The youngest member of the Mensa is a four-year-old child from the United Kingdom, who taught himself to read as a toddler. Teddy hails from Portishead in Somerset and can count to 100 in six different languages, including Mandarin. For those unaware, Mensa only accepts those individuals who score at the 98th percentile or higher on an intelligence test that is approved by them.
Beth Hobbs, the mother of this child genius, stated that her son learned to read when he was just 26 months old “by watching children’s television and copying the sounds of letters.” She further said, “He started tracing the letters and so when we sent him back to nursery after Covid lockdown we told them we thought he’d taught himself how to read.”
Four-Year-Old Teddy Hobbs Is The Youngest Member of The Mensa From The United Kingdom
Speaking about her Mensa child, Beth said, “We had a phone call back from the nursery, who’d sent a pre-school teacher to check, who said ‘Yes he can read!’” She also mentioned, “He chooses a topic to be interested in every couple of months or so, and sometimes it’s numbers, it was times tables for a while, which was intense, countries and maps, then learning to count in different languages.” But it was the fact that her son was reading and counting in other languages that surprised her. “He was playing on his tablet, making these sounds that I just didn’t recognize, and I asked him what it was, and he said, ‘Mummy, I’m counting in Mandarin.’”
Teddy was declared a member of the Mensa when he was just three years old. This definitely makes him the youngest current member of this organization. But his parents are more interested in their child having a well-rounded childhood- rather than streamlining him in a particular direction. Mrs. Hobbs mentioned, “He’s starting to figure out that his friends can’t read yet, and he don’t know why, but it’s very important for us to keep him grounded. If he can do these things, then fine, but he sees it like ‘Yes I can read, but my friend can run faster than me’, so we’ve all got our individual talents.”
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