Parents often tend to believe that their children are a bit smarter than other people’s children. Beth Hobbs (31) and her husband Will (41) don’t have to believe.
At the age of two, Teddy taught himself to read by watching children’s television.
– He did it by following the letters on the screen. When we sent him back to kindergarten after the pandemic, we told them we thought he had learned to read. A little later, the nursery called back and said they had had a pre-school teacher check. That was right, he could read, Beth Hobbs tells the BBC.
Made “strange noises”
A little later she was surprised by some strange noises he was making in front of a screen. The parents had been on the “Thomas train”, but Teddy was doing something completely different.
– I didn’t recognize the sounds, so I asked him what he was doing and he replied “Mum, I count in Mandarin”.
BBC, The Guardian and The Independent is among the British media that mentions the little boy from Portishead in Somerset.
The Independent writes that he has already learned to count to one hundred in seven languages, including Mandarin, Welsh and French.
– Every other month or something like that, he finds a new topic to be interested in. Sometimes there are numbers. There was the times table for a while – it was intense – and then there were countries and maps and learning to count in different languages.
Mensa member
Little Teddy was also given an IQ test. He was then three years and seven months old.
– We told him that he should just sit and do puzzles together with a lady for an hour, and he thought it was absolutely wonderful, says Beth.
The result was good enough to become a Mensa member. He got 139 out of 160 points on the Stanford Binet test, writes The Independent.
When they were asked if they wanted to enroll him, they thought “why not?”.
Beth says that she and her husband are still mostly concerned with raising him as a normal child, except that he needs slightly more advanced challenges to be mentally stimulated.
– He has started to realize that his friends can’t read and he wonders why. But it is important for us to keep his feet on the ground. It’s nice that he can do this, but he just sees it as, “Okay, I can read, but my friend can run faster than me. We have different skills,” says Beth.
