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Isabella, a slip of a thing with bright, curious eyes, is in many ways like any other 11-year-old. She lives with her mum and dad and big sister in a suburban house filled with games and puzzles, plays sport, goes to the movies with her friends and loves her dog, an adorable barky spaniel-something-cross resembling a mop that\u2019s lost its pole.<\/p>\n
In conversation, though, it quickly becomes apparent that Isabella \u2013 not her real name, for reasons that will become clear \u2013 is a bit different to other kids her age, thanks to an adult-like vocabulary and a tested IQ that puts her into the top 1 per cent of her age group for intelligence. \u201cI am highly gifted,\u201d she says. \u201cBut I don\u2019t think of it at all as a gift. Because the struggles of it are quite hard most of the time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Indeed, being \u201cgifted\u201d in Australia is a mixed blessing, as Isabella\u2019s parents have learned to their chagrin. Educators don\u2019t always know what to do with a child who is not only \u201cbright\u201d but academically years ahead of their contemporaries. Other parents might dismiss a gifted child as the product of middle-class hot-housing, manufactured to somehow gain an unfair advantage \u2013 which is why many of the gun-shy families we interviewed requested anonymity. There\u2019s not even a common understanding of \u201cgifted\u201d in this country. It is often lumped in with \u201ctalented\u201d which, while related, can be something entirely different. Even the word itself can be seen as problematic, perhaps implying that some children are more special, lucky or \u201cblessed\u201d than others \u2013 anathema in our supposedly egalitarian society.<\/p>\n
So, what is giftedness? And what is life like for children such as Isabella?<\/p>\n
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Credit: <\/span>Getty Images<\/cite><\/p>\n In popular culture, the gifted child is most often portrayed as a curiosity: bookish, nerdy and capable of impressive stunts such as performing complex calculations in their head or recalling pi to a hundred decimal places. Think Doogie Howser, MD, the youngest doctor in America; Big Bang Theory<\/em>\u2018s Sheldon Cooper, who speaks Klingon and received his PhD at 16; Lisa Simpson\u2019s unappreciated science-fair projects; or Roald Dahl\u2019s Matilda, who reads Dickens\u2019 Great Expectations<\/i> aged four and three months, much to her anti-intellectual parents\u2019 dismay.<\/p>\n Prodigies do pop up in real life. Mozart wrote Trio in G major when he was 5. US philosopher Saul Kripke had taught himself ancient Hebrew by 6. Mathematician Ruth Lawrence, who went to Oxford University at 12, became its youngest graduate at 13. Singaporean wunderkind Ainan Celeste Cawley passed his year 10 chemistry exam when he was 7 and, yes, could recite pi to 521 decimal places by the age of nine. Which is a lot.<\/p>\n The notion of \u201cgiftedness\u201d in children, at least as we understand it today, dates back to 1905, when Frenchman Alfred Binet devised the first modern IQ test, to reveal a child\u2019s abilities compared to others of the same age. Controversial US psychologist Lewis Terman (more on him later) built on Binet\u2019s work with a long-term study of children with high IQs and a doctoral dissertation titled Genius and stupidity: A study of some of the intellectual processes of seven \u201cbright\u201d and seven \u201cstupid\u201d boys<\/i>.<\/p>\n Yet, a century later, what constitutes giftedness is still being debated. Some educators deny its existence entirely or say, with a roll of the eyes, that it is no more than a fantasy of pushy parents. Some take the view that all children have a particular gift of their own. Others conflate giftedness with talent when the two are often discrete: a gifted child may have been born with great potential but not have explored or displayed it. (Canadian psychologist Francoys Gagne is often cited for his theory that distinguishes giftedness from talent, offering explanations on how natural abilities can be developed into specific skills.)<\/p>\n \u2018It is impossible to paint a single picture of a gifted student \u2026 A gifted student may have exceptional abilities in some areas but be average, or even below average, in others.\u2019<\/p>\n Another common definition of giftedness is simply as demographic rank \u2013 the top X per cent of children, measured by academic achievement, in a given cohort. In Australia, that\u2019s typically given as 10 per cent, which would apparently mean two or three children in any particular classroom are \u201cgifted\u201d. Singapore, more exacting, originally steered just .25 per cent of its brightest children \u2013 those who demonstrated \u201coutstanding intelligence\u201d \u2013 into its Gifted Education Program schools, originally modelled on an Israeli system from the 1980s (it has since widened its scope to 1 per cent). Across the US, the definition is commonly that of a child who performs at, or shows the potential to perform at, a remarkably high level compared to their same-age peers, in an intellectual, creative or artistic area.