Child intelligence

[NerdyCavegirl]

I'm also working on what I guess would be considered urban science-fantasy, same magic system and flavor of blood, sweat, hormones, and dark humor as my world of elves and fire people, and I have a child character that I wish to be quite smart but not like prodigy smart. Her name is Misha Mikhailovich, and she's a geeky hippie 8 year old at the start of the story. MC Alex's little sister. So what are the average reading, writing, verbal, social, and mathematic levels of a 1, 4, 6, 9, and 13 year old respectively? What are the highest levels of such skills recorded at those ages? In simpler terms, how smart are kids normally and how smart can they be?

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

Um you're going to have to redefine your question. How can anyone answer it as it is? 42? What scales do you want used? Because the standard measure for reading like an eight year old is reading like an eight year old! If she's bright, maybe reading like a twelve year old?!

Cheers, Greg.

 

[Caged Maiden]

my 7 and 9 year olds are reasonably intelligent. They understand when I'm being deceitful. They enjoy being let in on secrets and try to keep them. They have an understanding of life and death because they were exposed to those things (we've butchered chickens). They have an understanding of people's behaviors, how adults can have anxiety and behave badly when they get angry and upset. They understand that there are times to talk and times to think and quietly observe. In short, I think smarter children are more situationally and socially aware than kids who can merely read at a higher level. After all, what good is reading long words if one doesn't understand the complex thoughts and feelings behind them? A child can be a great piano player and appear a prodigy, but most of them are merely trained well. Conditioned for perfection. They rarely have the emotional range of complexity necessary to move adults with their understanding of the world.

I think what makes a child eerily intelligent is that feeling that they are an older soul in a very young body. My second son is really good at language and letters. He is eloquent and thoughtful and could read very well when he was four, but he didn't understand most of what he could sound out. So he's not any sort of advanced reader, he can just sound out words and naturally make sense of the letters, where a child with a large vocabulary can use the words he reds appropriately in conversation.

I think the main thing to consider when talking about child intelligence, is exposure. How could you show that a child is really intelligent, if he's only talking about books he's read or actually reading difficult words? It would be more convincing if he were talking to adults and his dialogue is deeper than one might expect. Those things come from connections, in my opinion. When a child can connect the math homework he's doing to a larger situation in our home, I sometimes pause what i'm doing and say, "Wow, that was really brilliant. How did you come up with that?" Even if he's wrong, I feel a sense of pride and joy when I see his little thought process come out. I think intelligent kids are more than robotic little repeaters, but individuals who put things together on their own, and even if it's inaccurate, like I said, the very process of doing it means they're smarter than the average kid who does what he's told, does math the way he was shown, reads like a data inputter, and follows directions and protocol all the time.

I remember watching a program in which they did an experiment between human children and chimps. They showed the children and chimps how to get candy out of a metal box, by tapping a stick into these little holes. The chimps and children followed the directions and got their reward. Then, they made the same box, but clear. The chimps looked at the box and realized that the process did nothing, so they skipped the steps and just performed the last step (turning the knob) to get the candy out. The human children continued to perform the useless steps they were originally shown, though they could see that the steps did nothing to retrieve the candy, that all they had to do was turn the knob.

There is a point where children abandon that mentality of doing what they were told by adults, but it all comes in stages. It's part of what makes us human, and cooperative, where apes tend to be more self-serving and individualistic. They don't do what they're told if it doesn't serve their purpose. I think when we consider child psychology, we need to consider how children progress as emotional and social beings. There is a point where children are only "me" and they associate everything around them, like Mom, Dad, food, everything with "me". Then, they realize they're their own separate thing, and the doodoo hits the fan. That is one of the reasons we have the terrible twos. They realize they have their own agendas and can demand their own wants over other people's. By age three or four (and boys and girls are different, because girls come earlier), they have some social skills. They can understand they do things to get things, or that they must follow rules or consequences happen. Some kids don't get that easily, so there are kids like my oldest son, who are continuously ready to do battle over everything. Where my second son is perfectly happy to negotiate ("Mom, I did all my chores, may I stay up fifteen minutes to watch the end of my show?") my first son is more inclined to argue everything and throw a fit ("I just want to watch the end of my show. It's so unfair that you don't let me do it ever. I'm older than those guys, why can't I have what I want? You never let me...") and it goes on and on. He never once put it together that if he just treated me nicely and asked, I'd give it to him.

So again, maturity is more of a measure of intelligence than actual knowledge, in my opinion. Not to say my oldest isn't smart and my second one is smarter, but they certainly have different skills that makes the one look smarter to an adult who can reason that if they just talked and put up a convincing argument, they'd be like the chimps who skipped the unnecessary steps. skip all the stick pokes of arguing and crappy attitude, and just turn the knob of getting what you want.

