Is My Child Advanced?

I/the nursery/people think my child is advanced for her age (23 months) and always seems to have been. How likely is it that I actually have a super-gifted child or the next Einstein?
—Kwan

Interesting question. Usually when people talk about precocity in a child this age, they’re reacting to language development, or at least that’s a part of it. And in the case of language development, we have a little bit of data that might help.

This paper (hilarious title: “Size matters”) looks at the relationship between having a large vocabulary at 24 months and language and literacy outcomes between the ages of 3 and 11. The authors find that a large vocabulary is predictive of literacy skills at older ages. However, there is a lot of variation. Although on average the distribution of literacy skills at 11 is higher for kids who spoke more at 24 months, there is significant overlap with the distribution for kids who spoke less.

Other data shows similar results. Abilities at the age of 2 do predict abilities later, but in a statistically noisy way. (An additional important note is that there is no sense that any of this is causal — it may well be that characteristics of families are driving much of the relationship we see. Here, we are focused on prediction.) Bottom line: This just isn’t that predictive, even of whether they’ll have higher-than-average achievement in elementary school.

If your question is about Einstein, you’re really asking, What is the chance my child is in the top 1 in a billion of the human population on IQ? Even if you’ve gotten some positive information from their language ability, the answer to “how likely is it” is “tremendously unlikely.”

Stepping back: it’s natural to ask this question. But it’s worth taking a few deep breaths before you, you know, start training your 2-year-old to do advanced mathematics. This book is worth a read for a perspective on some of the downsides of trying to make children precocious.