Are children who walk and talk early geniuses in the making?
the conversation | Emma Sumner | Elisabeth L Hill | February 4, 2016
From rolling over to walking and saying words, most parents will remember the exact age at which their child achieved a certain “milestone”. They will often also compare these early “rites of passage” to the progress of a sibling, cousin or friend, or to charts in the myriad parenting books setting out the ages at which children should develop certain skills.
For some parents this will provide reassurance about their child’s start in life. For others it will be a source of anxiety. But do milestones really say anything about a child’s potential? For example, is an early talker more likely to be academically gifted than others? Let’s take a look at the evidence.
Abstract |
What we do know is that new skills grow from the acquisition of foundation skills. Crawling enables a child to move independently to objects that they would like to explore, and adults increase the type of social signals they offer the crawling child. Walkers, with their new vantage point on the world, are typically more socially interactive and better at sharing objects. Therefore, it may be expected that those children that reach motor milestones at an early age will benefit from more opportunities to learn and refine new skills in the long run.
A study using a British cohort looked at the relationship between early development and cognitive skills at the age of eight. Cognitive ability was determined largely by literacy-type assessments, like reading comprehension and vocabulary, and a single measure of non-verbal IQ. While motor and language milestones were identified retrospectively by parents, meaning the accuracy may be questionable, the findings do suggest a tentative link between early and later development.