<\/p>\n Yet psychologists are trained, says veteran child psychologist Judy Parker, to confine giftedness to the top 2 per cent of the intelligence bell curve, measured by the currently recognised IQ tests (a slightly controversial and imprecise tool but probably the best we have for now).<\/p>\n \u201cThere are no agreed definitions of giftedness and talent,\u201d admitted a Victorian parliamentary inquiry in 2012, which settled on the catch-all description of gifted students as \u201cyoung people with natural ability or potential in an area of human endeavour\u201d.<\/p>\n Nor is \u201cgiftedness\u201d necessarily able to be quantified, the inquiry noted. \u201cIt is impossible to paint a single picture of a gifted student \u2026 Gifted students are not a homogenous group. They come from all socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds. Their gifts may be across a vast array of different domains, from academic to creative to interpersonal. A gifted student may have exceptional abilities in some areas but be average, or even below average, in others.\u201d<\/p>\n A late bloomer, physicist Albert Einstein did not speak in full sentences until he was 5.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Getty Images, digitally altered<\/cite><\/p>\n It\u2019s not always easy. As teachers will tell you, the number of parents who declare their child gifted vastly outnumbers the statistical reality. Then, there are the truly gifted children who mask their intelligence to fit in with their peers. Not to mention those who later turn out to have an IQ in the gifted range who initially present with learning behaviours that can suggest autism or ADHD. Many of the parents we spoke with have had their children assessed by psychologists after noticing unusual or odd behaviours, when their child struggled to fit in at school, or when they started to engage in disruptive behaviours in the classroom.<\/p>\n A handful of children \u2013 those with an IQ found in only one in 10,000 people or more \u2013 likely think differently in ways the rest of us cannot begin to comprehend. They may be top of their class or, as physicist Stephen Hawking was as a child, seem to be away with the fairies.<\/p>\n For argument\u2019s sake, though, being \u201cgifted\u201d in a general sense can be described as possessing an intellect that processes information faster, learns concepts quicker and retains knowledge more readily than most, allowing it to exponentially explore ever more complex ideas and to make increasingly insightful connections. \u201cThey learn rapidly, they have an excellent memory and they reason well. These are the sorts of characteristics I\u2019d note,\u201d says Judy Parker, who has spent much of her career testing for giftedness.<\/p>\n For these children, sometimes but not always, maths or language skills might come early and easily; reading might be absorbed, long before tuition, as self-evident; a child hungry for knowledge might temporarily nurture an alarmingly deep interest in an esoteric subject such as black holes or London bus routes; typically, they will have a precocious vocabulary full of spelling-bee words.<\/p>\n Physicist Stephen Hawking achieved only middling grades as a boy.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Getty Images, digitally altered<\/cite><\/p>\n The IQ-measuring tools that psychologists use to identify giftedness include the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, which tests for verbal comprehension, visual-spatial abilities, fluid reasoning, working memory and processing speed. IQs (again, somewhat controversially) are plotted on a bell curve, with most of us in the middle, clustered around an average of 100, and exponentially fewer of us at the edges, until there is just one person in all of humanity on the far horizon. An IQ of 160 on this scale is rare, one in 10,000 or more. The ranking ceases to be calculable beyond a point. An IQ score is not an absolute number, though. A child might test differently in different circumstances, such as if they are tired or hungry.<\/p>\n Some of the parents we spoke with are happy to share their child\u2019s IQ as a figure; others prefer to speak in terms of \u201cmoderately\u201d or \u201cprofoundly\u201d gifted, or where their child sits in a percentile of the population.