- I was always regarded as smart (or at least smart-mouthed), but I made a deliberate point of marrying a wife who is even smarter. So I guess that's the good genes factor.
- We always spoke to them in proper English. You speak baby-talk to a baby and you will get baby-talk back.
- Read to them a lot and made sure they grew up in a house surrounded by books, music, and art. We always allowed them to pick out a book to buy at every trip to a book store.
- Music lessons: starting on piano at about age 7 or 8 and adding a band or orchestra instrument in middle school. They both later added other instruments on their own in high school.
- Pushed to get them into a group of good kids who would be a positive influence. Older parents who knew the schools said the band kids were pretty good, so we started them in band as soon as we could. Seemed to work. Most of their friends were from the band and were pretty good kids.
- Provided firm but loving correction when needed (which it seldom was).
- Provided positive support and unlimited love at all times.
All of these comments make me feel insanely lucky about how I turned out (kinda).
I know if my mom had time she’d write a long, emotional response, so I’ll write one for her!
I taught myself to read (full sentences) when I was 3. I’ve loved reading as long as I can remember! I was reading at a college-freshman level in 6th grade. But, I’m terrible with math. I honestly have no clue how I receive As/Bs.
It may also be genetics, my mom’s family is very intelligent. My dad’s sister is a GENIUS.
I have a 3.3 GPA. In CC standards, this is terrible, although I personally think an 89 average is pretty good! My dream school is a state school. Even with more money/better grades, I don’t think HYPS would be my dream.
My GPA could be a bit higher, but school is SO boring for me. This is often the case with “smart” people, so I really do have to motivate myself.
My Ivy educated husband encouraged me to eat eggs (choline) everyday during my pregnancy.
If your husband was a real champ, he’d have fed you shrimp every day to get your choline!!
Re: Music lessons.
This reminds me of what happened to DS when he started to learn music: I heard many kids would learn to play “by ear” rather than “by reading the notes on a sheet of music” when they started music lessons early (e.g., 4 - 5 yo.) But this is not the case for our child. As soon as he started on piano, he almost immediately relied on reading the notes when he learned to play. This is just his natural mode of learning.
Also, he had not spoken much English before he started preschool. But he was the first kid who could recognize and read every other kid’s written name (the teacher put each kid’s name on the back of his/her chair in order to help the young kid to recognize his/her own name.) I heard that when some other preschoolers in his class still could not recognize their own name, they might ask him to locate the chairs for them.
We were accused by his preschool teacher that we “coached” him on reading prematurely, but we really did not do that. We were more concerned about his spoken English at that time (We acquired a lot of VHS tapes and audio tapes, and had not paid much attention to written words/books yet.) Actually, even when he could help his classmates to locate their chairs correctly, he might not be able to pronounce their names in spoken English correctly (i.e., without an accent) yet. This might be why his preschool teacher thought he needed to pick up spoken language, rather than “written words.” But he just naturally learned how to “decode” the written words by himself.
When he was in the first grade, I heard one kid told another kid that DS could read a “really thick book” (well…only 150 - 200 pages, I think) and “this is not easy.”
He is definitely a visual learner.
Of course, genetics!
One funny thing my husband did unintentionally to our kids was to talk to them like he did to adults. Not to make them smart or to teach them big words. It was just the way he talked. It didn’t even occurred to him to talk to them with boo-boo goo-goo baby language. Sometimes I saw him talking to someone and I would imagine he is talking to his mom or neighbor or his friend. It turned out he was talking to our kids! I was like, “C’mon, they won’t understand!!” But I guess they learned lots of big words and concept from him from early age because he never talked down to them. But it sure looked weird sometimes.
Back to preemies- a whole different discussion- not enough room here to digress enough to educate. For most kids by age 4 it doesn’t matter if the child was premature. Of course, those at the extremely immaturity (physical development) end are more likely to have problems.
Smartness is in the eye of the beholder- what some take for granted awes others.
