I’m in the Gifted program, and there are those of us you can’t get to shut up no matter what. On the other hand, there are those of us who don’t just aren’t as chatty.

There are smart people who talk a lot and there are dumb people who talk a lot.

There are smart people who don’t say much and there dumb people who don’t say much.

How much you talk isn’t a reflection of how intelligent you are.

However, in my experience at least, the kids who sit at the front of the class and seem to have this incurable need to answer every question tend to make the dumb people around them think that the question-answerer is smart, when in reality they’re quite stupid. They just like to memorize the book and pretend they’re smart.

an example i could give is of a child who attended the setting where i trained. he could not speak, but his understanding and skills reflected a great intellectual understanding – he could match colours and shapes, figures to pictures, characters in a story to soft toys, he could complete complex puzzles and would point to a written number if you held a number of fingers up. he had just started making sounds when he moved to the reception class.

this shows a child does not need to talk to be intelligent.

Anyway, sometimes not speaking is a sign of intelligence. Sometimes it is a sign of being delayed.

Take the kid to a doctor.