<\/p>\n Helen, a mother we spoke with, laughs as she remembers her son\u2019s early precocity. He was able to recite the alphabet as a two-year-old, a recognised signifier of exceptional giftedness, according to US educational author Deborah Ruf. Then a family friend told him, jokingly, that he wouldn\u2019t truly \u201cknow\u201d his alphabet until he knew it backwards. Says Helen: \u201cAnd so he just rattled it off backwards without giving it a second thought.\u201d Several years later \u2013 her son is now 11 \u2013 Helen took him to be assessed after he had issues fitting in at school and he recorded a WISC IQ score of 141, heading towards the improbable end of the bell curve\u2019s X axis. He\u2019s currently interested in aeroplanes, both the paper kind and real ones \u2013 he likes itemising the subtle differences between a Qantas A380 and one flown by Emirates.<\/p>\n The Barbie movie was funny but none of her friends understood the adult-oriented jokes, \u2018which was really awkward\u2019.<\/p>\n Isabella wasn\u2019t doing algebra in her cot but did have proper conversations with her mum at 18 months, which, a child health nurse pointed out, was quite unusual, after asking whether she had started putting two words together. Her family later had her psychologically assessed, thinking she might have an autism disorder. It turned out she actually had an extraordinarily high IQ.<\/p>\n A decade on, she has just aced a test on a book that she\u2019d read only the start of because she had \u201cmanaged to infer the rest\u201d. The Barbie movie was funny, she says, but none of her friends understood the adult-oriented jokes, \u201cwhich was really awkward\u201d. And even though she only recently started learning Mandarin she no longer needs to parse the subtitles when they play Chinese films at school because \u201cI can kind of understand it now\u201d, she says, proudly reciting a long phrase.<\/p>\n Yet, a perpetually active brain like hers has its drawbacks. \u201cBirthdays are not easy for Isabella,\u201d says her mum. \u201cBy the time we come to the birthday, she\u2019s already calculated how many days she has left to live, how many days the dog has left to live, grandma has left to live. She\u2019s able to reduce the bigger picture into the main facts that aren\u2019t always wonderfully positive.\u201c<\/p>\n Siblings will typically fall in a similar IQ range, though their \u201cgifts\u201d might be quite different. And high intelligence is not always demonstrated at a young age: Hawking was reportedly a late developer, never more than halfway up his class. Albert Einstein (wonderfully played, incidentally, in Oppenheimer <\/i>by Tom Conti) didn\u2019t speak in full sentences, according to some of his biographers, until he was five. (Perhaps he had better things to think about.) Robert Oppenheimer himself was probably a gifted child: he described himself as \u201can unctuous, repulsively good little boy\u201d, grade-skipped, read widely and would later teach himself Sanskrit. \u201cNow I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,\u201d he famously quoted from the Bhagavad Gita<\/em> after the Trinity atomic test in 1945.<\/p>\n Finn Bentley skipped two years of school (three years of maths). <\/span>Credit: <\/span>Penny Stephens, digitally altered<\/cite><\/p>\n Some argue that with the right educational techniques, many, if not most, children can achieve at a level of a mildly gifted child. The idea is either that all children are potentially gifted, or that gifted children are the product of coaching and parental effort, not some kind of magic they carry from the womb.<\/p>\n \u201cResearch is clear that brains are malleable, new neural pathways can be forged, and IQ isn\u2019t fixed,\u201d says Wendy Berliner, co-author of Great Minds and How to Grow Them<\/i> from 2017. \u201cMost Nobel laureates were unexceptional in childhood,\u201d she writes.<\/p>\n Much more important, this argument goes, is perseverance, effort and quality teaching \u2013 much like the 10,000 hours theory to gain mastery over any particular discipline.<\/p>\n Then there\u2019s the philosophy that all children are gifted in their own way, that every child surely has a special talent that might set them apart. \u201cThe great teachers and the great schools find the gifts in every student,\u201d agrees Deborah Harman, an educator of 45 years and one of the leaders in Victoria\u2019s accelerated learning program, noting: \u201cAll students \u2013 especially those who are gifted \u2013 need to feel a sense of belonging to their classes and their peers.\u201d<\/p>\n And yet, there are the children \u2013 the alphabet boy, for one \u2013 who seem to be different right out of the blocks, behaving in ways no parent could have confected.<\/p>\n Elissa McKay, a mum of a gifted 10-year-old, Finn, grew so frustrated with the myths surrounding giftedness that she compiled her own \u201cprimer\u201d, a kind of online booklet widely shared in the internet forums that some parents of gifted children inhabit (largely to share tips, schools advice, war stories and to ask the perennial question: is my child gifted?).