How to Raise a Genius: Lessons from a 45-Year Study of Supersmart Children

Parent Cafe
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‘One of the kindergartners in QMP’s class was reading “Little Women.” While I don’t doubt the ability to string the words together and follow the plot, it just doesn’t seem like a sensible choice for any 5-year-old, no matter how gifted.’

Not sure I agree, I think the word ‘sensible’ may be the problem here, if as I suspect it means a 5 year old cannot possibly understand a lot of the things in the book. I can remember when I first learned to read (stone age days, I was like 6 or 7 gasp…surprised they aren’t trying to teach kids to read in utero to get a head start on Harvard…). For whatever reasons, I picked up “The Caine Mutiny”, which is not a small book (was around 800 pages I think), and of course it contained things I couldn’t understand, there were adult references in it, concepts I couldn’t understand…but the thing is, I was learning to read, challenging myself, my dad asked me if I understood all of it, and my response was “no, but I’ll pick up more the next time I am reading it”. Many people read the great works of literature and don’t get the depth of it (real, or imagined by literature professors and critics, I leave to others), you can listen to a great piece of music and enjoy it without having to know the brilliance of the chord structure, understand what the Rondo form is, what a specific conductor did in conducting the piece.

The key thing isn’t whether a 5 year old can understand the book fully, it is that they are so enamored of reading that they make the attempt to read it, try to understand it as best they can, challenge themselves on new word, and in the process open up their mind to reading other things, too.
Child prodigies in music are an interesting thing, one of the problems of child prodigies is that they don’t really understand how they are able to play the music, or understand it, yet they can play it at an advanced level (Yehudi Menuhin was the one true prodigy I know of, he literally played like an adult as a child), and in a sense the music doesn’t challenge them the way it would an adult, they just, to quote Nike, do it…and many a prodigy crashes because when they get older, they can’t take that challenge, handle it, because whatever allowed them to play it ‘naturally’ disappears, and they didn’t do the work, whereas the prodigy who had the curiousity about the music, who challenged themselves to learn how to play it ‘right’, will get past the burnout. It is why many music teachers and musicians look at child prodigies, not as musical geniuses, but rather as a kind of performing monkey, in the sense that they are playing with about as much understanding of the music as a monkey you taught to play violin did. Actually, music is much like what someone wrote about studying literature and history, life experience plays a tremendous role, too, the young musicians who make it are not prodigies, they are young musicians who have already experienced a lot, learned a lot, at a young age, but in music while a brilliant young artist is admired, it is often the older musicians who bring new life to the music.

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Anybody here remember the days Before Rowling, when the idea that elementary-school-age kids would sit and read a novel of more than 100 or (gasp!) 200 pages was so clearly false as to not even merit mention?

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So sad that I misspelled prodigy! Nobody will ever accuse me of being a spelling prodigy.

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^^^S1 caught all kinds of h— from his 3rd grade teacher for reading Redwall books (this was pre-HP). He devoured chapter books at age 4. He did a book report on one of them, she interrogated him for a half hour in front of the class, and then made comments (witnessed by a parent who told me the story) that ensured he would be an outcast with his classmates.

The following year, S2’s second grade teacher caught h— from the same teacher because she was letting S2 read HP as part of his in-class reading instruction. The 3rd grade teacher was reading it to her students.) Happily, the evil teacher retired before S2 got to 3rd grade.

Both my kids were in stellar public, competitive admit highly gifted programs – one’s a STEM kid, the other a humanities. It was MUCH harder to get comparable opportunities for the social sciences kid than the STEM. That was a major reason S2 picked the IB program – it was a real strength of that particular school’s IB curriculum.

I think part of the challenge is that math/science skill progression is linear, so at least for a precocious math or comp sci student, there is a sequence of courses and skills that can get her to the really interesting stuff (or give her the skills to then branch out independently). In our experience, once we got past the hostile local elem school, it was much easier to subject accelerate in STEM, too. (S2 had a grade skip and significant additional acceleration in math and CS.)

In the humanities, it strikes me that the path is more lateral than linear, and there are so many different areas of study a student could pursue (languages, history, geography – a plethora of topics most students see until college). We couldn’t get S2 in-depth history classes til HS, but we were able to identify other activities and ways for him to feed his history-loving self along the way. Most of that was outside of the classroom. The humanities middle school program did a good job of challenging kids across several areas, but it was wide, not deep.

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Well, it’s up to each individual, but I think that Beth’s death in Little Women is pretty traumatic, and I would not wish it on my 5-year-old, whether or not the child had already begun to worry about death. Also, how many 5-year-olds know much about the Civil War, which is the backdrop of the opening chapter? It’s why Father isn’t around. Amy goes to Vanity Fair? What’s that? How about the relationship with Laurie? Also, I don’t think a 5-year-old is going to get much of the interpersonal dynamics between 4 sisters who range in age from 18 to 12 or so.