When you think about books in the environment, it is one thing to discover them and get lost in them by yourself. On the other hand,for our family, this was a joint project and we had a lot of fun exploring books like Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons which we read aloud, alternating readers among all family members. Some very adventurous children show up in those stories and we were entertained by all of the British phrases as well as the geography and sailing terms. We read books like Rabbit Hill where each of us tried to sound like the animal characters in the story. Needless to say, we developed funny familiy lore and this planted the seed for fiction writing and dramatic pursuits for all of the children. Essentially the kids developed the love of wordplay and storytelling as well as patience to listen to others. We always brought a new read out loud book along on a week’s vacation. As adults, all have outstanding verbal skills and each one enjoys a good night out at the theater.
Way back in post #126 (page 9), @Agentninetynine linked to an article about the genetics of intelligence published in Nature. I read the article this evening and found it very interesting.
It’s mostly genetics for basic smarts, with good health and diet. Sometimes individuals are simply born with a love of learning and nothing will hold them down, but for most, they are raised in an atmosphere that fosters education. However, being “born smart” is no guarantee of success if they don’t care (smart slacker), or don’t have a family who cares for education.
And, just about as often, a child with average intelligence is raised in a home where are taught to work hard to succeed in what they want, even if that means they want academic excellence. Or they may simply have an internal drive for success. They may achieve just as much as a child who is “so smart” and learn the same things. It just doesn’t come as easily.
As for innate intelligence as measured in IQ, it seems to correlate with the parents’ IQs.
Motivation, hard work, perseverance, grit, well, I wish I knew how this gets instilled in anyone.
Success seems to correlate more with the second line of traits that I listed.
I agree that genetics definitely has a role, as all the centuries of study in sociology have shown, as does environment, ditto. Adopted kids may not follow their adoptive parents educational footsteps as much as their biological parents in some studies and annecdotes.
We also talked to our kids as equals pretty much. I still remember H sitting S in his lap at age 6 months or so and reading him the newspaper out loud while I was preparing dinner. I thought it was cute and S was entranced and listening to the words. Both kids had a love of books and being read to and reading from earliest memories. They loved “Reading Rainbow.” S has always been more driven as my oldest child, but he likes to choose what to push himslf in–he loves to learn for its own sake. He had the most APs in our state the year he graduated–I think he graduated with well over a dozen. He was very self-directed and got his own internships and had 3 job offers for his career by Feb in SR year while many of his classmates had no job offers. He has been blessed with a very long attention span since infancy and is very good at making and handling money.
D also loves learning things that interest her but has a less clearly defined path and is still trying to get healthy enough to hold a job. We are glad she graduated from college and is now contemplating her next step. She loves to read and loves her computer and playing role-playing-games online, often involving very long scripts and interacting with people all over the world. She is much more creative than her brother and amazing at reading people (since preschool) and getting along with diverse folks.
Perhaps by example, the way many qualities are instilled. But for many people, the environment where they usually display these qualities is their jobs, and kids generally don’t get to see their parents at their jobs.
Maybe the otherwise-offensive trend for work to become a 24/7 proposition, with people working at home in the evenings and answering e-mails on Saturdays, is not entirely awful. It will give the next generation of kids a chance to see their parents working.
Well, how in a world one can measure being smart or not? Most people do not take any kind of IQ test. So, based on that, the only measure we have is high GPAs. High GPAs do not require being overly smart at all. Actually, most people around us and our family included, never mention “smart”. The kid is ether lazy or hard working or something in between. To be a straight A kid in American k - 12 does not require any special genes at all. The school is at such a low level! I used this fact to explain to my 5 y o that all is required from her in kindergarten and going forward is to do her homework and we cannot go to her (very favorite!!) sport practice until it is done. Now as a 25 y o medical resident, when she is asked by a young kid what were her priority in child hood, she always replies “homework, starting at kindergarten and forward”. Another comment from her mouth is “I am not smart, I am hard working”.
The “gene” comment is really hilarious! And thinking that a 3 y o is really smart if she mentions that the largest number is infinity is also absolutely hilarious!! Was Einstein smart? The guy could not speak legibly until about 9 y o. I guess, he was not smart at all, he was simply genius, but could anybody determine that when he was 10 y o or so, does anybody discuss the fact that the young person spent most of his time reading / studying tons of math and physics on his own, outside of school? Nobody accounts of the fact that most geniuses spend enormous amount of time on certain activity. Maybe we have some inborn talents, but without very hard work and drive (and sometime, a definite push from the parent), the outcome of genius mind is not possible at all, and who would know then about all inborn talents?
