Plasticity, Health and So-called IQ

Foreword 

If you are not already familiar with my opinion that IQ tests HAVE ISSUES, please read previous posts on this site before reading this. 

TLDR: My French is not good enough to research this, but long before we had Wikipedia spoon-feeding us predigested answers of what we should believe, I learned that the origin story behind IQ tests is that a Frenchman named Alfred Binet was asked to create a school readiness test in an era where:

1. Not everyone had a birth certificate, so you couldn't use age or birthdate as a proxy for school readiness.

2. There were substantial performance differences between city kids and country kids because the city kids had a lot more exposure to things like lining up. 

So they supposedly wanted a means to figure out who to admit to kindergarten without it being chaos. And fast forward to some later date and people decided this was a measure of INTELLIGENCE.

It's NOT. That is absolutely NOT what that test was supposed to do according to what I originally learned from the gifted education community.

So when I talk about so-called IQ or so-called intelligence, I am trying to talk about something more like the way we use the term military intelligence. Like: do you have what you need informationally to accomplish the thing?

Because I fundamentally do not believe that "some people are just SMART."

Start of Post

My oldest son looked like a cross between a bat and a frog at birth. He had squished up little ears that took a bit to look like normal ears and froggy legs.

I mean but cute as button. He was adorable, but he didn't look like most babies, no.

His brother didn't have froggy legs. This was highly memorable because, damn, was it a pain to change his diaper because he had normal baby fat legs and it took forever to clean up all the creases of the fat rolls so he wouldn't get diaper rash.

My oldest has a genetic disorder that involves misprocessing fats and he was too skinny for a newborn baby. Thus, the froggy looking legs.

And at something like age two, much to my aggravation, my oldest routinely took off one shoe while sitting in his car seat while I was driving. 

It eventually dawned on me that it was always the same shoe. And so I checked and one foot was bigger than the other.

I'm very fortunate. My mother supplied most of the clothes for my kids for the first few years I was a mom and I barely bought clothes for my kids.

I mostly bought socks, shoes and undies. I rarely bought anything else. I periodically took measurements and sent my mom updated info and clothes arrived by mail like MAGIC.

So it became my policy to buy my oldest new shoes frequently because they only comfortably fit both feet for a short time. And when he was older, we would look for shoes that were adjustable to account for the difference.

And we don't do that anymore. That stopped being an issue at some point and his face doesn't look as lopsided as it once did.

I'm not saying his feet are the same size, but if they still differ, it's a small enough difference it's no longer something we try to accommodate when shopping for shoes.

Physical lopsidedness correlates to learning disabilities and the like. And in my experience can be resolved to some degree by addressing underlying health issues, such as a previously unrecognized genetic disorder. (My son was diagnosed at age fourteen.)

I homeschooled and when I began homeschooling, I worked around his chronic health issues. He did his school work when he was functional enough to focus.

And I assumed it would always be that way, but it gradually changed where he was well enough to keep more of a schedule.

Low IQ is frequently associated with genetic disorders, like Down Syndrome. And I have observed people with low IQs doing germy things that had to be keeping them sick.

So if you have a child in your family who is "dumb," I highly recommend you look to their health and focus on improving their health.

We know just being sick temporarily, like with the flu, can impair performance. If you are chronically ill and it's not recognized, what do you think that does to your school performance?

My oldest son had a lot of issues when he was little and I decided I had until age five to address them because the brain is still physically growing. And my firsthand experience is that the window for brain plasticity is substantially larger than that.

The last I heard, the brain continues to develop until age twenty-five. But in my experience, if you have a backlog of health issues, redressing those can continue to show gains in "intellectual performance" or general functionality, regardless of age.