The opening chapter has some nice elements for a 5-year-old (aside from the Civil War issue).

It has been 50+ years since I read Little Women, so my recollection is a bit hazy–for its advocates as a kindergarten book, what is it that you think a 5-year-old would profitably glean from it?

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Death is traumatic, whatever the age. However, different families and individuals deal with it differently. For some, it’s big and huge and horrible; for others, it’s just something sad that happens. (I mean, at age five I had a pretty good idea about death, since I lived within a 20-mile radius of nearly all my blood relatives, and a lot of them were quite old when I was born.)

The Civil War? I didn’t know much about it at that age, but my youngest (now nine, but this goes back years) absolutely devours history, for whatever reason—it’s her thing. But does a reader really need to know details of the Civil War, or simply that something happened that led to the father being away, and it’s a problem.

And to be honest, I doubt that many 19-year-olds (or 39-year-olds, for that matter) would get the Vanity Fair reference nowadays, either.

And so on.

TL;DR: One should always remember to be cautious when generalizing from one’s own experiences or expectations to what is best for others.

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What’s good about Little Women, though, dfbdfb, for a 5-year-old?

Our family is losing quite a few of the next generation up from me in this time frame, and for me it is definitely not “just something sad that happens.” I think that grappling with mortality is one of the most difficult things that we have to do. I do not think that a “severely gifted” person is better able to come to grips with mortality, than anyone else. Aside from religious texts and sacred music, I’d nominate a few cartoonists along with a few writers as the most capable of handling it–all adults with a lot of life experiences.

It’s not that I think 5-year-olds are completely unaware of death. QMP started asking questions about death at age 4. But I wouldn’t want to push Little Women off on a 5-year-old, even in a case like that. The answer to this issue may depend in part on how emotionally involved a reader becomes in works of literature. Do you see a benefit in giving a five-year-old a book that will make her cry for an extended period (when Beth dies)?

A 10-year-old has twice the life experience, and it starts to make some sense to me at that age.

Edited to add: Not that I underestimate the giftedness of cartoonists! It’s just the added life experience. And dfbdfb, though you have responded to my complaints about Little Women for a 5-year-old, I don’t think that you have advanced a good reason for a 5-year-old to read it.

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I think the good reason would be that it was available and the five year old picked it up.

*To Kill A Mockingbird * was my first “chapter book” at probably age 6 or 7. It was a newish book, at the time, which all the adults around me were reading and discussing. I was definitely reading a different book than they were, but it was an educational experience for me in many ways.

When I picked it up, my parents (and their friends and my grandparents) talked about whether it was appropriate for me. My father said I was allowed to read whatever I wanted and for that I am eternally grateful. That meant all the books on all the bookcases at my parents’ home and my grandparents’ home were available to me. I suspect my grandmother took some books off the shelves and put them away when I visited. When I was 12, my father went to the library and told the librarians I was allowed to read anything in the adult section. That was after I came home without some books I had wanted to check out and told him about it.

My second chapter book was Nineteen Eighty Four,also a book all the adults were reading. I definitely didn’t understand parts of that one.

I read all of Alcott before I was eight, because they were available at the local bookstore and I had an allowance that covered them. Like dfbdfb I lived close to relatives and had been to funerals. My grandmothers and their sisters used to take me to family graveyards and tell me family history. They explained to me the monuments for infants and children, so I was aware children died. I didn’t think any children I actually knew were ever going to die till they were very old. Fortunately for me, that was true.

I am not advocating putting Little Women in a child’s hands, but I would never take it away, unless I thought it would be traumatic for that particular child. Then I might say, “I think that book may be too sad for you.” This is an issue for families with lots of books.

adding: my parents were part of a social circle that decided teaching kids to read before school was a very bad idea. They would be bored at school. When I began teaching myself by memorizing words on pages in the books they read me, they deliberately thwarted me by paraphrasing. I was the only child in my first grade class, who hadn’t learned the alphabet. By that time, my father thought this had been a mistake and he kind of spent the rest of his life making it up to me.

Scout’s father taught her to read before school. That was the main part of the story for me.

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Oh for goodness sake. Let them read!

Most of us who are voracious readers have had the experience of re-reading books we first read as children and realizing how much we didn’t “get” when we first read the book.

Of course we shouldn’t be “pushing” Little Women on a five year old. But if a five year old attempts it, she will either find enough in the plot and characters to keep her interested (even though she may skip the “boring” parts) or she’ll choose to stop reading it.

There are many, many levels and depths to any good book. A young reader will read a difficult book in a superficial way that is developmentally appropriate for her.

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I read Nineteen Eighty Four at age 13 and was traumatized by it for at least 6 months. I think it permanently colored my thinking.

