The System is Flawed

If your child does not do well on an IQ test it may not necessarily be his or her fault. One of the inherent flaws in using IQ tests as a measure of intelligence is that it only measures the ability to answer questions.

One flaw is that the human factor is not factored in to the actual test. Some people simply do not respond well to the question and answer format or they may be highly intelligent individuals that do not perform well under testing conditions because of nervousness or anxiety.

The other issue is that different children express their intelligence in different ways! Some children are brilliant verbally, others are good at languages and yet others are better at math or geometry. Some children are not good writers but brilliant graphic artists.

Many children today are more oriented towards the visual rather than written word and an IQ test is of the written word. Given all these variables who is to say that intelligence can really be measured using this type of criteria.

Another problem is that a child's background is not taken into consideration. A child's culture, home life, poverty level and educational environment can do a lot to affect the outcome of an IQ test. A child without a local library may be a genius but not do as well as a child who is able to take out books from the library every day. This is because an IQ test is in essence literacy and cultural reference test rather than a true measure of intelligence.

Using only IQ testing to measure intelligence can be so limiting. In the 1950s the IQ test was used to decide what class a child would be placed in. The children who scored high on the test were placed in superior learning environments and thrived and got even smarter. Their IQ scores persistently increased while the children who scored low in the first place fell even further behind because the learning environments they were placed in were so unchallenging.

You should not allow yourself to fall into the trap of believing that an IQ test is what is the measure of your child's intelligence. It is limited and often it will describe a brilliant child as having an average intelligence and a child of average intelligence as having a lower IQ then you might like them to have.

IQ tests have been contentious for many years exactly for the reasons just described yet it seems like an adequate substitute for measuring intelligence has not been devised. This is exactly why you should not allow yourself to fall into the delusion that IQ testing is an accurate assessment of a child's intelligence. In fact you should consider it to be a limited assessment of your child's assessment at best.

In a nutshell - don't assume your child is not intelligent just because they score low on an intelligence test.