@MiamiDAP, I think that anyone who has more than one kid can see the differences in people’s inborn talents.
For example, both of my kids took piano lessons and later, lessons on their band instruments, and both of them practiced. So it was easy for me to see that learning new music was much easier for my daughter than my son.
And when my kids had to do writing assignments for school, I could see that this was something my son could do very easily, while his sister struggled a lot more.
It was very evident that my son had more of an inborn talent for writing than his sister did, and his sister had more of an inborn talent for playing musical instruments.
“I think that anyone who has more than one kid can see the differences in people’s inborn talents.”
-Not really. With 2 kids of difference genders and huge difference in age and environment,both adults now, and 2 grandkids, again different genders, close in age and the same environment (I guess, my family situation covers a lot of different scenarios in sibling combinations), I cannot say that there is a difference in inborn talents and definitely there is no difference in capacity to perform in k-12 and beyond. There is a difference in preferences of doing certain things as based on financial situation, my kids were not given the same number of choices. One example is that while S. had only sport and art in his growing life, his much younger sister had piano in addition to sport and art. Well, she choose to continue pursuing music as minor at college. S. continue to pursuing art as big part of his major, and grandkids are definitely into absolutely everything while academics is always #1 priority with respective results.
I do not know any inborn talent, but D. was so busy with her ECs since 5 y o that she learned time management at the very young age. Specifically, it worked for writing papers. I did not know about the reason for her being a very fast (and superior) writer. That is until she mentioned that she writes the papers in her head during her sport practices (long, about 2.5 hours), then, it takes her very short time to type them up which leaves lots of time to work on perfecting them. One would say that she had inborn writing skills (more so, that she never was an avid reader). I say, superior time management skill. The personal choices in her life led her to develop superior time management skills that made huge difference in her life well beyond HS and college.
It looks more like “exposure and sticking to practice” thing then any “inborn talent” thing. This seem to be true with sport (not everybody could be Olympic star, but a star of certain level is possible with certain level of effort), writing, music, art, math, science (with proper instruction in each). These I have seen personally, I do not know any stats on internet…
@MiamiDAP, your daughter is really, really smart, even if she won’t say so, and could get away with minimal effort for straight As. Most kids are not able to do this, even pretty smart ones. Many B and C students do all of their homework.
I know some 4.0 kids who had ACT scores in the low 20s. I agree that equating HS grades with pure intelligence is not valid, but those kids had to work very hard for those grades.
Einstein was autistic, hard to compare his developmental path with someone who is not.
It is also hard to compare intelligence with academic achievement given that many of our grandparents never made it out of HS. My grandfather dropped out of 6th grade, grandmother 9th, their son (my father) started at Berkeley at 16.
We’re not talking about “measuring” being smart. We’re talking about being smart. As Justice Potter Stewart said under very different circumstances, “I know it when I see it.” 
Re: Motivation, hard work, perseverance, grit, well, I wish I knew how this gets instilled in anyone.
Success seems to correlate more with the second line of traits that I listed.
Can not agree more with this. I once read that a lot of members in Mensa are not very “successful” as perceived by most people, even though they are smart as measured by IQ tests.
Re: our family … never mention “smart”.
I admit I always have some “difficulty” in complimenting my own child that he is “smart” in front of him. So I rarely , if ever, praised him in this way. (I do not know why I behave like this as a parent.)
But I do not think I have troubles in complimenting him that he has put in his better-than-average efforts; more specifically, I put emphasis on the quality and reasonably amount of the EFFORTS, rather than the ACHIEVEMENT itself as a result of his efforts.
I also try not to expect our child works the hardest (and/or not to expect that he turns out to be the best among his peers). Only a reasonable amount of efforts are expected. (However, he may think otherwise; he would sometimes complain that my expectation is too high. LOL. – maybe my standard of “a reasonable amount of efforts” is still too high. He never considers us as “tiger parents” though – he himself told us this after he had grown up.)