Danger: child genius at work

20/10/2009

Mensa toddler Oscar Wrigley is as clever as Einstein. But experts warn that parents risk much in the race to raise IQ

by Jasper Hamill

Most parents would be bowled over if their child could say Einstein before his or her’s second birthday. So imagine how impressed Mr and Mrs Wrigley must have been when Mensa claimed their son Oscar was just as clever as the celebrated physicist, despite being just two years, five months and 11 days old. With an IQ of 160, he was the second-youngest British child to be admitted to Mensa.

This might sound like every parents’ dream, but with the media glare intensifying and big-money interview offers coming in from around the world, experts are already worried about whether all the attention could harm the young brainbox. “I feel really sorry for him actually,” says Sue Palmer, chair of the Scottish Play Commission and advocate of a back-to-basics approach to rearing a happy, bright child.

“It looks great and allows parents to say, ‘Oh, our kid’s brilliant’, but so many children who are very bright, very early can often find they have problems later on, because they are not alongside their playmates either socially or emotionally. Children need the whole business of play, and if they get pushed into an academic existence early, it may mean they are not balanced in the long term.”

Palmer is the champion of a new government-backed initiative called Play, Talk, Read that aims to remind parents that the early years are fundamental in creating an intelligent and balanced child. The advice is intended to educate parents about the two “elemental quests” in a baby’s life: the urge to explore the world around them, achieved through play, and the struggle to learn language, which can be helped along if parents read and speak to their child, giving them the opportunity to mimic the patterns and rhythms of their speech.

During the first three years of life, 75 per cent of brain growth occurs and an estimated 50 per cent of language is learned. Simply interacting with a baby can make sure these foundations remain solid. 

Simple advice. Yet many parents are too distracted by their BlackBerries, televisions or whatever else they fill their days with to give proper time to their child. After all, as Palmer is keen to hammer home, “time is the most important thing you can give a child”, not the latest whizz-bang toy or a DVD box set of In the Night Garden. But even parents who dedicate every waking hour to their kid risk drowning their child in love, particularly the parents of a so-called genius, Palmer claims.

The focus on just one aspect of their make-up – intelligence – risks suffocating other, equally important facets of their character, some of which are vital for future success.

“We’re born with predispositions in various directions – some children are really good at the sort of things we value from the point of view of the education system. It’s easy to say that’s fantastic, but there are other aspects to humanity,” says Palmer.

“To me, the young masters of the universe who managed to create this economic crisis were rather unbalanced lads, actually. Not a lot of common sense, not a lot of understanding of human beings.

“Probably very bright, awfully good on the computer, but that’s only one part of being a person. We really do value the cognitive, but we want a human to be a balanced, happy person who’s able to make good relationships. Britain seems to be bottom of the league in that.”

Modern-day wisdom suggests an early start is the best way to achieve eminence and success.  Backed up by the 10,000 hours theory, propagated by author Malcolm Gladwell, which says that the genius of an “outlier” comes down to the time spent practising at any given discipline, many parents believe that by hot-housing their child from a very young age, they will spur them on to future success.
But what worked for Mozart may not work for other children. In fact, early genius is a “dodgy” indicator of future success, says Dr Barry Hymer, chartered psychologist and expert on gifted children.

“It’s sexy for us in society to have these child geniuses raised before us, but the track record of prodigies going on to become high achievers in their fields later in life is very mixed,” he insists.

“A significant number disappear without trace and you look at their early promise and think: what’s happened there? I have a strong suspicion this is because they have been held up as geniuses who really just need to put their feet up and live long enough so that eminence will simply be thrust upon them. Life doesn’t work that way.”

Hymer is cynical about the word “genius”, which he reckons could be the “kiss of death for achievement”. A far better predictor of success is effort and commitment, he says.

Several of the most important minds in history – including Einstein and Edison – were considered remedial at school yet achieved success through persistent, dogged work.

Nonetheless, society is still keen to hail youngsters as geniuses. The Wrigleys noticed their child was brighter than usual because he knew thousands of words by the age of two, whereas most children would know less than 100.

Oscar turned to his parents and uttered sagacious comments such as “sausages are like a party in my mouth” or corrected friends who pointed out a “tweet-tweet” singing in the trees, telling the young buffoons that the creature was, in fact, a blue tit. You can see how that would alienate peers, and Oscar is already becoming estranged from other kids.

His father has said: “He can get frustrated playing with children his own age. Often Oscar does not want to do what other children want to do and he gets frustrated because of this.”

With this comes the problem of how to educate a young genius. Parents often feel they should railroad their child into a purely academic existence, sending them on a one-way trip to Oxbridge and an academic life. Yet the path to the dreaming spires is littered with the intellectual corpses of young prodigies who were unable to cope with the university environment, which relies on independent thought and, critically, the ability to gracefully fail, learn from mistakes and try again.

The stress of being around other egg-heads can be too much for someone who has been used to being lauded as a genius, mostly because their mates are of ordinary intellect. The trick, suggests Dr Peter Congdon, the  educational psychologist who assessed young Oscar’s IQ, is a careful balance of work, play and social interaction.

“Avoid pressuring the child,” he recommends. “It’s well known that the best preparation for growing up is to have lived fully as a child. Parents of clever children should not forget this.

“Accelerated mental development is sometimes bought at the expense of slowing down the pace of social and emotional growth. The result can be a lopsided and maladjusted individual.”

Everyone would like to be able to tell their friends they’ve given birth to a genius, but it may not be all its cracked up to be. Much better to leave the kids to their childhood.

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