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From Mensagenda - August 2002
"Giftedness and Family Dynamics"
by Deborah Ruf
In my role as a high-intelligence specialist, I was recently asked to answer a number of specific questions for a parent group. What is a normal IQ difference between parents and their children? How close intellectually are my spouse and I? If intelligence has a large genetic component, is it possible that one child can be gifted while another is not? How do we handle it when our children are not equally intelligent? How do we handle self-esteem issues when one child gets into the gifted program and the other does not? How might adult issues with their own intelligence affect their children? The parents also wanted me to explain some of the family dynamics when high intelligence is part of their family reality.
What Specifically Is Giftedness
According to Test Score Results?
The gifted range technically starts at the 98th percentile. On intelligence tests it starts at about a 130 IQ score. Generally speaking, schools provide score reports that list an SAI. SAI stands for “school ability index” and is a standard score, like the IQ, based on 100 as average. Most of the scores that the schools have are from group tests, and, while useful for assessing the learning ability level of groups, they are not so accurate in giving individual results. The tests currently used by the schools and most private psychologists do not go high enough to tell anyone whether or not they are simply very bright or astoundingly intelligent. This is called the test “ceiling” effect.
I have sketched a bell curve to help illustrate how common or rare different IQ ranges are. The bell curve is simply a statistical probability chart that lets us know that intellectually most people are in a clump surrounding 100 IQ. This is one standard deviation (SD) above and below the mean score. The commonly recognized score range for average is 85-115, or about 68 percent of all people. The range from 70-130 hypothetically includes 96 percent of a population. Below 70 or above 130 theoretically encompasses only about 4 percent of the people. The 2 percent of the population that is gifted has an IQ range on the continuum of at least 70 IQ points, which is more than the entire span of the average range. The accompanying sketch shows closed ends on the bell curve. In reality, the “tails,” the highest and lowest ends of the curve, go out much farther. There are IQs above 200. There is far more variety in learning ability within the gifted range than throughout most of the remaining intellectual continuum.
Currently, it is not possible to accurately test IQ scores into the high gifted ranges for adults. In considering or trying to estimate their own intelligence level, it is important for adults to know that their old test results are from progressively more “competitive” norming pools. SATs, ACTs, and then GREs and other various professional school admissions tests, use norms based on increasingly higher and more select groups of fellow test-takers. Except for the profoundly gifted among us - people who have IQs well over 170 - most of our percentile results keep going down as we take higher and higher level tests. This does not mean we get less intelligent. It simply means we are now comparing ourselves to our true intellectual peers. In other words, you may receive a 90th percentile score on a GRE, but it may equate to a 98th percentile in a national population comparison. The GRE (Graduate Record Exam) is only taken by college graduates in order to enter graduate school: a very select group.
The Intelligence Continuum
Intelligence is on a continuum, and people are not clustered as slow, average, or bright. Each person is unique. While allowing for uneven abilities, strengths, and weaknesses, people fall somewhere between very high to very low in their ability to learn and use information. Most people fall in the middle ranges, of course, and those are the children for whom the schools are designed. Children who are below average in intelligence need more time and more repetitions to learn new material. Children who are above average need less time and fewer repetitions to learn new material. The same is true, of course, for adult learners.
School systems that have gifted programs or that place some children in accelerated classes for instruction generally have a score cut-off as part of their criteria for selecting participants. The cut-off is usually somewhere between the 95th and 98th percentiles on an ability or achievement test. It is important to remember that a score “cut-off” is an artificial division, a division usually made because some cutoff has to be made for some practical reason such as class size. This dividing line that separates people who fall very closely on either side of that cut-off will most likely be very similar in their learning abilities. At the same time, an IQ difference of just 15 points, one standard deviation, makes a definite difference in how easily a person can learn and understand new material.
Studies have been done that indicate a child of 100 IQ needs seven to eight repetitions to learn new material. A child of 115 - 120 IQ needs about half as many repetitions or half the time. A child of an approximate IQ of 130 requires about one-quarter the time to absorb and use new material as a child of average ability. This speeding up of learning speed and a concomitant ability to decipher progressively more-complex material continues throughout the upper end of the IQ range. Someone with a 160 IQ needs about half the time to comprehend (continued on the next page) new complex material as someone in the 130 range. Obviously, this requires some conjecture because it becomes increasingly difficult to measure such things. The point remains, however, that the cut-off misleads people into thinking that they are either gifted or not gifted and that the division is clear and complete. It is not. There is a continuum.
Intellectual Differences
Within a Family
Many different configurations occur within the families of the gifted. Level of giftedness, strengths and weaknesses, personality types, gender, birth order, similarity to the teachers or parents, all these things can affect whether or not gifted children receive what they need in order to develop good self-esteem and social and academic success. Intelligence does vary and people’s needs vary accordingly both in school and elsewhere.
