If you are the parent of a high-IQ child, then you have a unique perspective on the world. Whereas most parents are used to feeling smart while around their kids, intelligent children have a unique ability to put you in your place. Check out the following things you only know if you are the parent of a high-IQ child.
You Don’t Need To Entertain Them
Most parents have to continually provide entertainment for their children to prevent them from becoming loud and restless. But parents of high-IQ children have the luxury of being able to let their children get on with it. High-IQ children can find entertainment and focus all over the place, often in the smallest of things. Steve Jobs, for instance, spent the majority of his childhood tinkering with computers. It provided an endless source of fascination for him and gave him the foundation he needed to build a great company, Apple.
High-IQ children will spend their time reading, creating things, measuring stuff, and collecting.
It’s Hard To Find A Decent Education
Most educational institutions are concerned primarily with achieving “minimum standards.” Things like “no child left behind” are all initiatives which focus on bringing the bottom up. Public schools have very little incentive to push highly intelligent kids and get the most out of them.
Parents who do find a gifted program are in luck. These programs help high-IQ children expand their horizons and learn more advanced concepts across a variety of fields.
They Make You Feel Stupid Sometimes
When somebody twenty or thirty years younger than you can solve maths problems that you can’t, it can make you feel a little dumb. Yet this is something that parents of highly gifted children have to deal with all the time. As a parent, you have to have pretty good self-esteem to cope with the brilliance of a child who seems to have infinite potential for originality.
You’re Always Gushingly Proud
Being a proud parent is natural. But you don’t want to take it too far. Parents who praise their children to the skies often end up with problems later on.
The problem is this: if children come to believe that the parent values them because they are smart, they’ll start focusing on that instead of the world around them. Kids who want their parents to see them as bright will often avoid intellectual challenges for fear of being “outed” as average. Children can also develop an obsession with being intelligent and have this as a barometer of their worth as a human being. If they fail at a test, then they’ve also failed as a person.
Parents of high-IQ children, therefore, know that it’s vital to praise their kids, but not to worship them.
You’re Never Bored
High-IQ children have a habit of exploring the world and discovering new things: stuff you never even knew was there. When there’s a high-IQ child in the family, there’s never a dull moment. You always have something new and exciting to talk about.
