Is your child gifted? How to tell from their drawings...
A study reckons the devil is in the detail... (but it still needs LOADS more research)
So, many of us won't give our kids' scribbles much more than a cursory glance (and a cry of "Oh! That's LOVELY!" of course) before we proudly stick them up on the fridge, but a new study suggests that perhaps we should be analysing them a bit more...
Why?
Because they could potentially reveal whether or not our kids are GENIUSES. Well, gifted at any rate.
Here's the deal: according to an Australian study, it all comes down to the 'exceptional detail' that children aged between 7 and 9 add when they are drawing people.
Among the 30 'signs of a gifted child' drawing details we need to be looking out for are goatee beards, eye makeup, mucus (MUCUS? Er, OK...), freckles, braces, a tie, a badge, hair on the arms, gloves, a ring, a wallet chain, and a waist.
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Nipples, genitals and urine also apparently figure in the sketches of gifted youngsters, which will come as a relief to every parent whose had the humiliation of a 'mummy and daddy without their clothes on' or 'mummy on the loo' pic coming home from school...
What's more, if they add further details such as drawing a person's head from the side, or putting their hands in their pockets or behind their backs, then they are even more amazingly clever. Apparently.
The study also noted 4 items which were only drawn by the apparently 'non-gifted': a nose piercing, knees, shoe zippers and perfectly straight lines that looked like a ruler had been used. (Knees? Piercings? We reckons that's pretty amazing detail for a little one, personally!).
The authors of the research paper admit that loads more research is still needed before they can confim whether or not this is really the case.
Not that that is going to stop us paying a wee bit more attention to our kid's masterpieces from now on, though...
Is that a goatee beard on that man, darling? No? It's a sheep, you say? Oh well...
(Do let us know what you think in comments or on Facebook if you have any little Einsteins based on this rather bizarre set of criteria ?)
Image: Getty
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