The one true prodigy I knew fairly well in HS walked away from a prestigious economics PhD program almost 40 years ago to join an ashram. He’s still there as far as I know. The other one is getting her PhD now after graduating from a Seven Sister’s college at 17. Things tend to even out as others catch up.
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I don't think the reactions the author speaks about just applies to genius children. There's also a tendency, in our age, to disallow adult overachievers to succeed and have failures, while at the same time downgrading their successes and achievements. Hillary Clinton is a good, recent example. I think its sad that we're still a species that doubts and fears the exceptional.
As a gifted child with ADD who was bullied because of it, I can definitely relate. I finally left school at 16 and spent years self medicating with substances until being diagnosed at 28. I have been in recovery ever since. Society, or at least the status quo, is very hard on the gifted, and rewards lavishly the exceptionally average, or below average.
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Having raised two children, I will admit both my wife and I made many mistakes---even with degrees in psychology and early child development. At the end of the day, you just do the best you can knowing that the complexities of child raising will always make you feel that you can have done better.
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Of course, being labeled a prodigy is a spectrum. Being at a school like Harvard studying mathematics and linguistics before you've experienced teenage acne can't be much fun. Besides not fitting in socially with older peers, the students and even the professors might feel the little genius is a threat to their own success. Besides, it's one thing to master calculus at the age of eight. Another thing entirely to come up with new ways of thinking that change and challenge the field itself. Einstein was deemed a failure before he proved them wrong and changed physics spectacularly, and more than once.
Plenty of musical prodigies thrive when they get older. Maybe that's because playing music is generally a collaborative endeavor, and the older ones passing the torch, knowing the history of classical music or jazz have a perspective that stretches across centuries and isn't consumed with petty jealousies. Not that the students at a conservatory aren't competitive, but eventually everyone realizes who among them is likely to truly make it to the mantle of greatness. I know, I've got two cousins from Manhattan making it in the world of classical music. Both are happily married to spouses likewise renowned in the world of classical music, and perfectly adjusted and contented adults. But we're more curious about the disaster stories that crashed and burned rather than the success stories, just like car crashes generate more eyeballs than the noneventful trips home.
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Let's not forget that there are two sides to every coin. Perhaps another book might focus on gifted kids who are well-adjusted and who successfully manage their gifts. They could do worse than to begin their investigation with Joey Alexander, the 10-year old wunderkind whose out-of-nowhere appearance several years ago stunned the music world with his mastery of the jazz piano and the jazz idiom itself. Balancing the two extremes might make for an interesting and illuminative exercise.
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I do not consider myself a prodigy but I have been described as such by others before because I skipped high school and went into college at 13, eventually graduating with 2 advanced degrees. A few things about me that were different from my fellow peers were my parents emphasized hard work rather than inborn intelligence, they didn't push me to skip school (I was self-driven), and I believe I was more emotionally mature than others my age having experienced war, poverty, loss of my biological father as a child. Even as a teen, I did not want to be defined by my early achievements and instead looked at life as a marathon rather than a sprint. I thought in a few years/ decades, no ones is going to care you skipped high school and I was right. I also really tried to balance work and fun and on the whole, I think I've done pretty well. People used to say to me that they were amazed how 'normal" I was, personality-wise. Never knew whether to take that as a compliment or insult?!
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The reality is that emotional intelligence is just as important, if not more so, as intellectual, musical or artistic prowess in becoming a "successful" adult. No, exceptional kids don't all have to be in the "cool" crowd in middle school to have happy, purposeful lives or bury their brilliance in numbing conformity, but they do need to be able to form satisfying relationships and understand the social cues of their peers. I think parents and educators often overlook the importance of nurturing the development of a child prodigy's social skills along with his or her intellectual achievement, leading to an unhappy adulthood.
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Sixty years ago, some people considered me to be a child prodigy. I taught myself to read adult books by age 4, finished writing my first novel when I was nine, and started publishing nationally at age 11. But as an adult, I'm no prodigy and have not achieved the kind of success in the world that many people expected of me.
But I have continued to write and be creative - according to my own desires and standards. And I've also spent close to 50 years developing social skills, learning to have happy and healthy close relationships, and dealing with the PTSD developed in an abusive family - which led me to obsessively focus on creative writing throughout childhood and adolescence at the expense of other areas of life.
Do I regret not continuing on the path of obsessive creativity and accomplishment? Sometimes, yes. But I wouldn't choose more of the former at the expense of the gains I've made in other areas of life.
Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote, "If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well." I too possessed that fear. And indeed, I lost many of my angels (while unfortunately still being visited occasionally by some of those devils). But I have made acquaintance with another kind of angel, the kind best described in the Alabama song, Angels Among Us. Their hearts are open and their feet are on the ground and, at least for me, their presence is more consistently enriching than the angels of creative genius.
