All gifted children are unique
All gifted children are unique: no two are alike. I say this out of need, for there is a force in the gifted community that says they are all the same. What is this force? The force of gifted labelling. Parents are encouraged, by psychologists who charge large fees, to secure for themselves an IQ test and a gifted label. These labels come in various sizes: moderately gifted, highly gifted, exceptionally gifted and profoundly gifted. Once the proud possessor of a gifted label, the child - and parent - are expected to accept this new identity of their child as being of this newly labelled type. Well, as they say, I don't buy it.
If you have two children and both are profoundly gifted with an IQ of 18o, are we to think that these two children are the same - that they are, in effect, two identical manufactured goods? This is the underlying implication of the "same" IQ result. In some way they are identical. That is the proposition of IQ testing. They are both children of the "same" smartness. Well, even if their subtest results are the same, too - that is the tests of different abilities that go up to make the total IQ score - I would argue that these children are still not the same.
For a start each child has unique interests, unique knowledge, unique passions, unique talents, unique outlooks, unique ambitions, unique thinking styles, unique drives. Each child is one of a kind, never to be reproduced again. They are NOT identified by a number, an IQ test result. There is nothing unique about an IQ result. An IQ test tells you where you are in relation to others on a subset of convergent thinking skills. It doesn't tell us how you arrived at the answer. It doesn't tell us what thought processes you went through to get to the answer. It only tells us that you got the answer.
Let us look at our two PG kids, above. Both have an IQ of 180. One of them is very passionate about physics, for instance. In fifty years time, that kid wins a Nobel Prize for Physics, for changing the way people think about the Universe. The other kid is passionate about animals and becomes a vet, who then opens his own zoo. These two kids began with the same IQ - but they have utterly different life outcomes. The outcomes could have been even more different - but there is no need to detail those. For an IQ is not a life: it is a statement of convergent reasoning ability - and indicates the power to think in a convergent style. It indicates nothing more than that. It does not say anything about the worth of the child in question - about the merit of the life they will lead. That is up to the child and the parent.
Now let us look at this in a different way. One child is highly gifted at an IQ of 145. Another is profoundly gifted with an IQ of 180. The world of psychologists, education and schools, would have us believe that the IQ 180 kid is better than the IQ 145 child. This is not necessarily so. It depends very much on the personality of each child, on their individuality. It is possible that the IQ 145 kid might be a highly imaginative child, with the ability to create in many domains. He might go on to be recognized as a "genius". The IQ 180 kid, might be a very disciplined child, who has a love of order: he might go on to become an Accountancy firm Partner. Who is the more successful? It depends on your viewpoint. The IQ 145 kid who is recognized as a genius, might change the world, but might not be rich. The IQ 180 kid might be rich, but might not change the world. To decide who is more successful, you have to decide your values first.
I am not comfortable with the idea of grading people according to a test that says nothing about the uniqueness of individuals: it somehow devitalizes the concept of a child. Even if the child is a high IQ child - like all members of my family - I am still not comfortable with it. Why is this so? Because it reduces the infinite diversity of human beings to a single number, on a very narrow scale with roughly two to three hundred possible outcomes, for a human being. That is an IQ somewhere between 0 and 300 is a reasonable range to include humanity - though I accept the possibility of some outliers above 300, as being possible, if a ratio IQ is being used.
I don't think 300 possible numbers can possibly describe the diversity of human beings.
Then there is the label itself. "Mine is a profoundly gifted child" Or "mine is a pg child." This is akin to branding children - as if they were an engine size or a capacity of handbag. It is profoundly SILLY. Why is it silly? Simply because it forgets that every child is unique. By summarizing your child's mental capacities with a categorization such as moderately gifted/highly gifted/exceptionally gifted/profoundly gifted you are not explaining your child's gift, you are stereotyping it. You are placing your child in a box, with a fat label on it.
A child is much more than a label. Furthermore, ANY gifted child is capable of changing the world. The moderately gifted child who is not thought well of by his profoundly gifted playmates, may actually succeed more spectacularly than any of them. Why is this so? Because of the uniqueness of the individual personality: his mind might apply itself in an original way and do something new.
So, don't feel that a particular label is "destiny" for your child. Your child is unique. There is no other child like your child. Even if your child shares his IQ with one million other children - or one hundred thousand 0r ten thousand children worldwide, that does not make your child the same as any of them. The story of your child's life will be unique. Your child will do things no other child has ever done - or perhaps will ever do. That wonderful richness of possibility is not captured by the clinically cold IQ test.