I wouldn't imagine it would be easy to show a particularly learned child by way of showing their great amount of knowledge, but I'd imagine if you want a child to appear very intelligent, give them the power to reason, that occasionally manifests at a young age (usually with an only child who is exposed to adults more than other children, and from a good upbringing, where people speak in longer sentences, deal with deeper concepts, and have emotional stability and an inclination toward communication rather than abrupt dismissals of ideas), and allow their intelligence to flow in their words and the concepts they express.

That's my two cents, anyways.

If you're really just looking for measure of book smarts, I can't really help, because I'd imagine a Google search will help you more than any one individual who is raising normal kids, really. Seeing a smart kid is like seeing a smart dog. The smart dog isn't the one who's trained to jump through a flaming hoop or trained to rescue a drowning person, the smart dog is the one who jumps in the water to save his little kid who's sinking and screaming, or who drops his toy down something and finds a way to get it out. Because that shows he's got a thought process that most dogs just don't have. Most dumb dogs will watch the person scream and maybe bark, or they'll look at their lost toy and try to alert someone to get it or they'll abandon it for lost. Same thing with kids. The smart kids are the ones who can figure things out on their own, and to do that, it takes practice making choices, making decisions, and experiencing the success or failure of their decisions.

 

[NerdyCavegirl]

Thanks! I don't have, particularly like, or spend a lot of time around kids, so they usually all seem kinda dumb to me and the only example I have of a "smart" kid is myself. xD That said, I knew my ABCs before I was 1, tryed to drug people with Xanax I stole when I was 6 so I could run the house when they slept, had a high school reading level at 8, and have a 130 IQ, but I utterly lack social skills and only graduated high school with a low D in 7th grade math. Not the best example of an overall intelligent kid, more like I was just "well-trained" as you put it. Being able to memorize everything and spell big words only gets you so far in life. The character in question was reading decently well at 4, I'd say at a 1st grade level but I'm not sure what that'd be, I imagine those big Dorling Kindersley Eyewitness books and Barnes & Noble Discoveries books. Otherwise she was a "normal" preschooler, although a bit more verbally fluent than the ones I've been around.

 

[Legendary Sidekick]

My 8-year-old started reading 100+page books in a single sitting just after her 6th birthday. She's the top student in her class.

My 6-year-old sticks to simpler books. (Dr. Seuss) She's about where a kindergartener should be... I think. I'll trust her teacher's judgment on that when we meet in two weeks.

I learned to read before long-term memory developed (age 2), so I didn't even know what it was like to be illiterate until I moved to Hong Kong. (It turns out that being illiterate in the local language kind of sucks.) A 4-year-old reading at a first grade level is believably smart.

 

[NerdyCavegirl]

By 6, she was developing an interest in anatomy, biology, botany, herbalism, and ancient/prehistoric culture. She wasn't particularly knowledgable in any of this, but she was growing her own plants and requesting a lot of material on the topics. She read quite a lot, and at this time she started to withdraw from other kids her age because they shared no interests. By 9, she's her older brother Alex's go-to person when he gets shot, and while I wouldn't trust her with a scalpel, she knows more than anyone else in the family about first aid, botany, medicine, and anatomy. She's reading at an 8th-9th grade level and, while still unpopular with other children, can relate extremely well to adults and adult issues. I'm just wondering if any of this is feasible, because like I said, the only kid I really ever associated with is myself. And CagedMaiden, I'm not sure if you PMed me back, my inbox is full, I need javascript to empty it, and my phone don't do that. Dx

 

[Tom]

Kids aren't dumb. Not by a long shot. My younger brother is eight, and he knows how to operate a gaming system better than I do. He understood high multiplication tables two years ago. He takes things apart and puts them back together for fun. He loves meteorology, and if you want to know the weather, you just ask him, and he'll rattle off the temperature, wind speed, humidity, and precipitation chances in one breath. He's also the snarkiest kid I know (takes after me, heheh). His burns are legendary.

The thing about kids is, they're always learning. They might seem dumb to you, but that's only because they're so young and still just starting to gain practical knowledge of how the world works. Childhood is a time of rapid growth and discovery. Kids don't take a passive role in their growth, either--they're always exploring, asking questions, and seeking new information. Kids aren't mini adults. Their brains are still developing. They're still elastic. Trying to apply adult psychology to a child's brain isn't a good route to take. "Kid smart" is different from "adult smart".

 

[Mirrortail]

They say kids absorb things like a sponge. Not to say they 'understand' many things they absorb, but nonetheless they can pick of language easier and learn faster.

 

[K.S. Crooks]

A fast way to determine this is to look at what is being taught in the elementary schools where you live are in different parts of you country or the world. Look at what they learn in terms of language, social science, math and science to get a feel for their understanding. Workbooks sold in stores for each grade or speaking to an elementary teacher would be helpful.