I have a lot of respect for you, alh, based on your posts, but I wouldn’t want a 6- or 7-year old in my family to read To Kill a Mockingbird. The young person is going to run into a lot of issues that are very tough to handled emotionally, and the racial prejudice may not even be in the top two.

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I just wasn’t reading the same book the adults were reading. “Mockingbird” was a different book when I was 10 and a different book in my teens and twenties, and a very different book when I reread it recently together with “Watchman” Likewise “Nineteen Eighty Four.” Maybe if I’d been a genius kid I would have been traumatized.

It is the same discussion as Invisible Man and we definitely are on very different pages here, QM. I suspect this has to do with individual reactions to literature. fwiw

It does surprise me we have such different views on this.

adding: However, some other posters didn’t agree with me on another thread about Ender being appropriate for very young kids, so maybe I’m an outlier.

adding: the traumatizing event of my childhood was all those cartoon Disney witches. I was dreaming about them till I was all grown up. Even the sorcerer in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice turned up in my nightmares.

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I did not discover the joy reading until I was about 9 years and was home sick for about two weeks. I found some old fable type books that my read when he was young and read all of them. They used more advanced language and had an Old English story-telling type of phrasing. I found it quite interesting how authors and people used language in the past.
I never seemed to find any of the books in the library in elementary school to be very interesting. I wanted something more challenging in terms of sentence complexity, plot, or even just more advanced vocabulary that provided more vivid descriptive narratives. I then discovered that my brother who was four years older than me had been assigned some very interesting books to read in school. I would wait until he was done with his assigned reading and then read those books.
I ended up reading To Kill a Mocking Bird when I was about 10 or 11. I had a good grasp of the nuances of the situations in the book and was truly amazed at how the author told the story. I did re-read it as an adult and did not feel that I had missed much about the underlying meaning of the story. I allowed my daughter to read the book when she was around the same age. She is more gifted in math and did not seem to find the story as interesting as I did.

After reading some pretty advanced adult books I found in our home, I found another book I really liked called The Phantom Tollbooth. While reading this, I came to realize that I had a great affinity for language and reading and realized that most of my friends would probably not appreciate that book. I absolutely adored the play on words and would re-read passages a few days after reading them.

So, I am in agreement with both Eastcoascrazy and Musicprnt- “The key thing isn’t whether a 5 year old can understand the book fully, it is that they are so enamored of reading that they make the attempt to read it, try to understand it as best they can, challenge themselves on new word, and in the process open up their mind to reading other things, too.”

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Still thinking about Mockingbird :frowning: but this is my last very off topic post …

It was published in 1960 and I probably read it in 62 or 63. I was living in the south and the civil rights movement was the background noise of my privileged white childhood. Also, every generation of my family has at least one very fragile individual like Boo. We don’t have the abuse going on, thank goodness. But none of these themes was unfamiliar to me, though I certainly didn’t understand much of what was going on around me at that age.

My parents decided no more tv news around that time, because that was so unsettling to all us kids.

back to the OP

I have no earthly idea how to raise genius children. Now I have to reconsider taking my grandchild to the cemetery to learn history.

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@QuantMech, I’m intrigued by the message I got from your reply to me that there needs to be an affirmative reason for a high-reading-level 5-year-old to read a book, rather than simply the lack of a negative reason. That creates a pretty massive gulf between you and me (along with a few others currently posting on this thread).

Of course, I would say that a big part of the equation is that the parent (or other adult figure on the scene) needs to know the child pretty well. Maybe Little Women would be right for one 5-year-old child, but not for another, even if they have identical reading levels (and even, perhaps, quite similar life backgrounds). This is normal.

Like I said earlier, generalizing from one’s own experiences and expectations to everyone else is often quite simply the wrong way to go about things—human beings, even at age five, are quite variable.

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I remember having to drag my father to our local public library when I was around 8 or 9 years old so he could tell them it was OK for me to take out books from the adult section. I had exhausted the children’s section and was bored with the remaining books there, but the library wouldn’t let me borrow anything other than from the children’s section. My father was not the sort of parent who really involved himself in what was going on with me, but, in this case, he did this because to him nothing was more important than education.

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@alh LOL!!! For me, it was the TV show Lassie. I wasn’t allowed to watch it because I would get so upset.

Again, QMP, nobody is advocating “Little Women” as a book that should be part of a kindergarten curriculum. I am only saying that if a child can read it and WANTS to, I wouldn’t take it away. Nor would I take away “To Kill a Mockingbird.” (“Valley of the Dolls” or “Fifty Shades of Grey” would be taken away. )

My kid’s favorite book at age 2 1/2 was Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince.” I read it to my kid. I confess I left out the one sentence that would lead to a discussion of anti-Semitism. That just wasn’t something I wanted to get into. It’s a very sad story. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Happy_Prince_and_Other_Tales My kid would sob and sob…and then beg me to read the book again the next night.