Ainan Celeste Cawley is a scientific child prodigy, aged six. He is my son. Whatever he does or becomes, will never be done in the same way or with the same outcome or creative result, as anyone else in history. There is no one "like" him. If there is another prodigy somewhere in the world, that prodigy is not like my son: his or her child prodigy is unique and irreplaceable. No-one will ever be the same again. The same can be said for all gifted children. Their gift, whatever it is, is unique. Do not let a psychological establishment reduce your child to a number - no matter how big that number is, your child is bigger than that number, more various, more rich, more exciting than that number. A number is just a number. Every child is greater than that - and more individual.
Why do I write this? I do so because a reader pointed my way to a bulletin board/forum as a possible resource for this site. I am not referring people to it, because I was struck by their obsession with which IQ number or percentile, their child had. I don't think that is a healthy obsession. Somewhere along the line, those parents have lost sight of what makes their child special: their uniqueness as a human being. Not their IQ number. A gifted child is much more than that - and always will be.
(To read of my scientific child prodigy son, Ainan Celeste Cawley, or his gifted brothers, go to:
http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of child genius, adult genius, prodigy, savant and gifted children in general. Thanks.)
6 Comments:
Next year, we will have to reevaluate what we are doing with our child’s education. Thinking she would fit, we have possibly put our child in a box by placing her in school that serves the gifted population academically but perhaps does not support them emotionally, socially and creatively.
We realized her abilities were different from other children so much so, that one of the reasons we enrolled her in school is that we wanted to give her the opportunity to be among other gifted to see if it was a good fit. Some subjects are below the level and rate she learns. The school does seem to go into depth on some topics other times they drop topics. But if academics were the main issue we could support it through home, community based services or negotiate with the school. However, the main concern is that she says she is "the odd girl out" and doesn't have time to do what she likes to do and that is composing on the piano, writing poetry, making art, enjoying nature and playing.
School doesn't allow time for creativity. She has said from very little that she is going to be an “artist”, her words. I don't know if she will be an artist, maybe something in a creative field, but it is important for her to have time for her creative endeavors. In an effort to support her, I read several books on creativity. I learned that it is important to observe what your child likes to do and provide experiences & opportunities that allow them to explore in as many ways possible their interests because what a child likes to do when they are young can possibly be a predictor of adult fulfillment. I have observed in my reading that there is some antidotal evidence of this in literature and it is certainly worth keeping in perspective.
Testing your child is something you have to do in the U.S. if you want the school to provide a more appropriate education. In our case, we realize our child is not a test score and more than twice exceptional. I agree that a test score if allowed to can reduce a child to a number. In fact, I have the most productive information I have received was from two sources: a lecture by Susan Jackson at Daimon Institute and a person that does qualitative assessment. Our child is unique. She is a prodigious poet that likes to create music and art. Yet, she also shares academic commonalities with a certain range of gifted. However, school structure and a commute that takes more than 2 hours of our day is not conducive to her creative nature.
I am uncomfortable with saying she is …………… gifted however certain programs for entrance require it be distinguished. In fact, the first time I tested her the professional said the child is ……… based on such and such. We had to test her again because the school does not like how this person makes their conclusions even if they are distinguished. Maybe too creative...
Best Wishes for your Family
Mamita
There is increasing awareness and acknowledgement of the uniqueness of each gifted child, regardless of IQ, but such information is always slow to trickle down to non-professionals. In addition, where there's a lot of parental ego-involvment, the numbers become important.
Hi Valentine. I wanted to address some of your points-
All gifted children are unique: no two are alike. I say this out of need, for there is a force in the gifted community that says they are all the same. What is this force? The force of gifted labelling. Parents are encouraged, by psychologists who charge large fees, to secure for themselves an IQ test and a gifted label. These labels come in various sizes: moderately gifted, highly gifted, exceptionally gifted and profoundly gifted.
I have been a reader and contributer to the gifted community in America for about 4 years now. I am talking about the TAG boards, Hoagies, etc as well as the Davidson Young Scholars (only 2 years with them.) and my own local gifted groups. And I have not found your assertation to be true. We all know that there is a great difference in our children and most of us are quite aware that an I.Q. score is nothing more than how our child scored on a congnitive test on one particular day. What leads us to accept a certain I.Q. score as meaningful is comparing the characteristics of our children within the same I.Q. level.
If you have two children and both are profoundly gifted with an IQ of 18o, are we to think that these two children are the same - that they are, in effect, two identical manufactured goods? This is the underlying implication of the "same" IQ result.
Again I don't know of anyone who thinks that.