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Speaking as someone who was tested at 5th grade reading & math at the age of 2...
Really easy for a disengaged teacher to punch a hole in the joys of learning. Even when one has competitive peers. 6th grade teacher made us redo the previous year’s math book because he didn’t want to deal with the 3 of us.
I’ve actually talked with one of the others later in life and it definitely was a shared experience of how to not deal with gifted children.
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Let's not forget the brilliant kids who get ignored (at best) or savaged (at worst) by teachers and school peers alike. This seems to happen mostly to the girls, in my experience as a very bright kid, the mom of an exceptionally bright daughter, and a teacher (some years ago).
In my own rural community, at least, most of the teachers were average to below-average students. They favor kids like themselves and treat any brilliant kid with disdain. A typical refrain is, "She doesn't need any help. She'll do fine on her own!"
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In many settings that attitude is probably better than attempts to “mold” or “manage” the unusual child’s abilities. Benign neglect, if it means being able to read as much as you want for a few years, isn’t so bad. That’s what I did.
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It is not just talented kids that live in the shadows of popular kids. The goal is to get children to accept that if they are not “cool kids” they still can have a cool existence. Cool is how you want to define it and every one can excel at something and still feel good about it. The strategy is to find friends that are like minded. Getting all kids to accept and like who they are is the goal.
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In my experience, 'cool kids' never grow up into 'cool adults. At best they lead ordinary lives, at worst they end up in jail (for murder, assault, drugs).
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In my experience, it helps highly gifted children to be surrounded at school by other high achievers. It provides a kind of middle ground where they can be their talented selves without standing out too much, while being exposed to varying degrees of"normal". The latter allows them to acquire the necessary social skills for living in regular society.
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This is why it is so important to have gifted intervention specialists and gifted education programs available for students. Good early intervention for both the student and the family can head off some of these problems and give these children the experience of intellectual peers, but alas gifted education is sorely underfunded in this country.
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Emphasis on "good."
Done badly it's worse than useless (been there, done that).
And while being with intellectual peers is good, being allowed/encouraged to be a regular kid too and learning how to socially meet the world halfway is just as important.
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I remember reading about Joshua Bell, the world-famous violinist, and how one of his teachers (Gingold?) only agreed to accept him as a young student, even though he was obviously a child prodigy, because Bell's parents made sure he played sports and did other "normal" childhood activities. And from everything else I've read about him and interviews I've seen, he certainly seems to be quite personable and well-adjusted. Letting kids push themselves at the endeavors in which they excel is certainly preferable in the long run than exerting excess parental influence for the bragging rights of having an exceptional child.
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Second to the last paragraph: he had grown into a lonely teenager, feeling he exits in the shadow of popular kids. So? Welcome to the world of everyone else - the non-prodigies! Try telling any teen popularity isn't the end goal, but when raised with good values, they grow up to understand there's much more to life than being the life of the party. This article frets on and on about giving prodigies a "normal" life, and when one years for what "normal" teens yearn for, it's still a problem! Hmmm
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Trust me, it's worse than the average teen blahs. And somehow wanting to be popular and have friends is not good values? You're supposed to want to be an outsider because it shows you're a better person? Either a bad attitude or sour grapes.
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34 years in a high school classroom put me in contact with several scary bright young people. If success is a professional career and money, the success rate for these kids was roughly 30%. My observation is that those who were not constantly reminded (mostly by relatives) of their brilliance did much better with their abilities than those who were. Michael Jordan left the delivery room with stuff the rest of us didn't get. But, those 600,000 jump shots when nobody else was around didn't hurt. Those who knew, and they knew without being told, they had something extra but were not content to get by on ability ( "he's in the gifted program and is so bored"), remained intellectually curious and worked at taking their ability to another level did very well for themselves. Nobody will know you're bright if you don't use it. The others, not so much. It's a gift to be smart, but we don't do these kids any favors by constantly reminding them of it.
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Many gifted children struggle because elementary and middle school are easy. They do well without studying. At some point in high school or college, they need to study, but don't know how.
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Michael Jackson said he practiced those seemingly effortless spins, hours upon hours, until he wore a hole in the floor. He obviously was very talented and could hear nuances in music that most humans can't, but he worked at it (his gifts), and hard, too.
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And, by his own admission, was pushed hard by a father who'd beat him - and his brothers- if they didn't live up to his harsh demands. Michael had no real childhood but spent it touring, practicing and cut off from his peers.
He was extraordinarily talented and unquestionably brilliant and creative, But he was also a tortured soul.
