13-Year-Old Long Island Boy With a 168 IQ Gets Into NYU Master’s Program—What That Means for Parents and Teachers
The email probably came on an ordinary weekday. It said congratulations, and somewhere below that, the family likely found details about orientation, advising, and how to access the student portal. Maybe his mother printed it out and pinned it to the fridge next to a permission slip for an eighth-grade field trip.
I don’t know the Long Island family in the news, but that specific image—graduate school email and middle school permission slip sharing the same kitchen magnet—is exactly what I recognize from teaching highly gifted kids. People hear “13-year-old accepted into NYU’s master’s program” and picture someone who thinks faster, works harder, and moves through life with unusual confidence. But the real picture is usually more complicated. The same child who can read a dense mathematics paper at 7 a.m. might not be able to find his own shoes by 7:15.
A few years ago, I worked with a student I’ll call Sam. Sam was eleven and could do college-level algebra in his head. During class, he would finish problem sets quickly and then sit quietly, waiting, while the rest of the room caught up. He wasn’t arrogant. If anything, he was almost too aware that he was different, and he spent a lot of energy pretending not to be.
One afternoon, his mother came in for a conference. She brought a travel mug of coffee and looked exhausted. She didn’t ask me whether her son was smart; she already knew that. What she asked was, “Do we push him forward or hold him back? He’s doing ninth-grade math, but he still sleeps with a nightlight. He doesn’t know how to tie his shoes properly. I don’t know what to do.”
That tension is the real story. A child with a very high IQ doesn’t have a uniformly advanced brain. They have a fast, powerful reasoning engine that runs on top of a nervous system that still belongs to a kid. Psychologists call it asynchronous development. A 13-year-old who can do graduate-level math may still be socially, emotionally, and physically 13 in most other ways. The hardest part for parents is that the labels don’t match the lived reality. The world calls them a genius, but at home they still need help with the mundane parts of being a child.
What works isn’t either/or. It’s not choosing between pushing and holding back. What worked for Sam was splitting the difference. He spent math class with older students down the hall. He stayed with his own grade for art, lunch, and the subjects he didn’t feel strongly about. That meant he got the challenge he needed without being pushed out of childhood entirely. His teacher agreed to make a small accommodations plan: if he finished his work early, he could read a math book instead of being told to sit still and pretend he was bored. It wasn’t a huge schedule change. It was just enough to let him move forward without having to leave everything else behind.
I think the same kind of split will matter for the Long Island boy at NYU. He’s been admitted to a graduate program, which is incredible. But admission doesn’t mean the university has solved how to support a 13-year-old who may not yet have the executive function to track a week of assignments, email professors, and handle a campus meal plan. The course content might be the easiest part of the experience. The harder part will be everything around it.
If Sam’s mother taught me anything, it’s that highly gifted kids often get praised for what they know and then left alone to figure out the rest. We assume that because they think quickly, they must also manage time well. But executive skills like planning, organizing, and following through develop separately from raw IQ. A brilliant kid can be a terrible multitasker. A 13-year-old who is ready for a master’s level proof may still need a parent to sit nearby and help him break a large project into smaller pieces. That’s not coddling. That’s giving the brain time to grow where it’s slower to catch up.
Another thing that strikes me is how much pressure comes after an announcement like this. Once the world knows a child has a 168 IQ, everyone expects him to be exceptional all the time. Mistakes stop being normal. A bad math day becomes a headline. From the outside, it sounds amazing to say, “my kid got into graduate school.” But inside the family, there may be a child who feels the weight of that number every time he hits a problem he doesn’t instantly understand.
Parents can soften that by changing the conversation. When people ask about the acceptance, it’s okay to say, “He’s really interested in mathematics,” rather than leading with the IQ score. Intelligence labels are sticky. A number like 168 can become an identity before the child knows how to carry it. Instead, talk about effort, curiosity, and the fact that he’s still a kid who has to be told to take his laundry out of the dryer. That matters more than a test score.
In the classroom, teachers can help by noticing what a gifted child does when no one is watching. Do they dive into work that interests them? Do they avoid work that feels risky? A highly advanced student still needs scaffolding, just a different kind. They may need someone to say, “I know you can prove the theorem, but can you explain it clearly to a peer?” They need opportunities to fail in small ways before they face a much bigger challenge.
There’s also the social piece. It’s tempting to assume a kid with a 168 IQ will fit in naturally with older college students because they can converse about hard subjects. But intellectual fit isn’t the same as emotional fit. A 13-year-old in a room of 23-year-olds may feel lonely in ways that don’t show up in class. He might hold his own in the seminar but sit by himself at lunch. That’s part of why I hope his parents are keeping some connections to ordinary kids his age, even if those friendships don’t revolve around math. A weekend activity, a gaming group, a sports league, anything where he doesn’t have to be the smartest ten feet in the room.
I don’t know what will happen with this particular boy. Maybe he’ll thrive immediately. Maybe he’ll need a semester to adjust. Maybe the graduate program will realize it needs to adapt, or maybe he’ll figure out how to adapt to it. The truth is, a story like this is still unfolding. He’s not a finished example of what happens when an extremely high IQ meets a prestigious institution. He’s just a teenager who happened to be good at one thing, and now he’s going to find out what it’s like to be in a place where that one thing isn’t enough to get by on.
The best support system around him will be the grown-ups who remember that an acceptance letter doesn’t erase the everyday parts of being thirteen. The same kid who solved a college level problem set is still going to need help with the things he can’t do quickly. And that’s okay. Growth wasn’t meant to be measured by a single number. It takes time, and he deserves plenty of it.
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