Two-year-old becomes youngest ever girl in Mensa

[Marnie]

Her parents knew Georgia Brown was bright. After all, she could count to ten, recognised her colours and was even starting to dabble with French.

But it was only when their bubbly little two-year-old took an IQ test that her towering intellect was confirmed.

Georgia has become the youngest female member of Mensa after scoring a genius-rated IQ of 152.

This puts her in the same intellectual league, proportionate to her age, as physicist Stephen Hawking.

According to an expert in gifted children, Georgia is the brightest two-year-old she has ever met.

Parents Martin and Lucy Brown have always regarded their youngest child as a remarkably quick learner.

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She was crawling at five months and walking at nine months.

By 14 months, she was getting herself dressed.

"She spoke really early - by 18 months she was having proper conversations," Mrs Brown said.

"She would say, 'Hello I'm Georgia, I'm one'. She was also putting her shoes on and putting them on the right feet."

Georgia was so perceptive that after one outing to the theatre to see Beauty and the Beast she solemnly informed her parents: "I didn't like Gaston (the villain). He was mean and arrogant."

Struck by the similarities between her daughter and Matilda, the title character in the Roald Dahl story about a gifted child, Mrs Brown began to worry about Georgia's future education.

She contacted Professor Joan Freeman, a specialist educational psychologist, for advice.

Professor Freeman applied the standard Stamford-Binet Intelligence Scale test to Georgia and was amazed to find this was too limited to map her creative abilities.

"What Georgia did on some questions was of a higher quality than that which was necessary to gain a mark.

"She swept right through it like a hot knife through butter.

"I would ask her things like 'give me two blocks or give me ten blocks' and she would manage it as easily as you would expect a five-year-old.

"In one test I asked her to draw a circle and she did it so perfectly.

"Most adults would struggle to do that. Her circle was near to being perfect.

"It shows she can physically hold a pen well but also that she understands the concept of a circle."

Georgia, who is at nursery school, was also able to tell the difference between pink and purple - a skill which most children learn at primary school age.

Professor Freeman said: "I said to her, 'What a pretty pink skirt, and you have tights and shoes to match'.

"She said, 'They're not pink, they're purple'. Most children go to school aged five and start to learn colours, let alone knowing the difference between pink and purple.

"I have to keep reminding myself that she is only two."

To the amazement of the family, who live in Aldershot, Hampshire, Georgia scored 152 points on the IQ test, putting her in the top 0.2 per cent of the population. Those with an average IQ would score around 100 points in the same test.

Georgia was then invited to join Mensa, the High IQ society whose members have IQs in the top 2 per cent of the population. Georgia is one of only 30 Mensa members under the age of ten.

Mrs Brown, chief executive of a charity, believes Georgia has benefited by growing up as the youngest of five children.

She has been absorbing information from her older brothers and sisters and father, a self-employed carpenter, while not receiving any special treatment.

"There is always someone around to offer her something," her mother said.

"But she still has temper tantrums, like you wouldn't believe, throwing herself on the floor.

"She doesn't think she's better and cleverer than everyone else. She is a very kind and loving child."

Georgia, who has a "wicked sense of humour" is as busy as any toddler, enjoying a schedule of ballet classes, listening to stories, dancing, singing, sport and even watching the TV.

DailyMail

[peaches]

crazy.......

[JustinM]

Most people have high IQ's at an early age. I would like to see her tested again in 10 years and see how she does.

[JustinM]

IQ tests measure your mental age with regards to your physical age.

[Guest LadyC]

i fail to see anything truly remarkable. so she's a gifted child... so what? my oldest daughter was rolling over at six weeks, walking by ten months, had an incredible gift with words from an early age and carried on conversations using some words that her father often had to ask me the definition of by the time she was 16 months old. she potty-trained herself (with NO help from anyone else) when her sister was born because she was no longer the 'baby", and by 18 months didn't even sleep with a diaper. she was reading fluently by 3, and reading cursive by 5.

i had her iq tested when she was 12, and she scored two points below me on the adult level... it wasn't scaled down to accomodate the age difference.

i took her out of public school in fourth grade and homeschooled her and her sister. she was already a school-year ahead of her peers (because of how her birthdate fell), and when i put her back into public school a year and a half later, they wanted to advance her a grade ahead of that. i refused... it would have meant that when all her friends started driving and dating at age 16, she would have been left out until her senior year.

