What makes child genius

Her family — mother Kerry, father Tom and three younger brothers — is close and loving. It is the highest possible score for someone under 18, and on a level with Stephen Hawking, the ground-breaking cosmologist who died last year. Yet so far, extraordinary intelligence has brought Ophelia little happiness. She has been bullied and changed schools several times. I wonder what Kerry would say to a parent longing for a gifted child?

It never will be. We have long known that some individuals have extraordinarily high intelligence. A gifted child may have an advanced ability to master something like maths, but more limited capacity to deal with their social environment which is another important part of growing up and fitting in over the course of their lives. One study shows that among members of Mensa in America, the rate of ADHD attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is almost twice that diagnosed in the general population.

Others argue that because some gifted children are so different from their peers at school, and may interact little with them in the classroom, they may do so less in the playground too. Yet once a child is left out of some social situations, her opportunity to catch up or learn these skills diminishes.

Kendall identifies several characteristics common among gifted children who have no identified behavioural disorders. One trait is that many of them are deeply anxious, usually as a result of overthinking everything.

The sleeping pattern of such children often differs from the norm: switching off their brains can be very difficult. Among these individuals, the incidence of depression, anxiety and ADHD is higher than in the average population. For many exceptionally intelligent individuals, everyday stimuli such as a radio playing in the background, the colour or texture of food, a vibrant display on a classroom wall or a scratchy label in a piece of clothing can become almost unbearable.

He can find it impossible to do his homework in a room that would seem to most people completely silent. Many gifted children struggle with failure. At workshops she runs for gifted children, the kids sometimes play Twister, a game where players contort themselves over a mat covered with coloured dots. She was conceived with donor sperm and her biological father had three degrees.

Before her first birthday she was using whole sentences. She completed a puzzle with 48 pieces in which she had to match pictures to the corresponding words at 16 months. That is difficult. This suffering is hugely under-acknowledged. Physically fragile and a loner, he has ended up in hospital three times after being beaten up at school.

In common with many gifted children he has difficulty eating because he is hyper-sensitive to food textures. But for Peter, as for many other children, the greatest problem is that humdrum, day-to-day life is so hard to deal with.

He finds school crushingly dull. But boredom can be torture. A gifted student needs a fraction of the hours to master a GCSE subject that the British school curriculum typically devotes to that subject, suggests Falck. She compares it to a seasoned runner being forced every day to trudge in step with people who walk extremely slowly.

How best to educate a gifted child? The challenges are complex and often competing. On the one hand they are able to master material sooner and more rapidly than their peers.

On the other, because the social skills of many such children are poorly developed, it can be extremely difficult for them to be a child in the traditional sense, to fit in and to learn many of the non-verbal, non-testable skills that social activity teaches you in preparation for being an adult. And without meaning to, such children may come across as smart-arses who, even with the best of intentions, other kids and adults may simply not wish to be around.

Adults, especially teachers, may find extremely clever children threatening: a small child talking to you as an equal can put you on the back foot. Chrissie was told she had two options: she could either home-school Tom or send him to a private school that could give him more individual attention.

Both ideas horrified her. Overall, it can be said that child prodigies are indeed intelligent, but not as intelligent as we would have expected. Furthermore, in terms of autism, the highly talented prodgies do not differ significantly from the rest of the population. When analyzing the working memories of the prodigies , scientists came across an amazing result. Our working memory is important for a number of tasks in our everyday life — its main task is to memorize and store information and keep several pieces of information at once in our head.

Our working memory capacities are highly correlated with our intelligence. While most of us are too old to become child prodigies, we can still improve our working memories through training. It has been shown that brain training, as offered by NeuroNation, can improve working memory performance permanently and significantly.

In other words, the ability to learn is not set in stone, but can be improved by targeted training designed specifically for you. NeuroNation brain exercises are based on the latest scientific findings to give you the best training you can find. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. Go Paperless with Digital. Get smart.

Sign up for our email newsletter. Sign Up. Support science journalism. Knowledge awaits. See Subscription Options Already a subscriber? Create Account See Subscription Options. Continue reading with a Scientific American subscription. Subscribe Now You may cancel at any time. Early childhood is prime time for learning—and play is critical to learning. From birth until six years old, neural connections form at a rapid pace, from 2, synapses per neuron at birth to 15, per neuron by the time a child is two or three.

That, she says, helps kids come up with ideas that draw upon their knowledge in a variety of subjects. For instance, creative play—with its openness and inventiveness—helps children develop their personalities and tastes, as well as understand the complicated world around them.

Experts resoundingly echo one piece of advice for how to help children build creativity: Let the kids take the lead. Matthews says her number one rule is to listen carefully to build trust between you and your child.

Navigating unpredictability, problem-solving in groups, and attempting challenges happens naturally during play. Repeat this mantra: It is percent OK for a kid to be bored, awash in unstructured time without tablets or activities. Matthews says downtime often leads to a child coming up with an activity they enjoy so much that they become completely absorbed in it.

So resist the impulse to correct them or take over. A bit of frustration is good.