<\/p>\n We meet at Elissa\u2019s home on the leafy outskirts of Melbourne, where Finn has just celebrated his birthday, which meant the long-awaited acquisition of a new yo-yo (yes, the craze has come around once again) and the surprise adoption of a kitten.<\/p>\n Elissa McKay and husband Jon Bentley with Rowan Bentley (holding their new kitten, Solaris) and Finn.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Penny Stephens, digitally altered<\/cite><\/p>\n Like many gifted children, Finn was reading fluently three years before he started school and, when he did start school, he was reading at high-school level, says Elissa. But he had something of a mixed educational journey until he was grade-skipped two years (three years for maths). Before then, says Elissa, \u201chis reports were really mediocre\u201d. It\u2019s a myth that gifted children need no educational support, she says. This is one of the subjects she addresses in her primer, along with the notions that gifted children are best treated just like their peers (she says they\u2019re not) and that they eventually \u201clevel out\u201d (she says they never do).<\/p>\n \u2018He started pulling puzzles from a shelf and actually completing them. The nurse basically said to me, I think your child might be gifted.\u2019<\/p>\n Indeed, Andrew Attard is showing few signs of levelling out. His mother, Julia Lewthwaite, recalls taking him for a check-up at a child and maternal health centre when he was six months old. \u201cHe started pulling puzzles from a shelf and actually completing them. The nurse basically said to me, \u2018I think your child might be gifted.\u2019\u201d By age three, he was reading, she recalls, \u201cand that\u2019s where the real craziness started\u201d. \u201cHe wanted to go walking down all the streets, reading all the street signs, reading all the house names, the house numbers.\u201d<\/p>\n Andrew was tested and found to be in the \u201cprofoundly gifted\u201d range, about one in 30,000 students. Now 15, he is about to become the youngest student to complete the NSW HSC.<\/p>\n If you want to \u201cmanufacture\u201d a gifted child, you\u2019re probably best off starting with two smart parents. Many of the families we spoke with professed to be surprised when their offspring tested in the gifted range, but it usually turned out they had a rocket scientist for an aunt or an uncle. <\/p>\n \u201cBoth my parents, I\u2019m sure, are profoundly gifted,\u201d says another mother of gifted children. \u201cMy parents met at Oxford (university), my husband and I met at Oxford, there isn\u2019t anyone without a PhD, you know. It\u2019s just snowballed in our family.\u201d Helen, meanwhile, now suspects her husband, who went to a selective school, is gifted and that she might have been herself had she been identified as such, although her focus as a child brought up by a struggling single mother was survival, not excelling academically. \u201cI had a very different journey in that respect.\u201d<\/p>\n At 15, Andrew Attard is the youngest student to complete HSC in NSW.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Rhett Wyman<\/cite><\/p>\n As US cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead once observed: \u201cNeither teachers, the parents of other children, nor the child peers will tolerate a wunderkind.\u201d Every parent we spoke with was extremely wary of being portrayed as pushy, boastful or downright deluded. Some preferred to reveal just first names; others asked to remain anonymous (although Isabella is the only pseudonym we have used).<\/p>\n \u201cPeople talk,\u201d says Kate, whose daughter Libby, 10, ploughed through all of her prep-level books almost immediately when she started school and had to go up a year. \u201cA mum might come up to me and say, \u2018Oh, my daughter said how fantastic Libby is at maths\u2019 but the natural inclination is to downplay it.\u201d All kids just want to fit in, she says. \u201cI think a lot of people make the assumption that kids that are really smart must be egotistical, and they must walk around thinking they\u2019re smarter than everyone else but it\u2019s usually the opposite. They usually try to hide their true self.\u201d<\/p>\n And while some parents, unsurprisingly, can\u2019t help but show a little pride in their children\u2019s precocity, others resolve to treat their offspring as \u201cnormal\u201d. One mum whose children have tested with IQs in the 99.9 percentile is more interested in raising them to be good citizens than encouraging what she calls \u201cparty tricks\u201d. \u201cThey didn\u2019t teach themselves to read or speak Russian or anything like that. They\u2019re just normal kids who pick things up quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n Giftedness can provoke discomfiting notions of a handful of children belonging to an elite group that, by definition, excludes the \u201cnon-gifted\u201d masses. Indeed, early IQ tests were developed with more than a dash of eugenics \u2013 the debunked pseudo-science that flourished in Victorian and Edwardian eras. One early test had the stated goal of \u201ccurtailing the reproduction of feeble-mindedness and the elimination of an enormous amount of crime, pauperism and industrial inefficiency\u201d.