SingaporeMotherhood | Parenting

September 2026

Can You Raise a Gifted Child, or Are They Born That Way?

By Mandy Lim Beitler

Every so often, one phrase sends a familiar ripple of anxiety through Singapore parents: gifted child. And right now, it is back in the spotlight. From 2027, the Ministry of Education is overhauling the Gifted Education Programme (GEP), retiring the single high-stakes exercise that once sorted pupils into the ‘gifted’ pile and everyone else.

For parents of toddlers and preschoolers, the shake-up stirs up an older, more personal question. Does my child have to be born a gifted child, or can you nurture all that intelligence at home? It is one of parenting’s most loaded questions, but happily, the answer is more encouraging than you might fear.

(See also: 13 Places to Bring Bub for Brain-boosting Fun and Creative Baby Activities)

First, What the GEP Change Actually Means

Here is the news, minus the jargon. Until now, roughly the top one per cent of pupils sat two tests in Primary 3, and those who passed moved to one of nine schools offering the GEP. Giftedness, in effect, became a label a child earned once, early on. From 2027, that changes: children stay in their own schools, and more of them qualify — around 10 per cent, up from about 7 per cent today.

One change matters more than it sounds. Rather than a single screening in Primary 3, schools can now spot promising children at several points across Primary 4 and 5 as well. A one-off exercise assumes ability turns up on cue, while several chances assume something truer to life — that children bloom at different times.

The quiet message is a hopeful one: potential is not something you simply have, but something you can develop.

Born or Made? Both, As It Turns Out

So can you really grow it? We put the nature-versus-nurture question to Parvinder Kaur, centre director and principal at preschool Growing Up Gifted, who has spent years watching young children learn. Her answer is refreshingly honest. “Both,” she declares, “I’d be sceptical of anyone who offers you a clean percentage split, because the honest answer is that the two are not separable in practice.”

A common misconception, she says, is “that giftedness is a fixed thing a child either possesses or doesn’t and that this is settled early”. Furthermore, it produces two kinds of unhappiness. Parents whose child is identified early can start treating the label as a promise, and become anxious when progress isn’t linear. Parents whose child isn’t identified as ‘gifted’ can quietly conclude the door has closed. Neither is true, and children absorb both.

What a child does inherit, Ms Pavinder explains, is not achievement but disposition. “It’s how intensely they focus. How readily they take a risk. How much stimulation they seek out.” Those tendencies, she notes, show up remarkably early, and they differ from child to child. On their own, though, they are only a starting point.

Temperament turns into real ability, she continues, only when the world around a child answers it. Respond to a naturally curious toddler with impatience, and “they learn, quite quickly, to stop asking”. Flip that around, though, and the news is wonderful. The environment does much of the shaping, and you are the biggest part of your child’s environment.

(See also: Mud, Not Flashcards: How Nature-based Preschools in Singapore Do It Differently)

What a ‘Gifted Child’ Really Looks Like

Here is the freeing part: giftedness was never only about being clever. In fact, the idea that ability comes in many forms — not one tidy number — has been around for decades.

Educators today point to a wider cluster of qualities, and you can probably spot them in your child already. “Curiosity is the engine,” Ms Pavinder says, “Everything else is a passenger.” A curious child, she adds, “educates themselves in the gaps between lessons, and keeps doing it long after they’ve left you.”

Next comes resilience, which she rates more highly than most parents expect. It “decides whether ability survives contact with difficulty.” A child who finds everything easy at four has had no practice at finding something hard. So when difficulty finally arrives — and it always does — they may experience it, she warns, “not as a normal part of learning but as evidence that they were never clever after all.”

Then there is communication, which makes thinking useful to others. “A child with a brilliant idea and no way to express it has, in practical terms, a private idea.” And finally comes care: the instinct to notice how someone else is doing. That last quality, Ms Pavinder insists, is “not a soft addendum”. It is the whole point, since it decides what a child will use all that cleverness for.

This is not just one school’s philosophy, either. Dr Rebecca Chan, a child-development lecturer at the National Institute of Education (NIE) and a long-serving ECDA Awards judge, sees the same qualities surface when young children get room to explore. Give them time and space for deep play, she observes, and it feeds their “curiosity, critical thinking, and problem-solving”.

