What to Do With a Gifted Child

My oldest son, who we'll call Bub, was verbal at a very young age. Before his second birthday, he could identify several letters and their sounds, talk in paragraphs, and name several different vehicle models based on looking at them. And that was just a drop in the bucket.

Down the block, my friend had a son the same age as mine. He was a pint-sized mathematical genius. At two, he was playing math games, doing basic addition and subtraction, and playing with numbers all day long.

But when I saw that Bub was gearing up to learn how to read at the ripe old age of two, I took a step back. As an early reader myself, I had grappled with the boredom that comes along with knowing things before your classmates. In elementary school, I would complain about school, ignore my homework, and even misbehave out of sheer boredom. I didn't want that for my son.

And so, I held back. While my neighbor continued to feed her child's desire for numbers, I starved my son's desire for words. No reading games, phonics flashcards, or even sounding out words on cereal boxes in our house. Instead, I fed his intellect with library books about outer space and conversations about the circulatory system. I brought him to the Wool and Sheep Festival and taught him about spinning and weaving wool. As much as I could, I focused on filling his intense hunger for knowledge with ideas that would not be the bread and butter of his elementary school years.

And so, I managed to stave off his reading progress and viewed myself as successful.

My neighbor, on the other hand, viewed me as a failure of a mother. After all, if my son showed an interest, I should encourage him. Take it and run with it. By the age of four, her son could add two- and three- digit numbers in his head. He played Monopoly for fun ("Sixty dollars a house, and I want three houses, so here's a hundred and eighty dollars").

And slowly it became obvious that my neighbor's son couldn't relate to the other kids his age. He would spend recess time rolling a ball back and forth. Indoor playtime writing numbers on a whiteboard. And my son? He decided he wanted to be a scientist when he grows up.

There I was, a successful mom. I had wrenched my son from the jaws of anti-social boredom and turned him into a budding professional. Oh, he was five years old. Self-righteous I was.

Suddenly, his teacher started telling me that Bub was spacing out, refusing to read the little books she assigned to them, and saying "I don't know" whenever he was asked a question. She was sure that Bub had a comprehension problem, and that he didn't know how to read. News to me, since he was reading Dr. Seuss books at home and having complex conversations about books I read aloud to him. Sure, he's not reading chapter books yet like my sister and I were at his age, but he's well on his way there.

Bub's take on the subject? He told me that school was boring because they were sounding out these little words all the time. He wished they would learn something interesting, like astronomy or marine biology. (Yes, those are currently his two loves.)

Bub started his first day of first grade yesterday, and I wonder. Should I have helped him read earlier? Would that have helped him adapt better? Or are gifted kids destined to boredom and/or social isolation in a mainstream school without a GT program?

What do you think?