My son has always been a quick study. When I was pregnant with my daughter, he had so many questions about how babies are made that he wore me out with the sheer volume of them: "Can she cry in there?" "Does the food fall on her head?" "Where does her poop go?" "How will she get out?" I knew this was a learning opportunity, so I answered each question. By the time Ava was born, Cole had a better understanding of human reproduction than most of the men I've dated.

The speed with which Cole learned made him a delight to teach, so I expected him to do well in school. That was not the case. (See also Attention Issues and School: A Mom's View.) The problems started in Kindergarten, but I didn't start to seriously worry until his first-grade teacher told me, "I keep making the work easier for him but he can't seem to get it." I gently told her that he was really pretty smart and that she might have more luck making the work harder. She gave me a look of profound pity. That and further evidence that they thought he was a discipline problem, as well as slow, was the very moment I turned into a meddling, bossy, dissatisfied, aggressive parent. I called meetings with the principal and threatened (and seriously considered) pulling him out to homeschool him.

After a long battle with the school, I succumbed to their pressure to have Cole evaluated for attention issues—thinking it might also help me sort through my education options. The test turned up what I suppose I already knew. Cole was very bright—probably gifted—and no doubt very bored. Like many gifted children, he isn't all that interested in demonstrating his knowledge, so tests make him go limp. He just craves more stimulation. Schools, though, are very concerned with demonstrating what children know, rather than getting them excited about something new.

I might have saved my son a lot of trouble if I'd identified the signs that he fell into the "gifted" range many years earlier.

Despite the oft-held belief that an IQ of 130 and above is "gifted," IQ is only one measure. Gifted learners are "children and youth with outstanding talent who perform or show the potential for performing at remarkably high levels of accomplishment when compared with others of their age, experience, or environment," according to the U.S. Department of Education.

It is possible to recognize giftedness in a toddler, or even in a baby. Cole had passed all the baby milestones early; he was observant and curious from an early age; even as a toddler he had a long attention span for topics that interested him; his command of the language is outstanding; he's very funny; he picks up abstract mathematical concepts easily; he worries about morality and death, and he pursues topics like robotics, marine life, botany, dinosaurs, and outer space with an intensity I've rarely encountered outside of college.

All parents think their kids are great (and if they don't, they should!) so I resisted the urge to discuss my son's intelligence with others. That was my mistake. "Parents are the most accurate judges of their children," says Joan Franklin Smutny, Director of the Center for Gifted at National-Louis University in Evanston Illinois and the author of numerous books on the topic including Stand Up For Your Gifted Child (Free Spirit Publishing). "These children need their parents to be advocates for them—early and often."