A toddler has become Britain’s youngest Mensa member aged just three, reading fluently and counting in seven tongues.
Teddy Hobbs managed to gain entry to the exclusive organisation for the intellectual elite aged only three years and nine months.
The child prodigy from Portishead, Somerset, can already count to 100 in six non-native languages, including Mandarin, Welsh, French, Spanish and German.
Teddy, now four, taught himself to read just two years and four months and is now capable of even reading Harry Potter books. He even likes to relax with a word search.
Little Teddy was admitted to Mensa late last year after acing an IQ test with the group, scoring 139 out of 160 on the Stanford Binet test and surprising his parents, who had no concept of how intelligent he was.
Beth Hobbs, 31 and her husband Will, 41, said they’d never expected their son, born Theodore, to get into the group, and never planned to even apply for membership.
Beth Hobbs said that they were told that three was the youngest age of anyone they’d accepted into Mensa in the United Kingdom, though there was someone in the US aged two.
She said that to be fair, it was a total fluke really that he got in. They never sought to get him in, and even when they had him assessed, that was so that they could help him when he started school in September, but they never intended on getting him into Mensa.
She said they did an IQ test, where they basically told him that he was going to sit and do some puzzles with a lady for an hour, and he thought it was the most remarkable thing.
She said that after he finished it they were told he was eligible by Mensa’s child adviser, so they felt he may as well join.
She said they were a bit like ‘pardon?’ They knew he could do things that his peers couldn’t, but they didn’t fully realise how good he actually was.
She said they took him to nursery afterwards and he came home after because he was so sad about having to stop doing puzzles, and that he will even do word searches to calm down.
She said he wasn’t even interested in what Mensa was, but that now he’s just about starting to comprehend that he’s more talented than other children, so when school starts she believes he’ll realise more.
Good luck to the young man, but let’s hope that he doesn’t get ridiculed at school for being too intelligent, and let’s also hope that this young man does something useful with his talent like becoming a doctor or scientist because our country needs people like this.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 