Should Genius Kids Know Their IQs?

She is barely out of diapers, but the world already knows 2-year-old Karina Oakley is a genius. Her mother, Charlotte Fraser, revealed to the British media Tuesday that a London-based intelligence researcher estimated her young daughter's IQ around 160.

This March, America learned it had its own genius child. Six-year-old Pranav Veera of Ohio made the media rounds after he scored 176 on an IQ test.

Although millions of us celebrate these children's brilliance on TV shows that air past their bedtime, childhood development experts debate whether Pranav and Karina should ever have been told.

"We don't usually tell children what their IQ scores are," said Sylvia Rimm, a child psychologist and author of "Why Bright Kids Get Poor Grades, and What You Can Do About It."

"The overemphasis on how brilliant they are often leaves them with a pressured existence trying to living up to their potential," she said.

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Rimm has seen many clearly gifted children begin to shun work, fall short or even fail due to a psychological trap.

"The root of gifted underachievement is that kids feel that they need to prove how smart they are all the time," said Rimm. "When they're young and in school and they find school easy, they then get into the habit of equating smart with easy."

If that happens, especially if "gifted becomes a title over their head," Rimm said children may just simply walk away from any challenging schoolwork to protect a fragile identity.

"When challenge gets there, it feels threatening [and] they think, 'Suppose people find out that I'm not that smart?'" said Rimm.

Rimm said she would not even venture to use the word "gifted" unless a parent has to do so to explain something, nor would she ever bring up a specific IQ.

But intelligence researcher Joan Freeman, who tested Oakley, takes a slightly less restrictive view. Freeman has followed 210 "gifted" children and children with normal abilities for 35 years. In her research, she has seen children's awareness of IQ both help and hinder them as they grow.

"Some children are happy and proud, and some children are really affected by it," said Freeman. "They begin to feel that that's all that people value them for. ... For some children, it's frightening to be gifted."