Considerable research throughout the last 130 years or so indicates that giftedness runs in families. This is true at all intellectual levels, not just in the gifted range. The typical IQ difference between American husbands and wives is approximately 12 points. It may be a somewhat wider spread between mates where the “tails” of the bell curve, because there are more males than females in both ends of the curve and there are fewer potential mates from whom to select at the extreme ranges. The close IQ relationship between spouses is an interesting phenomenon when one considers that we do not normally ask a potential spouse what their IQ is or request copies of their standardized test results. I like to explain it by saying, “You get each other’s jokes.” Sense of humor, like most of our interests, is highly related to our intellectual level, and humor and interests in common draw us to other people and make us feel comfortable with and accepted by them.
If two people have 100 children, the children’s IQs theoretically form a bell curve pattern around the parents’ IQ average. Because most of us have only a few children, simply look at the likelihood that any two parents’ children will be more than 30 IQ points higher or lower than theirs. That might happen about three out of 100 times. The statistical probability is that your children will be within 15 IQ points of your parental average, higher or lower, two out of three times. These are just probabilities and something different can occur at any time. Sometimes only one parent will be the most intelligent within the family. Sometimes a child will be the most intelligent. The point is that it is rare that the differences are vast within a family, although it can happen.
Children within the same family are usually within about 15 IQ points of each other. A family with a moderately gifted child who is identified for a gifted program can easily have another child who is bright but not “gifted” by the technical “cut-off” standards. At the far ends of the gifted range, one child may be significantly higher than the other children, say at 160 and up, but all will be within the gifted range, 130 and up, somewhere. This goes back to probability and the likelihood that none of the children will be farther from the parents than about 30 points (two standard deviations on the bell curve).
In other words, probability does not guarantee that any one family will stick to the 12 points difference between parents and 15 points difference between siblings. Such statistics describe a population group, not individuals or individual families. The fact that most of our traits and characteristics, including intelligence, are highly heritable does not mean that each child will inherit the exact same configuration of the parental gene mix. This is why it is better to look at the family pattern and range and realize that cut-offs are for school programs, not families. Even more important, look at what your school is offering each of your children and determine whether or not each child is getting his or her learning, social, and emotional needs met. If your child is bright, but misses the gifted cut-off, what does your school offer her while the average-intellect children are doing their seven to eight repetitions? What can you offer your child in order to prepare her for a future that accepts and enjoys challenges?
Giftedness and Family Dynamics
Intellectual level influences our interests, our humor, our capacity and desire to learn complex material, and our ability to feel connected to and comfortable with those around us. People who are within the normal range of the bell curve, the bulge in the middle, are almost always surrounded by people with whom they have a great deal in common. The reason for this is straightforward: The hump of the bell curve is where most people are intellectually. However, if we are not part of the middle range group, our intellectual level is quite different from those with whom we spend most of our time, and we can feel out of place, maybe even unwelcome or unacceptable. As adults, we do something about that. We follow our interests and abilities and find people more like us. Children are locked in. The learning environment at school can become more and more inappropriate as the child moves out on the intelligence continuum, too. If parents can keep all this in mind, they are in a better position to analyze what it is each of their children needs in order to thrive.
It is very helpful for parents to learn as much as they can about where each of their children fits on the intellectual continuum. It is not about being better or worse, or more or less valuable than a brother or sister. It is about each child’s individual needs. These needs include finding one’s own path and purpose, friendships, and sense of worth. It is in childhood that we learn what we are capable of, what excites us, and how we are viewed and valued by others. It is important for parents to learn how the schools are set up to group students, and what is normal for the educational systems in the United States, so that you, the parents, can figure out whether or not your own children’s needs are being addressed.
It is up to the parents to determine what kinds of academic adjustments each of their children may require in order to learn and work up to their potential. If one child is identified for a gifted program and another is not, find out somehow where each child is on the ability continuum. This is simply so that you can determine the best approaches. Investigate whether or not both children are receiving what they need in order to learn up to potential. Children learn to underachieve when they are well above average and often ahead of what is going on in class. They cannot develop good study skills when they have no need to study or budget their time. The parents can see one child’s inclusion in a gifted program as part of the way the school is addressing that child’s learning needs. A child who is bright but not qualified for “the program” has needs, too, but needs that can and should be met differently. The school’s general program might not be enough. It might need some fine-tuning that you can supply. Your children will each feel valued and important when they can tell you care about how each of them is being treated by his or her environment, at school or at home. Let them know you will do whatever needs to be done in order to make sure their particular needs are being met. They will have every opportunity to learn and perform and achieve up to their own very special potentials.
I believe that our children will feel valued when we get to know them well, work to make available what they need in order to thrive, and show them that we value them for the very people that they are. I say that we each want to be loved for our essence - not for what I do, nor what I earn, not for my looks, not for how clever I am. All of these qualities can fade or disappear. “Will you still love me simply for who I am?” If you can get the message across to your children that you love them for their essence, you’ve raised very gifted children indeed.
Concluding Thoughts
Become comfortable with your own gifts. It is never too late to change your own understanding of yourself and change your own path toward fulfillment. Parents set a wonderful example for their children when they take care of themselves, too. When you demonstrate that you can learn new things and develop new goals yourself, you give your children the encouragement they need to keep their options open and their viewpoints flexible. My personal opinion is that life is not about being better than anyone else. Life is about being the best we can be.
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