In some way they are identical. That is the proposition of IQ testing. They are both children of the "same" smartness.
No, it just means that they are one, two ,three, or more standard deviations from the "average" person's I.Q..
An IQ test tells you where you are in relation to others on a subset of convergent thinking skills. It doesn't tell us how you arrived at the answer. It doesn't tell us what thought processes you went through to get to the answer. It only tells us that you got the answer.
True and I think most parents of kids who have been tested get this. One reason they do is because it just makes sense. No one thinks that all people are the same. Nor are all kids with 100 I.Q. nor kids with 180 I.Q.. Also the people I talk to on boards or "in real life" gifted groups know that kids are all different from personal first hand experience.
I have many friends with PG kids and none of them are exactly alike, but they often have some interesting things in common.
For an IQ is not a life: it is a statement of convergent reasoning ability - and indicates the power to think in a convergent style. It indicates nothing more than that. It does not say anything about the worth of the child in question - about the merit of the life they will lead. That is up to the child and the parent.
This I definitely agree with. :)
Now let us look at this in a different way. One child is highly gifted at an IQ of 145. Another is profoundly gifted with an IQ of 180. The world of psychologists, education and schools, would have us believe that the IQ 180 kid is better than the IQ 145 child.
No, I do not think they would say that at all. They wouldn't judge whether a person is better than another based on their I.Q.
I don't even think they would even say a 180 I.Q. is better than a 145 I.Q. Stephanie Tolan describes what might be the optimum I.Q. in her book Guiding the Gifted Child and that is supposed to be between 125 - 145. But even then she is talking about the ability to relate to average people and get along in society and she is not saying every PG kid is going to have a hard time. And she is not judging anyone's self worth.
I am not comfortable with the idea of grading people according to a test that says nothing about the uniqueness of individuals: it somehow devitalizes the concept of a child. Even if the child is a high IQ child - like all members of my family - I am still not comfortable with it. Why is this so? Because it reduces the infinite diversity of human beings to a single number,
The is a lot that an I.Q. score doesn't tell us. There is more that it can't tell us than it can. But it does tell us something. For many of us it is worthwhile to get that number. The further you are from the average, often, the greater your differences are. The issues that face a moderately gifted person are not the same as those of a profoundly gifted person.
One example from my experience: When I first started thinking of Z as being gifted I joined a certain online message board for parents of gifted kids. When I talked about what was going on with Z I was met with disbelief and some people assumed I must be pushing my child and there was no way my daughter could really be wanting to do the things I said she was doing. This was a board for parents of gifted kids and I was really confused by this reaction.
Later on I found a board for parents of PG kids and when I asked questions or brought up issues that I was facing with Z people there totally got it. Instead of being accused of pushing or exaggerating, people said "Oh, my kid does the same thing, don't worry."
These kids are all unique, no doubt about it. But they often share certain characteristics with other children in their gifted "level."
Then there is the label itself. "Mine is a profoundly gifted child" Or "mine is a pg child." This is akin to branding children - as if they were an engine size or a capacity of handbag. It is profoundly SILLY. Why is it silly? Simply because it forgets that every child is unique. By summarizing your child's mental capacities with a categorization such as moderately gifted/highly gifted/exceptionally gifted/profoundly gifted you are not explaining your child's gift, you are stereotyping it. You are placing your child in a box, with a fat label on it.
I think those labels are useful. But then again I don't, nor do I know anybody, who thinks of a gifted label as the be all end all of their child. It is just a word that can help us deal with certain aspects of our child. We can use their gifted "label" to search for articles about parenting gifted kids that may apply to us. For example I have found that resources on parenting MG kids are not as useful to me as resources for parenting a PG kid.
A child is much more than a label. Furthermore, ANY gifted child is capable of changing the world. The moderately gifted child who is not thought well of by his profoundly gifted playmates, may actually succeed more spectacularly than any of them. Why is this so? Because of the uniqueness of the individual personality: his mind might apply itself in an original way and do something new.
Sure! I think people without gifted kids may think that we think our kids are going to accomplish greater things than their kids. But most of us know that the gifted population, at least in America, have a very high percentage of underachievers. Also gifted people shouldn't be held responsible for changing the world any more than the rest of the population.
Giftedness is a way of thinking and experiencing the world.
Why do I write this? I do so because a reader pointed my way to a bulletin board/forum as a possible resource for this site. I am not referring people to it, because I was struck by their obsession with which IQ number or percentile, their child had. I don't think that is a healthy obsession. Somewhere along the line, those parents have lost sight of what makes their child special: their uniqueness as a human being.
