An early sign of intelligence

     Many parents are proud of their children if they learn how to do something – walk, talk , tie shoelaces – at a younger age than the neighbor’s child. Is it true that more precocious development leads to greater ability or intelligence later in life? Are there other kinds of infant behavior that have this kind of predictive value? Can you tell how smart the ten-year-old is going to be by looking at the ten-month-old? And is there anything you can do about it?

     Observers of child development, including mothers with more than one child, know that infants and children have their own timetable for learning and acquiring skills. Intelligence unfolds over years, sometimes in spurts that some researchers think correspond to rapid development of synapses between brain cells. The order of stages can’t be changed, and most researchers believe that the developmental stages can’t be accelerated. Different kinds of learning require different developmental stages to have been reached, and there’s nothing parents can do about it. A child can’t learn mathematical set theory, for example, before the ability to understand symbols and the concept of categorization have been installed in the developing brain.