The brain of a young child grows at a prodigious rate. In a very short time, the child acquires verbal language, learns how to read and write, and absorb information quickly, retaining names and reciting snippets of television commercials with 100% accuracy. The child’s parents, having forgotten how quickly they acquired knowledge and skills during their formative years, are surprised when their offspring display these competencies at an early age, and often wonder if their child is gifted.
Before the child is old enough to take an IQ test, the best indicator of giftedness is usually the child’s ability to spend a long time focussed on a particular activity. For example, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, attended a Montessori pre-school where he became so engrossed in each project that he had to be picked up–chair and all–and moved to the next activity. The ability to focus intently is common to most gifted children.
Giftedness becomes apparent at different ages for different people, making it difficult to recognize. Sometimes the ability to read at a very early age is an indicator, but Einstein took so long to acquire speech that the family wondered whether he would ever learn to verbalize. By the time Einstein learned to speak, Mozart was writing music.
When a child has siblings, it is easier to assess whether he or she has special gifts, by merely comparing how quickly, relative to their siblings, they learn and become proficient in strategic games like checkers and chess. Sometimes, as in the case of prodigies Carl Gauss and John von Neumann, the young child reveals an advanced facility in arithmetic computation.
The ultimate assessment will come when the child is old enough to take a test, and particularly an IQ test. While the IQ score will be a good assessment of the child’s academic potential, it will not measure creativity or intuition. For more information the age at which giftedness appears, visit: At what age does giftedness appear? – Intelligence and IQ .
