‘Do they get much time outside?’ I asked our prospective childminders, gaining a flash of admiration from my wife. Like me, she couldn’t quite tell if we were interviewing or being interviewed. With more trivial concerns, I’m great at posing probing questions. I grilled our broadband guy like I was in Mossad, and if someone asks me the name of a face-melting techno track I haven’t heard in a decade, I develop the cunning of a bloodhound with a degree in Swiss tax law. But for grown-up problems, I freeze. I once viewed a flat in Canonbury and realised hours later that it didn’t have a sitting room. When I ask someone for directions, I spend so much energy nodding my head that I’m incapable of remembering anything they say. More than once, a stranger has caught up with me to ask why I’d immediately headed in the opposite direction.
‘Yes, we have a lovely garden area,’ our childcare professional assured me, happy to impress us, or eyeing up our child to see if he made the cut. The garden was good since, on my quest to place my son’s chubby feet on the childcare ladder’s first rungs, outdoor space was listed as a must. Talk of competition for places had wormed into my brain, and a simple search for childminders snowballed into a parental paranoia spiral that saw me on the kinds of sites that tell you the best way to get your child doing the FT crossword by spring.
I spent over half an hour on one site that misspelled ‘genius’ as ‘genious’, and marvelled at its sweet-natured desire to make every reader feel like their child could be a savant. Parents, it said, should look for a baby to exhibit either ‘a need for constant stimulation’ or ‘consistent, quiet contentment’ which is a bit like saying, ‘They should be on nodding terms with differential calculus, or constantly trying to eat their own fist - either’s fine.’
A more hard-nosed blog said all clever children display acute sensitivity to sounds and smells. The sound thing, at least, checks out in our case. My son has the auditory sharpness of a bat that thinks his Deliveroo order might just have arrived downstairs. At bedtime, he can be stirred fully awake by the sound of a well-phrased thought inside my own head. Smells, though, are less inclined to bother him since, if he’s prodigious in any respect, it’s in the manufacture of odours so foul they could strip the paint off a landmine. In the end, I came away convinced there’s very little you can tell about a child’s intelligence until they’re old enough not to eat, say, ear plugs you leave lying around.
As we left our childminder, I was delighted when she insisted my son seemed bright and alert for his age. Against my better judgment, I felt a surge of pride. It’s not possible, or necessary, to judge his intelligence just yet, but it still feels nice to be told. I mean, it doesn’t take a genious to figure that out.
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