I am not sure which board you are referring to. But I am aware of some boards that may come across that way and there are reasons for it and they are not what you seem to think.
Like I said I can't speak directly of the board you experienced but I know of one board that is for the "profoundly gifted". The reason they make that distinction is because they want to be free to talk about the extreme abilities of their child without having someone accuse them of exaggerating or pushing or lying, etc. And they want to be able to talk about radical acceleration and grade skipping which is often frowned upon but necessary for many Pg kids. They want to ask for book recommendations for their 8 year old and get Dickens, not Judy Blume. I am sure you get where I am going with this. They want a community where they are safe to talk about children that are very different from the norm.
kindest regards
Cher Mere
Dear Mamita
I was a creative child in a school that made no allowance for such things. It is not a good fit when you are surrounded by people whose essential nature is reproductive/replicative. By this I mean that they absorb and reproduce other people's ideas but have none of their own. As a creatively gifted child, I found my work imitated at every opportunity by the people around me. Some of them even took my childhood ideas into the adult workplace with them in later years...thus depriving me of credit for my work! That hurts.
If your child is creative, she may find a conventional school stifling. The problem is that, as a culture, the West (and most definitely the East, too) ignore the needs of creative children. Perhaps it is because few children are truly creative. It is the same situation for children who are very academically gifted - in most countries there is little or no provision.
I hope your daughter does become an artist - but if she does she will need a lot of support. There are many lean years in a young artist's life before they can make a living from it. My wife Syahidah Osman Cawley is an artist - and her brother Hafiz Osman is an artist. (They are very different artists: my wife only does people, he never does people.) Her brother actually makes his sole living from his work - but he is one of the few in Singapore who manage to do so. It is not easy.
Being the "odd girl out" is painful. I don't think it ever goes away. A good remedy is to find a school where being the odd one out doesn't carry a social penalty, of victimization. I will post about that since people tend to miss comments.
I was unaware of how bureaucratic the US is about IQ. IQ is hardly mentioned here in Singapore. That is something else I will post about.
School never did anything for my creative nature. Neither did Cambridge University (a place that seemed even MORE hostile to creative people than my school - which is really odd when you think about it. Another post perhaps.)
If she wants to be an artist, I don't think education will be of any help. She will probably have to grow on her own.
I wish her the strength to succeed as an artist. Best of luck to you all.
Dear Catana
I am glad to hear that people are waking up to the uniqueness of gifted children. However, the very idea of putting a number to intelligence, is measuring it and if two measurements are the same it means the intelligences are the same and that means the children are the same in some way. That is what I am trying to point out. The concept behind IQ is that people's intelligence can be measured, in a very simple way and defined exactly. I think it is too simplistic and inherently unhelpful, for it leads to the stereotyping of humans - and other issues.
From the way you write, you intimate that I am not a professional. I am unconcerned what you may think of me. I am only concerned about the truth of myself as I know it. I am a thinker and have been since birth (or before, I suppose). I went to a leading British Public School, and found myself generally unimpressed with the level of individual thought at work there. I went to Cambridge University and discovered that very few of them think for themselves. There is too much reliance on "authorities" or what the text says. I have never been that kind of person. I really am not concerned about what the text says or what the professionals hold to be the case. I do my own thinking on all things. My own thoughts are what matters. I don't, therefore, wait for second hand thoughts to "trickle down from professionals", since from experience their thinking processes are not superior to my own and usually are, in fact, inferior. Where did I form this opinion? Living among them for three years at Cambridge University did it.
Everything I write on my blog, or anywhere else, as I have written much that is yet to be published, comes from my own thinking about the situation of giftedness, prodigy, genius, and savant, in general and my children and relatives in particular. It does not derive from what professionals write/think/say. I rely upon my own thinking, my own observations, my own thoughts.
It is a fundamental fallacy that you have to be a professional in an area of learning, to contribute to it. That is what professionals want you to think so that they may protect their position. Albert Einstein was not a professional physicist when he contributed his Special Theory of Relativity or his work on Brownian Motion - he was a lowly patent clerk. If the world had rejected his work on the basis that he wasn't a working professional physicist, there would have been no Theories of Relativity (there are two, Special and General), no E=mc squared and no atomic bomb. (Though that last one might have been a good thing.)
Anyone can think about anything. Anyone can come up with something new. Anyone can contribute to any area: in my world, that is. In this world, there is much looking askance at you if you don't have the appropriate credentials or background for a particular task - rejection on the basis of not bearing the right labels. That is fundamentally foolish. I have a Cambridge University degree in Natural Sciences at Bachelor's with a complimentary Master's Degree thrown in. I don't think much of them: neither do I expect you to.