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John Von Neumann was a prodigy and was a pretty normal guy except for the polymath type stuff.
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I imagine adolescence--and in America, that means high school--has a way of dampening or destroying many of these wunderkinds. And if they skip that whole
four-year running of the social gauntlet, they're thought to have been cheated out of the "normal" experience of growing up.
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My own genius level husband has been tolerated for his essential goodness for decades now. Not everyone predicted to win a Nobel prize actually does one in twenty actually do! And one in a hundred
with the IQs and training and intellectual accomplishment put out by the Nobel prize winners are actually predicted to be a potential winner. They, like a woman with a beautiful trained soprano voice when she aspires to a professional career, are a dime a dozen.
So it should be no surprise that the 'rules' for good parenting are the same for the gifted and talented and for the merely average!
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Winning a Nobel Prize is as much politics as anything else. It's an old boys club.
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This fascinating review of a evidently fascinating book seems to indicate something crucial missing in the book: Guidance FROM gifted persons who did well for gifted persons who are striving to flourish prudently. Yes, parents need good advice. And gifted flourishers (I'll call them) can provide that. But what gifted youth need is guidance from the gifted who figured out how to be graciously protean, pragmatic flourishers. Finding the balance between owning one's own talent and managing others' discomfort constructively is very difficult. The gifted have to learn how to fit well. They can't expect others to figure it out for them. I do say that from experience.
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Two of my siblings were in special school programs but none in HS, except AP, I think I and older brother did better without segregation.
Also one of the younger two did a lot of creative stuff that actually never provided basic math skills which was difficult for many years later, requiring her to pay for tutors etc.
I was considered stupid early then testing suddenly smart, I hated the additional load of work. Had been safe hiding.
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One of the issues for child prodigies is that they spend their time with adults and that the relationship between an adult and child (no matter how smart or talented ) is, indeed should be, a one way street. Adults indulge children, don't expect them to reciprocate in the back and forth, give and take, that a peer relationship demands. When these prodigies then grow so that adults are their peers or start spending their time with other kids they often lack the social skills that those who have engaged substantially with peers have developed. This seems particularly the issue for Marc Yu.
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For me, it was the pressure to be normal that killed the whole enterprise. I wasn't normal, and a few strategies on how to protect myself and my feelings would have made the difference.
Instead, I learned how to be tough. Terrible idea.
Now, having dealt with crippling fear and depression, I crave normality, because I need to go out in this world and deal with everyday people and things. It ate up a lot of the time I needed to create.
If someone had told me, "you need time alone," "you need people you can always talk to," "you need an animal by your side to soothe you," I would have been able to keep my intellect from being carved up the way it was.
The only thing that nurtured me was art. Art and animals.
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Thanks for writing this. I hope that now as an adult, you have an animal by your side, enough time alone, time to make art, and that you are kind to yourself. We all of us have to search for meaning and fulfillment in our lives, whether we're gifted or not. I think that learning how to cope with our existence is also a great gift.
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"If they try to re-engineer the fundamentals of their offspring, they will fail spectacularly, sooner or later...." This is really profoundly simple and true. In this statement, there are many take aways for parents to apply in their parental decision making.
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May 2017 I lost a dear friend who was a child prodigy... first in Ohio state competitions as a classical pianist, an IQ off the charts, accepted to Washington University Medical School while in high school, artistic, creative, brilliant. He was a trophy child to his parents until he started to question and challenge them. Dropping out of the Washington University Medical School program was the final straw. Their trophy was broken. They turned their love elsewhere. Falling from their grace and the shame they placed on him was too much. He became an alcoholic and died very young. He was a remarkable human being... success came easily to him. He was at times arrogant and temperamental. He was the most talented individual I will ever know. Thank you for this excellent article. I think I may understand him better for it. He was a broken trophy child.
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I am so sorry for the loss of your brilliant friend. He had one person who understood him, for however short a time. I just learned of the death of another such person. It took a while, but they finally got to him. A flame of my youth snuffed out.
Young people need strategies to help them cope with the burden of their own minds. A program of self-care could be customized for each individual. Above all, these above-and-beyond individuals need to know that they are loved...for who they are.
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Dr. Mesmer, so sorry for the loss of your friend. That he became an alcoholic is an indication of the family dynamics over his entire life...and of the family dynamics in his parents’ families growing up, and potentially back over many generations. Alcoholism and dysfunction in the family set up a family system that warps any children’s sense of identity and agency, leaving lifelong damage. The damage can be undone only through focused and, I daresay, challenging efforts. As a survivor of such a family, I urge anyone in a similar situation who wants to work their way out to check out Adult Children of Alcoholics & Other Dysfunctional Families. Visit www.adultchildren.org to learn more.
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