This little boy taught himself to read when he was only 2 years old, and has now been accepted into the International Association of the Gifted, MENSA, in the UK. He has become their youngest member.
Raising children is a topic that all parents frequent. From home education, their development of skills, their behavior at school and even the best diet for the little ones. Everyone wants to have a healthy and outstanding child, so many parents go out of their way to give their child the best. This is why it is now increasingly common for children to do extracurricular activities or to be stimulated from an early age to fully exploit their abilities.
This time we will talk about Teddy, a boy who is currently 4 years old and lives in Portishead, England. The little one can count to 100 in six different languages, not counting English and including Mandarin.
Not only this, apparently Theodore “Teddy” Hobbs learned to read from the age of 2. Without a doubt we can affirm that we are facing a next genius child. So much so that he is now the youngest member of MENSA, an association specializing in teaching gifted children.
The minor was accepted after he took the Stanford-Binet test, one of the most recognized IQ tests in the world. According to his parents, Teddy had a lot of fun with his test, in addition to obtaining a score of 139 out of 160 possible. This confirmed his talent, since it was a much higher result for someone his age and in general, since the average is between 90 and 110.
Teddy taught himself to read while watching TV and playing games on his tablet at the age of 2 and without his parents realizing. He can now read the Harry Potter books when his parents let him, who never imagined he would join Mensa or even apply for membership.
“He was three years and seven months old, and they said he had the letter and word recognition of an eight-year-old,” recalled his mother, Beth Hobbs. “He has done all this himself. When we go out and give him the option of a gift, he wants a book instead of chocolate […] He picks a new topic of something to be interested in every two months or so, it seems. Sometimes they are numbers. It was multiplication tables for a while, it was a very intense period, then countries and maps and learning to count in different languages.”
Despite being a genius child, his mother made it clear that he is still, when it comes down to it, just a kid. She added that her son’s IQ score, which The Times reports ranks in the 99.5th percentile for her age, presents particular challenges for parents.
He claims it is “a blessing and a curse.” The young man’s curiosity is not always easy to handle on a day-to-day basis for his relatives. When Teddy doesn’t hesitate to ask her questions about the war in the Ukraine, his mother admits to being unsettled. “It’s hard to explain it to him when he’s so young,” she admits.
“Nothing escapes him, he listens to everything. You may remember conversations we had at Christmas last year. But he is absolutely a normal four year old. He finds poop really funny. We were told that three was the youngest age of anyone who had accepted into Mensa in the UK, although there was someone in the US who was two years old.
“We’re not sure how it ended up this way, my husband and I aren’t linguists so we always joke that the embryologist must have slipped in a needle or something to make it this way. Everyone we’ve talked to has been fabulous because it’s been so hard to find support, but we have no idea why he’s so smart.”