The Terrible Gift: Smart Kids
Need permission to choose – and fail

© David Chartrand, 2006


    Aug. 25, 2006 — The publisher’s timing for “Hothouse Kids” couldn’t have been better — or worse.

   Journalist Alissa Quart’s formidable examination of genius children arrived in bookstores recently as the resurrected JonBenet Ramsey case reawakened an American heartlessness, our abiding need to explain misery by diminishing its victims.

   Among those who believe that bad things only happen to bad families, “Hothouse Kids” (Penguin Press) is likely to be misjudged by its cover: a violin prodigy glancing nervously at the unseen grownups for whom she must perform.

   Fortunately, journalist Quart spares us the familiar inventory of excesses inflicted upon genius children by narcissistic parents and peddlers of “Baby Einstein” books and DVDs. Instead, “Hothouse Kids” nimbly demonstrates that the dilemma of raising a wunderkind is often equal to the dilemma of being one.

   A former half-pint literary phenom, Quart learned firsthand the intoxicating nature of precocity for both children and grownups. Unable to live up to the advance billing of her fawning mentors, Quart entered adulthood with “a distinct feeling of failure.” For this she does not blame overzealous grownups so much as narrow American attitudes about the nature of success and failure.

   Quart urges educators and parents to view giftedness as a condition that presents great possibilities rather than possible greatness. The lesson of “Hothouse” is that children — especially the highly gifted — need options. Without such freedom, Quart explains, the exceptionally bright child soon becomes chained by the very talents that should free him to explore and experiment — and make mistakes.

   “Conveying to children that they are so special and putting them on public display,” Quart writes, “can lead them to feel that any talent they have is bigger than they are and that, in a sense, they are a mere employee of their talent, that they work for the gift.”

   “It is as if,” she adds, “they were employees of Prodigy, Inc.”
The message of “Hothouse” is moderation, which makes it smart reading for all who aspire to raise children or teach them.

   However, veteran moms and dads will sniff that such advice is easier to prescribe than practice. After all, authors are constantly exhorting parents to meddle — I mean, become actively involved — in their child’s education. Little wonder that Americans approach child-rearing as a riddle to be solved, a project whose outcome can be managed and controlled by reading the right books and watching lots of public television. To the Sesame Street generation, a child is a flower to be pruned, pinched, watered, and fertilized; if a little is good, more is better.

   Quart suggests that over-watered children are more symptom than disease. Parents often are as frightened as their kids, unprepared for the great expectations awaiting those who inherit the terrible gift of genius. What both need is more support from schools and communities.

   Too frequently, Quart says, schools reserve the label “gifted” for students with advanced reading, writing and math skills. She recommends that it also include the love of music and art, and even the “ethical giftedness” of those with a fervor for serving others. She calls for enriched learning opportunities for children of all social classes, kindergarten through high school, not just those with stratospheric I.Q.’s and wealthy parents.

   A hallmark of the gifted mind is the penchant for asking questions and questioning the answers. It’s also the mark of a good journalist. To explain the tepid support of school-based gifted programs, Quart refuses to settle for the familiar laments about lack of money and the evils of standardized testing. We tag along as she digs behind official excuses to reveal that exceptional children often face obstacles that are more about attitude than money.

   Where one finds indifference toward the needs of the profoundly gifted (“PG Kids”), Quart writes, one often finds a deep-seated “resentment” toward those who want more than their share. In the moral calculus of Americans who believe that superiority is achieved only through hard work, “the very word gifted suggests something unearned.”

   Curiously, Quart adds, such anti-elitism is tangled inside an “American knot” that extols the virtue of special rewards for special achievement. This knot does not go unnoticed by the gifted child or one with a learning disability, both of whom are smart enough to know the difference between feeling exceptional and feeling like an exceptional burden to others.

   “Instead of fully funding education for both the gifted and those who are struggling,” Quart writes, “we make kids fight a battle royal in which either the gifted or the academically straggling will lose — a battle where the children can only cancel one another out.”

   With writing both eloquent and muscular, Quart renders the material accessible to those who view most discussions about child rearing as the impenetrable shoptalk of child psychologists and academia nuts. The enduring power of “Hothouse” is its outsider’s perspective, the view of one who has been on the working end of Prodigy, Inc. The keeper passages are those in which the author summons her considerable voice, and her past, to explain what happens when narrow expectations are confused with great ones.

   Gifted kids, Quart notes, do not necessarily become resentful adults scarred by Mommie Dearest nightmares of their boot-camp upbringing. To the contrary, they become “pinioned to childhood,” when life was perfect because they could no wrong. If childhood was perfecthood, Quart writes, then “adulthood, their inevitable fate, can only diminish them.”

   It’s Peter Pan, in reverse. Having wandered too far into an imperfect future, PG Kids are unable to retrace their steps to the perfect past. If it ever was perfect.

   “Those that experience sadness later on,” she writes, “do so because they believe they must remain children in order to be loved.”

   “Hothouse Kids” picks no quarrel with parents who have big dreams for their little ones. But it reminds us, if we needed reminding, that children need permission to pursue dreams other than those dreamt on their behalf. That includes the permission to fail.

   As Quart discovered, a child’s worst fear is not that she will be pushed too hard by the ones she loves. The nightmare is that she will become a disappointment to them, and to herself.