Is your child secretly a genius? Here's how to tell for sure.

If your kid brings home a Picasso-esque painting do you:

(a) write it off as a fluke;

(b) pat her on the head and say ‘very nice darling’; or

(c) call everyone you know to tell them little Susie is a GENIUS?

When it comes to unearthing a gifted child, we’re about as clueless as a bloke holding a dirty nappy. So we decided to call in the professionals.

On the latest episode of This Glorious Mess, Mamamia’s podcast about family life, we asked an expert to explain how you can tell if your kid is a genius, and debunk some of the myths you may have heard.

Listen: Dr Mimi Wellisch joins Holly Wainwright and Andrew Daddo to shed some light on gifted children.

Dr Mimi Wellisch is an expert in gifted kids and the Director of Clever Kids Consultancy. She is also the mother of a child genius. But while she figured it out early, a lot of parents can miss the signs and simply mistake it for a lack of social maturity.

“If they go to mother’s groups where they can see their child and compare their child to other mother’s children it becomes obvious in a very short period of time,” she says.

But once you start watching, the differences become clear as day.

“They might actually physically be much more advanced than the other children… They might skip developmental stages, they mightn’t crawl they might just start walking,” Dr Mimi says.

“I know of one mother who said that her child stood up at the age of six months amongst all the other little babies who were just crawling around.”

If you’ve got an early talker, that’s another indicator of genius, according to the Director of Clever Kids.

“The usual sign is that they are very, very articulate and very quick at picking up language. Sometimes they are really good at maths things, they will look at a number of apples and say five without counting. They have amazing memories, they’re like sponges.”

But the number one sign of a gifted child is a hunger to learn.

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“They need to learn. They are so hungry for information they tend to stick around adults and older children just to absorb their knowledge,” the gifted kids expert says.

And if you don’t feed that hunger, it can start to manifest in some pretty ugly ways as your child starts to feel frustrated and play up.

“[A gifted child] might just be one of those kids who do really well and aren’t any trouble at all. But there are other children, especially if they are highly gifted, they will start acting out,” says Dr Mimi.

“They will become a behaviour problem, they will turn off learning, they won’t finish their homework, they don’t want to go to school, they might become quite anxious, because they feel like they’re aliens, they start having low self esteem because again they are different from the other children.”

“They may also additional issues such as ADHD or be on the spectrum but the fact is if you don’t attend to the issues around giftedness, the child will have problems,” she says.

If you want to find out the best way to deal with a gifted child (or more honest and hilarious parenting talk) you can listen to the full episode of This Glorious Mess here:

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This content was created with thanks to our brand partner Bad Moms 2.