We love them dearly, and we're amazed at how fast they learn and what they can do.  Sometimes it seems that yours is  doing things earlier and faster and MORE than the kids around him.  She seems to understand more quickly, and he shows huge amounts of creativity.  Is your child gifted?  How do you know?  And if your child is gifted, what should you do about it?

 Ever since the theory of Multiple Intelligences  was put forward, educators have begun to realize that people could be gifted in many ways.  The standard IQ tests simply measure how well children go to school and keep up with school tasks.  They even have some serious issues with bias against minorities and non-middle-class children.  Instead of looking wholly at IQ scores, we now look at the whole child.  It is quite possible to be considered gifted in areas like music or athletics, or even in social skills, communication, or spatial understanding. 

 As a parent, you know your child best.  It is likely that if you feel your child is gifted then there is something there.  If you notice consistent quickness in an area of life, development that's out of step with age and peers, or understandings and conceptual leaps that seem uncanny for the age groups, you might well be dealing with a gifted child. 

Many gifted kids have a huge array of interests and hobbies, and they tend to delve into each subject far more deeply than their age peers.  A child might be interested in horses and collect a few figurines and write a few wistful stories about ponies.  A gifted child spends hours pouring over reference books to learn the names for the parts of a horse, digs for information about breeding and care and feeding even if there is no real horse forthcoming, and learns the histories of famous horses from the past two hundred years.  You can see the difference in the level of effort that your child puts into hobbies and interests is vastly different from peers.

You'll also notice greater creativity and problem-solving skills.  Gifted children often have big ideas and work very hard to put them into action.  At our house, we had a number of budding entrepreneurs.  Instead of the usual short-lived lemonade stands, though, we had mail-order houses with distributed catalogs!  We had a museum set up in a bedroom that lasted for two years, complete with tourguides, docents, and tickets (with admission fees).  The scale of childish projects is much grander for gifted children.