While most two-year-olds are playing with Barbie dolls and having tea parties, two-year-old Kashe Quest of Los Angeles, CA, is making history by becoming the youngest American Mensa member.
Our sister site, Blavity, reports that it was the little girl’s mother, Sukhjit Athwal, who first noticed that her daughter was something special.
“We started to notice her memory was really great. She just picked up things really fast and she was really interested in learning. At about 17, 18 months, she had recognized all the alphabet, numbers, colors, and shapes,” she said.
And that’s not all.
Kashe Quest can also identify all 50 states by shape and position on a map. She is learning to read, can sign over 50 signs in ASL, and can identify elements on the periodic table by their symbols. She is even learning Spanish, as a second language.
After an IQ test, it was determined that the precocious two-year-old has an IQ of 146, well above the genius level, and well making her qualified to become a member of American Mensa, a prominent high IQ society.
Despite this amazing accomplishment, Athwal says that she wants people to remember that Kashe Quest is still a child.
“At the end of the day, she’s in that toddler stage. So she very much is still a normal 2-year-old where we have negotiations, we have tantrums, we have everything and it’s different because the way we communicate with her, has to be different because she’s able to understand just a little bit more,” she said, while adding that she wants her child to have a “normal” childhood and having “nothing forced on her.”
Kashe Quest is one of 11 children, and her mother — an educator herself — opened up a school for gifted children just so she could continue to help her daughter reach her full potential.
Congratulations are in order for the family!
