breezed through until high school. Since I was first in class all the time, I started to get a bit too big a head. For high school, I found and gotten into a school that was extremely hard to get into (IIRC at the time I got in the ratio was 30:1 for applicants/accepted), and being in a school where EVERYONE used to be first in his class was, on one hand, sobering, and on the other hand extremely satisfying. I credit those years in that high school for my every success later in life. Without that environment where on one hand I was reminded that I am not the smartest person on the planet, and on the other had constant stimulation/competition environment (and of course excellent teachers) I would have probably just continued coasting with no big goals or ambitions.
So, I say at 3 years old just provide the access to information - books, magazines, the net - that would satisfy the kid’s appetite for knowledge. But later, and preferably as soon as school starts, it would be great to find her a school where she is surrounded by kids that are as smart or smarter. Which, unfortunately, in the US, usually means private school, and such schools are very few and far between (Bronx School of Science et al excepted).
It must suck to parent a kid who is labeled gifted. You don’t want to push too hard, but if you don’t push hard enough you end up with an adult child like me who pretty much lost ambition after what I went to college “for” didn’t work out to be what I wanted out of life. I finally have a challenging and rewarding job where I’m able to put both my creativity and problem-solving to use, but was still horror-stricken when my boss asked yesterday if I’d ever considered going back to school while discussing what long-term goals I’m supposed to put on my next performance review…It really must be hard to accept that your even exceptionally bright kid probably isn’t going to be out there changing the world despite the potential you see in him or her. I know I’ve disappointed my parents until recently, that’s for sure.
As a former bright kid, all I can suggest, irishgirl, is you do your best to keep yourself mindful that she might be smart, but more than that she’s a kid. They need to do kid things or they’ll be behind their peers in ways that aren’t measured in words and standardized tests. They screw up. They do things that you don’t understand. They’re still working out how this whole life thing works. And if you find yourself apologizing for getting mad when she does something developmentally appropriate for her age by saying “I’m sorry, you’re so smart that sometimes it’s hard to remember that you’re only [years] old so I got overly mad when you [action]”* it’s time for some reflection.
- Yes, I heard this often enough to memorize, why do you ask?
Thank you, that’s very kind. I didn’t really mean it to be self-deprecating. I’ve just run into a lot of remarkable people in my life who have really humbled me. It reminds me of the story of when my father-in-law attended an orientation session for my husband’s first year of college. The director said, ‘‘Raise your hand if your kid graduated Valedictorian.’’ 80% of the hands went up. College can be a very sobering experience for overachievers.
Actually, how’s about pointing out that both are good, without being gushy? I hated knowing that the things I was good at were worthless when I did them perfectly, but praiseworthy when other people stumbled over them.
The Nephew will jump into things he’s good at and avoid those he’s less good at, but it’s simply a matter of following the path of less resistance (hey, being in single digits doesn’t mean you can’t figure that one out). His father came to me for a lesson on “how to build puzzles” because Bro had never learned, Nephew loves them, and they’d figured that “do this for this long and then we build a puzzle” was a good way to get the kid to do stuff that wasn’t automagic. We’re lucky in that his Bestest Friend is also very smart, but they’re smart in slightly different ways, and their friendly competition means they’re always willing to do the “hard” stuff because “I want to be as smart as [Best Friend]!” <— line heard from both of them.
The Niece is the one that scares me: between being a lot more analytical, being much better at manipulating people, being the one who meets their mother’s specs, and having a Big Bro Who Helps, that kid’s more dangerous than an untrained, scared person behind a mounted gun…
The second paragraph should begin “The Nephew would…” He’s now 6 and doesn’t do it any more, now he knows that once you try enough times, and once you get better explanations, those hard things get done and are often pleasurable.
[COLOR=“Red”]Whatever it is encourage her growth and learning, if she gets bored find stuff that can help her learn, she may only be 3 but it no way means she doesn’t want a challenge, remember if she does have a ‘gift’ nourish it and dont let anyone tell you otherwise! shes your daughter if shes smart help make her smarter! 
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If you can afford music lessons, get her started early. My school did recorders in 5th grade and regular band in 6th–that’s *way *too late. I had taken piano lessons for about a year in third grade, which provided an enormous advantage. And there’s an instrument out there for everybody–or a voice, if nothing else appeals to her.
Intelligence doesn’t imply musical ability. It doesn’t hurt to try though.
I’m proof to the contrary.
True enough. Those benchmarks are averages. It doesn’t mean much if they are quicker than average. My daughter was speaking in complete sentences before she was two. By the time she was three people were asking her what grade she was in (she was also very big for her age). Now at 12 she is a smart but not remarkably above average for her grade level. I won’t even go into what the other one was doing at that age. You probably have a smart kid but don’t start thinking because your toddler is a little advanced that you should be making shelf space for the Nobel Prize.
This is advice not so much for now as for when she gets a little older. There is a tendency among adults to assume that, because your kiddo has advanced cognitive skills, she is advanced in other ways as well. When your kid gets bored faster than her classmates, that won’t necessarily mean she is any less fidgity or likely to talk to her neighbor than the average kid. (She might be…but she might not.) My son reached a point where his motor skills for handwriting couldn’t keep up with the ideas he had in his head. He got VERY frustrated and he had some teachers who were very impatient with him because of it.
You may be tempted (or encouraged) to skip her ahead a grade. Do consider her maturity and physical development. I think this might be even more of an issue with girls, who can be so catty and mean to the girl in the class who is the smallest physically, who doesn’t wear a bra yet, etc., etc. This is not to say these are reasons you shouldn’t do it. Just don’t be blindsided by the social issues that might arise.
Oh, you get the literal LOL for that one.
If she’s good at memorising stuff, teach her your phone number. Then if she gets lost, the gods forbid and all that, whoever finds her can find out how to reach you.
How’d you shove the typewriter up the hoo hoo?