However, I do expect you to recognize when someone is thinking for themselves, and appreciate that fact. The world is always much more interesting when people think for themselves and not stop to wait for some "professional" to make a pronouncement. Just because someone does a job professionally that does not mean that they are any better at it than you are. You may exceed them in every way by far - or just enough to be right and them wrong. Professionality does not confer infallibility, truth or knowledge. It usually just confers status and the opportunity to opine with an audience to hand. In my experience, being a Professor/Don at Cambridge (which I wasn't, of course) didn't even involve making any effort as a teacher - for they didn't, generally. It did confer, however, a lot of status in the outside world. People thought of them as "professionals" and listened to their every word. I wouldn't.
I only ever do my own thinking.
Kind Regards
Dear Cher Mere,
In some way, my scenario seems to have been misunderstood. I need, therefore, to clarify.
I posited a situation in which two PG kids had identical results, answer for answer, in their subtests of different tasks, on an IQ test, and consequently the same total score.
I have studied Psychology at Cambridge University - it was one of my subjects in my second year. They believed, there, that an IQ test measured "g" - a general intelligence factor. They believed that the test was an objective tool to ascertain this g factor. They thus believed that two people with the same result (in every way, would be necessary for the comparison to be fair, on every subtest) had the same g. This means they have the same intelligence. They are therefore functionally identitical. They are like two six litre, three hundred and fifty horsepower cars with four wheel drive. They are functionally identical. In this sense, of the psychologist's view of intellectual function as g, then two people with the same test results ARE the same. It is that identification with each other that I was arguing against, for IQ is, I think, a poor tool for assessing the complexity of a human and identical results don't mean functionally identical minds - and I argued why in my original post.
Of course, parents of gifted children look at their kids and see individuals. They look at each others' kids and see individuals. But psychology, in testing people in that way and categorizing people in that way, does not see individuals: it sees differing levels of "g" - or any other variety of intelligence factor you may care to name, depending on which theory is fashionable at the time.
Psychology DOES say that an IQ 180 kid is better than an IQ 145 kid. Psychometric testing says that the IQ 180 kid has a higher g, general intelligence factor, and is therefore objectively more intelligent. That is what the test says. That is, in fact, what the test is FOR: to grade people according to a test purported to be an objective measure or yardstick for intellectual function.
Society may balk at considering one child better than another on the basis of IQ - but in the limited sense of functional convergent intelligence, that is precisely what an IQ test is for and what it is designed to do. It is designed to decide who is the "smarter" and is not smarter better? That is the underlying assumption on which the whole test process is built.
It is true that adjustment problems plague the truly gifted among us. The more rare your intelligence, the harder it is to make accommodations to a world that just cannot understand. Yes, so in that sense, it is "better" not to be too smart. Up to Highly Gifted, to use the label or IQ 145 is just about right in terms of maximum advantage with minimum disadvantage. However, in areas of human thought that require more convergent thinking - maths, perhaps or physics/hard sciences, or philosophy for that matter, a higher IQ - that is convergent thinking ability - may be a useful tool to furthering your work. That is not to say that someone of lesser IQ won't produce more interesting work - they might do. That depends on personal factors.
I agree that the moderately gifted may not comprehend the profoundly gifted or the exceptionally gifted at all well. I was in a school in which most boys would have been considered gifted. But looking back I would say that the bulk of them were either moderately gifted - or not even that, just "bright". Therefore the odd one or two who were distinctly more intelligent had a hard time fitting in, despite the supposedly selective environment.
You say that IQ doesn't measure smartness and argue that it just measures standard deviations above the norm. On the contrary, it does measure smartness - and it expresses it in terms of a number which indicates the number of standard deviations above the norm. That is it expresses it in terms of the rarity of that degree of smartness. It is designed to measure convergent intelligence. That is its precise purpose. To say otherwise is to deny the actual meaning of the test.
I argue against it being used to judge a person's intellectual worth, because it is not a complete measure of a person.
As a shorthand means to find situations in which one's extremely intelligent children might be discussed, with acceptance, these labels have their function, but I believe the label tells us less about the child than might be supposed.
The pity of what you say at the end is that those who bear great gifts should find it so difficult to be accepted by those of lesser gift. Why do you need to seek out specific boards for the profoundly gifted? Because others are not accepting. That is sad.
We should all accept each other for what we are. I would like that to be the way the world is.
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