so what did all that boil down to? resentment. not resentment over refusing to let her advance, but resentment over being treated as "special". she hated the GT program. she hated being on the "who's who" list. she hated being on the national honour society. she hated being nationally recognized for her musical accomplishments in band. she hated getting straight A's in school without ever cracking a book to study.

and she just flat quit trying. she dumbed herself down so she would fit in among her peers. her grades dropped dramatically to B's and C's in high school.... how? because she refused to complete or turn in her assignments. she quit band because she didn't want to be recognized for her talent anymore.

she started sneaking out her bedroom window in the middle of the night to visit boys by age 13. she started dabbling in witchcraft and experimenting with alcohol about the same age.

how she survived her teen years can only be credited to God's devine intervention and a lot of prayer. she left home at sixteen, graduated high school at 17, and decided on her own that she needed a more disciplined life... so she asked her father and me to sign papers granting her permission to enter the marine corp. she spent her 18th birthday in boot camp, her 20th birthday in iraq. she's going to be spending her 21st birthday anticipating the finalization of her divorce in a few weeks.

being intelligent has nothing to do with having common sense. nothing, nada, zilch. she's made a few improvements as she's grown into adulthood, but she's got a long ways to go. but intelligence can be as much of a curse as it is a gift, and i hope the little girl who is being written about utilizes her gift wisely.

[Afal]

Speaking as a teacher, I know that this litle girl coud find life quite difficult for having such a high IQ. I have had experience of this when a gifted child is so beyond the other children that they become socially inept. This is very sad for the child.

This might sound like a WOW! story, but infact, it is not something that I would want for my child at all.

[Guest LadyC]

Speaking as a teacher, I know that this litle girl coud find life quite difficult for having such a high IQ. I have had experience of this when a gifted child is so beyond the other children that they become socially inept. This is very sad for the child.

This might sound like a WOW! story, but infact, it is not something that I would want for my child at all.

exactly.

between my two daughters, the one i wrote about and my other one, who is of average intelligence but has a good deal of common sense, guess which one is happiest in life, has more self-esteem, a better sense of "family", and a much higher quality of friends? yep, you guessed it. the younger one.

[Marnie]

i fail to see anything truly remarkable. so she's a gifted child... so what?

Well, what's remarkable is that she is a member of MENSA. To be a member at that age you have to take and pass a test, which she obviously did. I know because I took my first MENSA test at age 6 and passed. She has an IQ of 153 (I think it said), which is just shy of being a genius by most scales. At 6 my IQ was somewhere around 140, so this kid is beyond gifted. What she becomes--a normal little girl or a freak--will be determined by her parents. MENSA for me made it possible to learn at levels beyond other children my age. My parents elected to keep me in regular schools (although there were private). I was never kept "out of the loop" and always had friends. It's not the brains, it's the raising of the child that is the determinative factor.

[Guest LadyC]

i fail to see anything truly remarkable. so she's a gifted child... so what?

Well, what's remarkable is that she is a member of MENSA. To be a member at that age you have to take and pass a test, which she obviously did. I know because I took my first MENSA test at age 6 and passed. She has an IQ of 153 (I think it said), which is just shy of being a genius by most scales. At 6 my IQ was somewhere around 140, so this kid is beyond gifted. What she becomes--a normal little girl or a freak--will be determined by her parents. MENSA for me made it possible to learn at levels beyond other children my age. My parents elected to keep me in regular schools (although there were private). I was never kept "out of the loop" and always had friends. It's not the brains, it's the raising of the child that is the determinative factor.

marnie, i respectfully have to disagree here.... it's not entirely the raising of the child that is the determinative factor. i raised both my girls with the same standards. it has a great deal to do with a child's personality, how the child perceives themselves, and how their peers, teachers, and other people in their lives react towards them.

could i have done some things differently? probably. but i did what i could like every parent does.

sure, it IS remarkable that she's a member of mensa at age 2. rana and i are never going to be mensa members, and likely neither of us would accept such an honour even if our iq scores were six points higher. i know she wouldn't want to be, because she hates her intelligence, more so than i did when i was her age. and boy, did i dumb myself down to fit in. (i remember one time in my mid-20s, one of my regular customers where i worked, whom i'd known for years, looked at me in total awe one day and said "wow, you really aren't dumb! why do you pretend to be?") i still could care less about my own iq score. it means nothing to me. my level of common sense, my wisdom, and especially my relationship with God mean so much more than the bragging rights that come with being part of such an exclusive community.

i'm not trying to be offensive, i just think iq scores are overrated.

[Gerioke]

I would rather have a high faith count than a high IQ count.

Alas I fell short in both categories.