Western children’s literature, at least, is filled with sad themes. Hansel and Gretel and other Grimm’s fairy tales. Nursery rhymes. (He cut off their tales with a carving knife.)

I think a conservative estimate would be that at least a quarter of the heroes of Western children’s literature are orphans or at least have absentee parents. Cinderella, Peter Pan, Mowgli (Jungle Book), Pippa Longstocking, Anne of Green Gables, Sophie in The BFG, The Little Princess, and yes, Harry Potter, among many others.

Beth’s death is sad but is it sadder than Bambi’s mother’s for a young child?

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Since all the men in my family hunted, and we ate venison, I never saw Bambi as a child. Thank goodness.

When my kids were young, a lot of parents I knew were reading Bettleheim’s Uses of Enchantment and thinking about how dark tales may be useful in child development.

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I think @dfbdfb came up with something I was thinking about, that it is a matter of knowing the child,too. I would agree that books like 1984, Little Women, To Kill a Mockingbird, and so forth would be ridiculous as mandated reading for 5 year olds, but it is also ridiculous to assume it isn’t worth reading for some 5 year olds. As parents part of what we should be able to do is judge our child’s emotional being and how they would react to things, and make judgements from there. One of the things to keep in mind is that emotional reactions develop, and what to an adult is scary or frightening or emotionally draining may for a kid be very little, because they don’t really understand what is going on at the depth we do. As a young kid, I remember reading the book “Sounder”, about a poor black sharecropper family where the dad ends up in jail for stealing a ham to feed his family, the family dog gets shot and maimed by the sherrif coming to arrest the dad, dad ends up crippled from being on the chain gang and eventually the dog and the father both die. As a young kid, I was saddened, but not to the level I had when I was older, and angry at the injustice of these people’s lives, it was a different experience.

On the other hand, I was careful with Harry Potter and our son,as bright as he is, we waited until he was older to have him experience it (we had a family tradition with the books,we read them together, taking turns reading to one another, and once we caught up did so when the new ones came out on the day they were released. In that case, we waited until he was 8 or 9 I recall. On the other hand, he read other books that were advanced even for adults, and while we had to explain things to him, and with certain topics put it in an age appropriate way (usually when there were allusions to sex and some other things I have forgotten), often we didn’t have to worry because he didn’t get the details that would have made it harder. Like others, I would be very careful with things like explicit sexuality (it is one of my major boundaries with kids). There is a big difference between, to use someone else’s example “Valley of the Dolls” (which they and I would definitely keep away from kids), and Shakespeare or To Kill a Mockingbird.

“I did not discover the joy reading until I was about 9 years and was home sick for about two weeks. I found some old fable type books that my read when he was young and read all of them. They used more advanced language and had an Old English story-telling type of phrasing. I found it quite interesting how authors and people used language in the past.”

This brings up an interesting thought (and is in no way a response to the OP who wrote this, rather as an interesting thought) is a lot of parents would be perfectly happy if their kid had a copy of Grimm’s fairy tales or other such books. Parents have visions of the pap that Disney put out, so they assume it that they are all technicolor sweet and so forth…and they aren’t. Grimm’s fairly tales were that, and the British had ones as a whole that were pretty brutal (get a gander at one of my favorites, "The Children’s book of Cautionary Tales’, that had the kid who wouldn’t listen who got devoured by a lion at the zoo, with pretty graphic description, others were similar, funniest was the kid who always threw a tantrum to get what he wanted who ended up as governor of New South Wales, tells you how they viewed Australia back then:). Yet kids were allowed to read those stories, had them read to them.

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Yes, D read some very violent Greek myths and legends in grade school, some with lots of colored illustrations. She had a 1st grade teacher who tried to limit her reading selections to books the teacher deemed appropriate. We took her to the library and turned her loose to select whatever interested her. Many of the myths, fairy tales and legends are violent and have various people having sex with lots of others. It didn’t seem to bother D.

S read one of my books when he was in 2nd grade which involved a werewolf and he had nightmares one night. I comforted him but suggested he may want to be a bit more selective about nighttime trading material.

Neither child suffered lasting harm from reading material they selected or things assigned as class reading.

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One of the struggles I had with my son in elementary school was the insistence of teachers that he read non-fiction books at his lexile level. Because his level was very high it was a huge challenge to find books that he could handle emotionally. Death wasn’t the challenge for me but he was and is extremely sensitive to interpersonal conflict. Now he can handle it but he never ever can take it lightly. This is part of his giftedness too and highlights the challenges of gifted education. His 4th grade teacher was trying to differentiate in the classroom by insisting on lexile level reading but it didn’t work well for my kid.