On Child “Prodigies”

I hate tooting my own horn, so please don’t take my story, roughly described below, as boastful. I’m only trying to clarify my experiences, and that requires some context.

According to family legend, I was reading before I could walk. Everyone who saw me by age two tells me that I was not only reading, but I was also fluent in American Sign Language and English, so much so that I was able to fluidly interpret in real-time between the two without any notable mistake or issue.

I was so far ahead of my peers in humble Palmdale that I finished a week’s work in elementary school in an hour. An hour. (I’d like to believe that the work was a joke for anyone and they were just bullshitting our education, but I have no idea if that’s true.) I ardently complained about being bored and unchallenged. The first elementary school I attended was so confused about me that they first experimented with giving me more work, which I finished just as quickly; and then, not sure what else to do, they skipped me around to other grades, isolating me from my friends. I complained a lot about that too.

To this day I wonder if home-schooling (strongly looked down upon in the early nineties, as I recall) wouldn’t have been a proper compromise, although I know in truth that it would have been impossible for either mom or dad at the time to have made that commitment, or have it even cross their minds. They didn’t know what to do with me either, so they just let me play, just let me be creative, and in some way that was enough.

Now, I’m certainly a believer in play. That’s what let me make my own decisions about the world. But my academic life was a disaster, and everyone’s approach to me was unhelpful. Looking back, I would say now that the worst thing the community did was praise me for my intelligence without pushing me to work harder for it. No one put a book in front of me and challenged me to comprehend what was in front of me; no one compelled me to think deeply; no one gave meaning to busy work (because there wasn’t any); and so, as I found out later, when things got challenging, and I couldn’t ride only on my intellect anymore, I stopped trying. I was afraid to fail. And that, for someone who ostensibly has potential, is the worst thing to believe.

I’m willing to go a little deeper on this matter to prove a point. The problems I eventually faced were not necessarily academic. At first, when times were good, people stared at me in awe (I remember those moments so, so vividly it hurts) and people raised me onto the highest pedestal they could, as if intellect was all there was to the world. This, I took with glee. Who wouldn’t? Every child, when encouraged to do something, no matter how smart he is, will do it, if it makes others proud. (I remember trying to wink in front of family so that I could get applause.) But encouragement raises the value of a certain action or quality; so when Reality hit me in the form of my parents’ divorce, and I found out that not only do people not really care about the opinion of a minor, no matter how smart or perceptive he is (since the law tells everyone not to take children seriously), that even if they did, it wouldn’t be enough to fix things, that sometimes, a) you can’t fix things, and/or b) you need to know how to work hard to do it, I fell apart. I had neither skill in spades. I had enthusiasm, but by then I also had ego—immense ego. I was the biggest fish in the room, bigger even, I felt, than some adults; and so I had no emulous struggle against myself up to that point, no inner conflict of which I was aware. I wasn’t willing to raise my standards if it meant humbling myself.

By then, in addition to dealing with what was to me a traumatic event, I also had to confront the immensely inflated expectations that people had so confidently weighed onto my shoulders. The skills I had weren’t enough, and I knew they weren’t. I lost the motivation to try and create new ones, because I didn’t have that meta-skill of growth at all unless I got direct feedback. I had to learn how to work hard for things on my own, had to compensate for the ego that came with my ostensibly ballooning intellect with getting down and dirty, losing my high-and-mighty, high-falutin’ self-image, and here I am.

I’m still paying the price for that. I still wonder now if what I have is enough to do all the things I dream of doing. It’s one thing to be a really smart six year old, because everyone’s willing to pour their resources into you, because there’s glory for them in that; but if you’re a brilliant twenty-two year old, it’s a little different. People are harder on you, expect “more” from you, in some way, cease to make exceptions for you just on the basis of your intelligence. At this age, things are different: A smart person is a dime a dozen. What distinguishes you, as a ‘really’ smart person? If you can’t work with people, if you don’t have qualities to bring to the table, if you don’t even have the will to build new qualities for yourself, what do you have? That’s a hard notion to swallow. And when you do swallow it, the inner dialogue becomes: “You’re Not Good Enough” instead of “I Can Get Better.” Right there is what makes the difference.

I don’t know if I was a boy genius. I do know that the “child prodigies” I see on Youtube and elsewhere, I can absolutely relate to. I don’t think I was far from their level. But that’s not what matters: I only know that everyone else believed that I was a child prodigy, a genius, special, and that affected me more than I yet fully understand. If you ever land into a child you think is brilliant, or even if they’re “only” gifted (in all honesty, do this for any child at all), please, please take my advice, and at least do the following:

– Don’t talk down to them;
– Emphasize hard work over intellect;
– Don’t put them on a pedestal—be there for them and remember that they, too, have weaknesses and fears they want to share and have validated.
– Don’t impose on them your own dreams; give them the room to form their own.
– Let them be children. Let them play.
– Conversely, don’t push them to be ‘adults’: words like “childish” are as meaningless and discriminatory as any other label. To be a child is normal, encouraged, important, and has effectively no relation to being “immature” or “mature”, the latter of which ought to be encouraged as a quality in itself. Indeed, I soon found that to join the ‘adult’ world was to join nothing more than a world of mal-adjusted children. I liked being a child better.

To those of you who still feel as if intelligence is the sort of messianic characteristic we need more of (whereas I’m rather ambivalent about it), check out the studies which suggest that conscientiousness ismore important than intelligence; or all of the books (Emotional Intelligence by Goldman, Integrity by Cloud, and especially The Ethicsby Aristotle) which praise emotional savviness over brute reason.

Intellect does not an outlook make. MENSA members don’t seem to have any higher a rate of success than non-MENSA members (certainly, I believe that). They actually don’t have anything other than theoretically greater intelligence. Well, fuck that. I mean, seriously, who wants to be part of that club?

We all look for love. Let geniuses put their particular talent aside and let them be human around you. That’s the secret to a well-adjusted, happy kid who will turn into a well-adjusted, happy adult.

And that’s what we want, first and foremost. I, genius or not, don’t owe society my productivity, or my thoughts, or my hard work. It’s up to me to want to do it and it’s up to me to make that a worthy pursuit for myself and for others. So if I want to lounge around and be angry at the world, then I can do that. But our goal, as members of society, is to try to get that to *never* happen, because there’s already every reason to be angry, if we look for it—and there’s also every reason to be happy, if we look for it.

Let’s not make expectations and beliefs so unrealistic that depression sets in, right? “A child,” as Noam Schieber said of Aaron Swartz in his great New Republic piece, “is just a child.”

I hope you find the children in your life—even if they’re now adults—and give them the hugs they need to feel just a tad more often.

I’ll leave you with poetry which I hope reminds you as much as it did me how much control I really have in the world, how much I can carve out my own little niche in this moment of place and time I get to call mine:

“Some murmur, when their sky is clear
And wholly bright to view,
If one small speck of dark appear
In their great heaven of blue.
And some with thankful love are fill’d
If but one streak of light,
One ray of God’s good mercy gild
The darkness of their night.
 
“In palaces are hearts that ask,
In discontent and pride,
Why life is such a dreary task,
And all good things denied.
And hearts in poorest huts admire
How love has in their aid
(Love that not ever seems to tire)
Such rich provision made.”

Trench