Pete and Ilona Pretorius suspected from an early age that their son, James, was special, particularly when he came home from his first day of kindergarten.
"Mom, Dad, I think I'm in the wrong class," he said. "Why?" his parents wanted to know.
"Because the teacher and I are the only ones who can read," he told them.
The Pretoriuses, who live in Surrey, B.C., recount such stories with pride and a fair degree of amazement. The same sorts of stories will surely be told by the parents of Elise Tan Roberts, who last week made headlines around the world for becoming the youngest member ever of Mensa in Britain. With an IQ of 156, the two-year-old girl tested just below Albert Einstein, who had an IQ of 160. She joins such wunderkinds as Georgia Brown, who joined British Mensa in 2007 at 2¾ years old with an IQ of 152, and Mikhail Ali, who joined in 2005 at three years old with an IQ of 137.
Earlier this year, Pranav Veera, a six-year-old boy in Ohio, was reported to have an IQ of 176.
While their stories make all those parents who have helped Baby Einstein videos fly off the shelves green with envy, experts and parents of gifted children say raising them is often extremely difficult.
"It's the biggest challenge in the world," says Susan Jackson, founder of the Daimon Institute for the Highly Gifted, an organization in White Rock, B.C., devoted to supporting individuals with exceptional abilities.
Giftedness has traditionally been defined as having an IQ of 130 or more. (The average IQ ranges from 90 to 109.) But in recent years the definition has expanded to include children whose gifts may be different than those of abstract reasoning, the trait most often caught by IQ tests. Experts now agree that a gifted child is someone who "has potential in one or more areas of human capacity placing him or her in the top 2 to 5 per cent of children the same age," Ms. Jackson says.
Push a gifted child too far and there is a risk of burn out. Don't push them far enough and boredom sets in. Either one can see gifted children turn their backs on their possibilities.
"The field of giftedness and talent development is full of people who were identified as extraordinary as little kids and who just sort of opted out," says Dona Matthews, an educational psychologist and co-author of Being Smart About Gifted Children.
Often, experts say, problems arise when gifted children begin school. Not only do they face the risk of stagnating in the classroom, but they may also have a difficult time making friends since it is often hard to find any true peers.
"Alienation is a real problem," Dr. Matthews says.
It is true not just of the children themselves but also their parents, who often clash with educators and other parents. "It's almost like you're a leper," says the mother of a gifted 11-year-old in Vancouver who asked to remain anonymous for fear of aggravating continuing animosities with the local school. "You don't fit in with the parents, your kid doesn't fit in with the other kids."
Otto Schmidt, president of the Toronto-based Educators of the Gifted Organization, tutors several highly gifted children. "I'm usually called in times of great desperation, strife and tension," he says. "The words I hear are, 'Help, I've got a gifted kid and that kid is totally frustrated, doesn't know what to do.' "
At the same time parents of gifted children work to keep them intellectually engaged, there is also the issue of trying to make sure they get to be, well, kids.
