Children Above 180 IQ Stanford-Binet: Origin and Development

by Leta Stetter Hollingworth

When we observe young gifted children, we discover that religious ideas and needs originate in them whenever they develop to a mental level past "twelve years mental age." Thus they show these needs when they are but eight or nine years old, or earlier. The higher the IQ the earlier does the pressing need for an explanation of the universe occur, the sooner does the demand for a concept of the origin and destiny of the self appear.

In the cases of children who test above 180 IQ observed by the present writer, definite demand for a systematic philosophy of life and death developed when they were but six or seven years old. Similar phenomena appear in the childhood histories of eminent persons where data of childhood are available. Goethe, for example, at the age of nine constructed an altar and devised a religion of his own, in which God could be worshiped without the help of priests.

Much could be said of the special problems of the young gifted child in this period of immaturity when his intellectual needs are those of an adolescent while his emotional control and physical powers are still but those of a child. It would be of great interest to study the reactions of older persons to the insistent questions and searchings of these young children. "You are too young to understand." "You can't know all that till you grow older." "You unnatural child!" These are responses that have been heard incidentally, falling from the lips of undiscerning parents. A girl of eight years, of IQ 150, recently was heard to express a determination to join the "Agnostic Church," because she had asked, "What is it called when you can't make up your mind whether there is a God or not?" and had been told that this would be agnosticism.

Part and parcel of these questionings concerning origin and destiny are those concerning birth and reproduction. At a "tender" age these children ask for an account of sex and reproduction and suffer much at the hands of parents and guardians who are shocked at what thus emanates from the mouths of babes. Lifelong problems of mental hygiene may be thus engendered by parents who cannot understand why a child should be "so unnatural" as to weep over questions of birth and death at six or seven years of age.

In the same way problems of right and wrong become troublesome for these young children in a way that does not happen except for the very able. For instance, a six-year-old boy of IQ 187 wept bitterly after reading "how the North taxed the South after the Civil War." The problem of evil in the abstract thus comes to trouble these children almost in their cradles, at an age when they are ill-suited to grapple with it from the point of view of emotional maturity. Special problems of mental hygiene are perhaps inherent in this situation which do not arise with the generality of children.

GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS

The list of problems that we have suggested here does not by any means exhaust the subject under discussion. However, the present writer believes that these are some of the more important problems of childhood that originate directly from the circumstance of being very highly intelligent among official guardians who are ignorant or careless of the fact. These problems of adjustment do not arise unless a child is gifted intellectually. They are conspicuous to the psychologist who studies children with "test knowledge" of them.

It is especially to be noted that many of these problems are functions of immaturity. To have the intelligence of an adult and the emotions of a child combined in a childish body is to encounter certain difficulties. It follows that (after babyhood) the younger the child, the greater the difficulties, and that adjustment becomes easier with every additional year of age. The years between four and nine are probably the most likely to be beset with the problems mentioned.

The physical differences between a child of six whose IQ is 150 and children of nine years (whose mental age corresponds to his) are unabridgeable, and so are the differences of taste, due to differences in emotional maturity. The child of six graded with nine-year-olds is out of his element physically and socially, but the same thing is not true of a sixteen-year-old among nineteen-year-olds. The difference between six and nine is very great. The difference between sixteen and nineteen is small in terms of biological development.

Moreover, as the bright go forward in school, they find work increasingly adapted to their powers by the automatic developments of the established curriculum. Senior high schools are, we have discovered, adapted only to adolescents of superior intelligence. Classmates become automatically more congenial through being more highly selected. The dull bully, with his crude horseplay, has left school, and in any case the gifted, being older, can defend themselves physically.