<\/p>\n \u2018IQ tests get a really bad rep. But they\u2019re highly accurate at measuring what they measure.\u2019<\/p>\n US psychologist Lewis Terman, who revised the work of Binet to produce the first versions of today\u2019s Stanford-Binet test, was a eugenics fan. Yet he was also determined to challenge the contemporary prejudices against gifted children, particularly that they were physically weak and anti-social. In an extraordinary long-term study, he recruited 643 children of various ages and published five volumes of findings over 35 years. While he \u2013 weirdly \u2013 referred to his subjects as \u201cTermites\u201d, his conclusion was that gifted children, by and large, thrived both in their professional and personal lives.<\/p>\n Concerns about how IQs and educational potential are tested continue to inform the approach to gifted education in the United States. New York City scrapped a standardised test that, according to The New York Times,<\/i> \u201cforeclosed opportunity for thousands of Black and Latino children\u201d because of its biased cultural references.<\/p>\n \u201cI know IQ tests get a really bad rep,\u201d says Elissa McKay. \u201cBut they\u2019re highly accurate at measuring what they measure. They don\u2019t measure potential for success. They don\u2019t measure for potential for happiness. But they do measure a small subset of characteristics associated with intellectual potential.\u201d<\/p>\n Psychologist Judy Parker also believes they are an effective tool. \u201cIt\u2019s the best quick and comprehensive and individualised assessment, if done by a psychologist experienced in the field.\u201d<\/p>\n Educator Deborah Harman: \u201cThere can be kids who don\u2019t want to reveal how talented they are.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n If your child is so smart, how come they\u2019re not top of the class? This refrain was familiar to many of the families we spoke with. Many have spent years persuading educators to let their child skip a grade or to be given more advanced work, only to be told their supposedly gifted child isn\u2019t even keeping up with their current grade levels.<\/p>\n These children are not magical: some stuff still has to be learned. Hawking, according to one biographer, did so little revision at Oxford he decided to focus on theoretical questions in his final exams rather than get caught out on those that required recalling facts. This is the puzzle it\u2019s hard for us non-geniuses to understand.<\/p>\n One explanation is that they start school with great enthusiasm but quickly tire of it, forced to crawl along the curriculum when they should be running. \u201cJust because you are highly able does not necessarily mean that you will achieve to a corresponding level,\u201d says Jae Jung, an associate professor at the University of New South Wales who has a research interest in gifted children.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the reasons we have so much of this underachievement happening is that teachers are not trained in giftedness, which means that these gifted kids are not being looked after. They\u2019re being given content that\u2019s, say, three years below their level of capability so they\u2019re bored, they\u2019re not going to do the work, hence they\u2019re not achieving to their full potential.\u201d<\/p>\n According to Parker, there is \u201cvirtually no\u201d training for teachers in giftedness at an undergraduate level. She also says a number of studies have shown that teachers are not very capable at detecting the gifted children in their classrooms.<\/p>\n \u2018There\u2019s always this focus on the kids who are struggling and, of course, they need support. But … the kids at the other end need support as well.\u2019<\/p>\n Isabella tells us at her old school she would finish an hour\u2019s work in six minutes then stare at the ceiling for the rest of the class. Another mother worries that her gifted daughter \u2013 whose interests range from teleportation to the origins of the Christian calendar \u2013 is losing her initial love of learning. \u201cThey disengage and tune out and don\u2019t find it interesting,\u201d she says. \u201cWe want her to strive for more and not think, oh, this isn\u2019t for me, I\u2019m not that smart because I\u2019m not doing well at school, and just give up.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s still about engagement,\u201d says Harman, who is principal at Melbourne\u2019s Balwyn High School. \u201cIt\u2019s still about inspiring them.