Some years ago, I was asked what it’s like to have a child who is “significantly” smarter than I am. This is the essay I wrote on Quora (using a pen name) to answer that question.
I have a 15 year old son who is more intelligent than I am. As background, I have an IQ of around 125, his is somewhere in the 135–140 range. I don’t know if that qualifies as a “significant” difference, but some days it certainly does feel “significant” to me.
I first began to notice his intelligence was likely superior to mine when he was very young — perhaps as young as even 2 years old. At 18 months, he was playing computer games with a mouse, no instruction needed. I remember thinking at the time when we were setting up the computer for him to play that he would probably just play with the CD drawer (pushing the button to eject the drawer over and over, instead of actually “using” the computer. He certainly fooled me.) At 3, he was doing addition and subtraction in his head without counting or finger games. At 7, he was able to solve simple equations which contained variables. At 8, he provided significant input to an analytical problem I was wrestling with at work. And so on and so on. Just a couple of months ago, he again provided unexpected insight into something I had been working on for months. He looked at my model on the whiteboard and said “I think your problem would be solved if you did X”. And he was correct.
I am reminded in subtle and not so subtle ways of his intelligence, almost daily. When I forget, it slaps me in the face in unexpected ways.
When he was younger, I thought often about how I would handle it when he realized that he was smarter than his mother and father and how that would play into raising him.
When he was about 7, I had a talk with him about intelligence. He already understood that he was well ahead of his classmates in school, but I don’t know if he knew at that point that he was smarter than the rest of his family. I told him that intelligence was like a cup. And his cup was pretty big. But knowledge/experience was like water in the cup. And his experience was very, very low. He had a big cup, but without much water. That was also the point that I told him his cup was bigger than mine, but I had a lot more water in my cup than he did, and he should remember that. (He still remembers that story to this day.)
Here are a few things that have worked well over the years:
- Logic, reasoning, and natural consequences are my friends when dealing with issues
- Autonomy and choices are my friends … even when the choice is not significant, the fact that I am giving him a choice makes things go more smoothly. Starting when he was pretty young, I would give him choices about things — “do you want to eat lunch before or after your nap?”. There was not a question we were going to have a nap. But I would let him make a choice “around” the nap so that he had a bit more autonomy.
- We often play thinking games. As he has gotten older and into the teenage years, it has become more difficult to connect with him, but “smart games” are my inside track.
- He knows that he is smarter than I am, but I don’t always let him know that I don’t know the answer to his question. The other day he asked me a question about a crazy math question on the SAT. He expected me to know! I didn’t. He figured out the answer with just a bit of lucky guesses from me.
Overall, he is a blessing. Sometimes his ‘smarts’ present challenges, but I wouldn’t change anything.