(See also: 8 Ways to Boost Your Baby’s Speech and Language Skills)

Why the Toddler Years Do the Heavy Lifting

If the environment shapes so much, then the toddler and preschool years are prime time. Around 90 per cent of brain development happens before age five, a figure UNESCO cites. In everyday terms, the neural connections your child’s brain uses repeatedly grow stronger, while the idle ones fade away.

Ordinary chatter, endless questions, and bedtime stories are quietly doing the wiring and building the architecture. And it starts earlier than you might think. Even answering your baby’s babble, as though it meant something, teaches a first lesson: that communication works!

The part Ms Pavinder most wants parents to hear, though, is gentler than any milestone chart. These are the years, she explains, when a child decides what kind of learner they are. Long before they can put it into words, they are “forming a self-concept: whether questions are welcome or a nuisance. Whether being wrong is dangerous. Whether effort works, or whether you’re simply clever or you aren’t.”

Those beliefs take shape in tiny, unremarkable moments — like how you react when they ask “why?” for the ninth time before breakfast. And they tend to endure.

A child can catch up on content at almost any age. Catching up on the belief that you are someone who can figure things out is much harder.

– Parvinder Kaur, Centre Director & Principal, Growing Up Gifted

One Child Who Grew Into It

What might all this look like further down the road? Take Gisele Chiam, now 17 and a student at National Junior College. As a preschooler she attended Growing Up Gifted. Today, she is also an actor, singer, and host who recently helped steer a major fundraiser.

As Second-in-Charge of Concert Viva, one of Singapore’s largest junior college student-led fundraising events, she helped sell 734 tickets, bring Benjamin Kheng on as guest performer, and raise more than $50,000 for the Singapore Association of the Visually Handicapped.

Ask what shaped the way she tackles problems, and Gisele points back to her earliest years. What stayed with her, she says, was the freedom to “try different approaches and not be afraid of getting it wrong.” That ease with uncertainty stuck. Pulling off the concert, she realised, was less about knowing what to do than “knowing what questions to ask”. Curiosity, it turned out, was a “very practical leadership skill”, and the habit that still shapes how she learns today.

What You Can Do at Home Tonight

The best part? None of this needs flashcards, tuition, or a special programme. Ms Pavinder, herself a proud mum of a very active toddler, offers suggestions that start from babyhood and cost nothing:

• Narrate ordinary life. Talk through what you’re doing while cooking, folding laundry, walking to the bus. Vocabulary is built by exposure, and household life is full of it.
• Read together daily — then ask, don’t quiz. After the story, skip testing recall and ask what they should have done instead, or what happens next. There’s no right answer, which is precisely the point.
• Answer a question with a question, now and then. “Why do you think it floats?” hands the thinking back to your child. Do give the answer eventually — the goal is a thinking habit, not frustration.
• Praise the effort, not the child. This concept draws from Carol Dweck’s well-known research on mindset. “You worked hard at that” builds persistence, while “you’re so clever” quietly teaches that ability is fixed.
• Let them be bored. Unstructured, unentertained time is where children generate their own ideas. A fully scheduled child rarely has to invent anything.
• Let them struggle, briefly. The instinct to step in immediately is loving but, done every time, costly. Count to 20 before you rescue.
• Cook and shop together. Weighing, counting, halving, comparing prices — this is mathematics, and it’s free.

(See also: Why You Need to Let Your Child Be Bored

One caution: don’t turn every moment into a lesson. Children can tell, and they disengage. Most of this should feel like ordinary family life, because that’s exactly what it is.

So, does your child need to be born gifted? On the evidence, not really. What they need far more is someone who spots the spark and feeds it, day after ordinary day. Or, as Ms Pavinder puts it, “The question is almost never whether a child has a gift. It is whether anyone noticed, and what they did next.”

All images unless otherwise stated: Depositphotos

All content from this article, including images, cannot be reproduced without credits or written permission from SingaporeMotherhood.

Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, and TikTok for the latest article and promotion updates.