Basic Trope: A character has an extraordinary talent or skill despite their (usually extremely young) age.
- Straight: A ten-year-old kid can fly a plane and best adults in combat.
- Exaggerated: A three-year-old kid can fly a plane, best adults in combat, and is an expert on literature from the Romantic period.
- Downplayed: A thirteen-year-old can do basic driving maneuvers on a car.
- Justified:
- A 30-year old surgeon is also an expert in other fields of medicine because of his extreme OCD disorder that forces him to study day and night
- The phrase kid is not entirely correct. The body may be young, but the mind in it isn't really what one would expect.
- A character is qualified in a position that took less time than usual for them to study because they were smart enough to be skipped ahead.
- Inverted:
- The ten-year-old is actually much more unintelligent than they should be (cannot spell their own name/has the grammar of a four-year-old).
- A character is actually at the completely normal age for doing a particular role but is repeatedly told that they are too young/too old. Alternatively, the whole universe has far tighter age-based requirements than reality (e.g. every soldier must be exactly 23).
- Subverted:
- The ten-year-old can fly a plane and best adults in combat because they're actually sharing their body with the spirit of a genius.
- Or they're Older Than They Look.
- Double Subverted: The ten-year-old can fly a plane and best adults in combat... but wait, they're Really 700 Years Old, some kind of mystical entity. Oops, wait, they're the latest incarnation of that entity, with only a few memories of what they are, I guess they really are a kid.
- Parodied:
- The infant sidekick is basically smarter than the entire adult cast and is more capable than them in combat as well.
- The still-to-be-born baby is already smarter than the entire multiverse.
- Zig Zagged: The ten-year-old can fly a plane and best adults in combat... but wait, they're Really 700 Years Old, some kind of mystical entity. Oops, wait, they're the latest incarnation of that entity, with only a few memories of what they are, I guess they really are a kid. No, wait, they don't keep memories but they do keep knowledge and reflexes. Except it turns out that even when drugged to avoid this, they can still best them. Except among past skills was immunity to the drug...
- Averted: The ten-year-old cannot do anything special and is just a normal kid.
- Enforced: "We need a pilot to get them to the Big Bad's fortress in episode thirteen, but we also need a character who can appeal to this age group...Let's make Kate's ten-year-old brother a genius so he can fly a plane! Yeah, that'll work..."
- Lampshaded: "Why is it that my little brother can drive this plane and we, the young adults, can't?"
- Invoked: "Someone must operate a computer. Give me a list of every person younger than 14 years we can call"
- Exploited: Positions are given out with the youngest getting the best positions
- Defied: Underaged people are not allowed to go on a mission or access restricted areas. So there is no way they can show their unprobable talents.
- Discussed: "God! I hate my brother! He's so useless!" "Too bad we aren't in one of those shows where the second-grader can fly us to Paris in their plane made from scratch."
- Conversed: "This kid is ten and can drive a plane! My little brother's the exact same age and can't tell a plane from a helicopter!"
- Deconstructed: The child's early ability and the fame it brings screw up their ability to interact with others and ruins their life, as they lack the experience and maturity to bear the attendant burdens of talent.
- Reconstructed: The show is about a special institute for especially skilled/gifted kids, but no break from reality is forced.
- Implied: Bob offends Alice in a science lead team meeting by asking what an eighth-grader is doing here. It is never clarified if Alice is Older Than She Looks or if she actually is that young.
- Played For Laughs: A young infant is able to outsmart an entire cast of adults who never realize they're being tricked.
- Played For Drama: A ten-year-old is shown suffering considerably from society not being accustomed to him. Other children view him as a freak, adults don't see him as even an equal in spite of being an objective superior, and the areas where he could make major advances get him largely ignored for petty political reasons or suspected to be a fraud.
Aren't you a little young to be clicking the link back to Improbable Age?