\u201d Often, she says, underperformance can be tied to self-esteem or a student\u2019s relationships with classmates. \u201cThere can be kids who underperform because they don\u2019t want to reveal how talented they are.\u201d<\/p>\n Then there are the \u201ctwice exceptional\u201d children, who might show indications of giftedness but who fail to shine at school because of an accompanying learning impediment such as autism spectrum disorder or ADHD. A study of US members of Mensa, the international club whose price of admission is a high IQ, found that high intelligence often co-exists with super-sensitivities.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat\u2019s extremely difficult about having those two things combined,\u201d says a mother with a gifted daughter, \u201cis that children like this, their natural intelligence kind of floats them through at a decent level. Not at a high level, but at a level that is still above a lot of other kids, which is what we\u2019re experiencing. And the school will say, \u2018Well, they\u2019re doing fine. They\u2019re getting Cs or maybe occasional Bs\u2019. But it\u2019s relative to how smart you know your child is and how you think they should be doing.\u201d<\/p>\n Associate professor Jae Jung: \u201cTeachers are not trained in giftedness.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n Does it matter? Haven\u2019t these children already effectively won the intellectual lottery? Obviously, their emotional welfare must be considered, along with that of every other child. But their underperformance is also Australia\u2019s loss, at least according to the Victorian parliamentary inquiry, which estimated between 10 and 50 per cent of gifted children were failing to reach their potential. \u201cGifted students are our prospective leaders and innovators. In nurturing their talents, we are not only meeting their rights to access an appropriate education, but also ensuring that the future of our society is in good hands.\u201d<\/p>\n An earlier government inquiry, from 1988, concluded that gifted children were among the lowest priorities of all educationally disadvantaged groups. Jae Jung puts it this way. \u201cThere\u2019s always this focus on the kids who are struggling and, of course, they need support. But just as they need support, the kids at the other end need support as well. The fact that they\u2019re not being appropriately supported is demonstrated by the long declining trend in the performance of Australian students at the top end in international assessments\u201d.<\/p>\n Australia has been slipping down the international rankings of the thrice-yearly Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests since its inception in 2000. In 2019, this masthead reported \u201calarm bells\u201d as the proportion of Australian students among the low performers increased while the proportion of the high performers decreased.<\/p>\n Isabella\u2019s first school did not believe that \u201cgiftedness was a thing\u201d, says her mum. \u201dTherefore, every child was to finish the year at the same level. At first, Isabella desperately wanted to go to school. But she learned very quickly that it was easier to hide.\u201d She was so bored and frustrated in class she ground down her front teeth (\u201cthey\u2019re actually damaged,\u201d she says).<\/p>\n After years of struggles, including a period of home-schooling, her parents finally enrolled her in a private school\u2019s remote learning program where the class levels are appropriate for ability, not necessarily age. Isabella is clearly much happier these days.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a pretty good school,\u201d she says. \u201cThere\u2019s about six kids in my class and most of them are like me. It\u2019s very focused on individuals. It\u2019s pretty advanced stuff, too. It\u2019s not like normal schooling. So we get a lot done.\u201d<\/p>\n And her advice to other gifted children? \u201cThey\u2019re obviously going to be different and you have to acknowledge that. Also, it\u2019s not, like, a really good thing. So you shouldn\u2019t just think, Oh, I\u2019m so smart, like, everything\u2019s going to be easy. But it\u2019s also not really a bad thing. I guess you get used to living with it.\u201d<\/p>\nWhat is a gifted child?<\/b><\/h3>\n
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How do you recognise a gifted child?<\/b><\/h3>\n
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Can you \u2018manufacture\u2019 a gifted child?<\/b><\/h3>\n
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Why is giftedness sometimes considered controversial?<\/b>
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Why do some gifted children underachieve?<\/b>
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