<p>I wish the moderators could change the title of this thread. “No other subjects” is wrong, wrong, wrong. “No friends” is highly debatable too. Please?</p>
<p>For those who haven’t visited the website recently, there are now links to other child prodigies who take music with the same teachers as this young man.</p>
<p>There’s also a link to a picture with the middle finger raised in the “f-u” sign. You can all interpret from that what you want about the parents’ social skills.</p>
<p>Marite: Yes, thank you : ) </p>
<p>cartera 45: Oh my. Father is setting quite the example for his son.</p>
<p>The website changes hourly. He added some other gifted piano websites to prove other prodigies have websites. And I don’t know what webpages he links to showing the Journal took the article offline, but it is still there:</p>
<p><a href=“http://media.southlakejournal.com/smedia/2008/07/24/12/Journal.source.prod_affiliate.122.pdf[/url]”>http://media.southlakejournal.com/smedia/2008/07/24/12/Journal.source.prod_affiliate.122.pdf</a></p>
<p>And now he spends a “great deal of time playing sports”, among them basketball. So he picks up games somewhere that they didn’t mention in the article. Maybe at 8, he doesn’t consider acquaintances to be friends? Let’s hope that is the case…</p>
<p>Oh my! I just saw where they put a middle finger up on their 8 year old’s website!! ICK!! ICK!! What are they thinking???</p>
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Show of hands if anyone thinks the guy doesn’t desperately NEED to get a life.</p>
<p>It’s almost like compulsive.</p>
<p>Perhaps we will get a visit from Pater Magnus soon?</p>
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<p>Heck. I view that as a dramatic improvement.</p>
<p>The middle finger is, at least, normal and a personal reflection.</p>
<p>I hope Daddy Dearest comes and answers my question (in case you missed it “What WERE you thinking?”)</p>
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<p>[holds hand up] At the risk of being filtered…I just have to ask, so what if it IS compulsive? Many individuals have compulsive tendencies. Frankly, the CC Denizen, which seems to be almost compulsively following this family, should be quite proud that they have been so successful in dictating how this web site should be changed. Who knows? Perhaps with more of our continued feedback we could close it down completely. I bet that would make a lot of people happy. ;)</p>
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<p>The “so what” is that the website harms the dignity and privacy of a child – a separate human being who is not yet able to consent. If the parents want to do whatever on the website, fine. But this is a minor child that they’ve displayed and used.</p>
<p>That was quick…Mama’s middle finger gesture on the child’s website is now removed. Can you imagine if that child checked his website and there was mama doing that??? If they feel the writer created caricatures of them, they are perpetuating them.</p>
<p>I’ve stayed out of everything but the website advertising and the quotes of dad. I tried my best to derail the course of the thread. </p>
<p>Nobody asked but I’ll tell y’all I think the kid is probably pretty special. I’m impressed. But then again, I liked my dad’s old Floyd Kramer records (“Floyd plays with the skill and technique of a truck-driver.”). I didn’t take part in the “profoundly gifted” or “diagnosis by internet” part of the thread. </p>
<p>All that being said, IMO the dad did wrong. The website is over-the-top. A coach I know uses the adage “Don’t tell somebody you’re good. Let them tell you.” Take it down, dad. Raise your kid the best way you know how but don’t do it in public. Public can be a mean place. Good luck.</p>
<p>Edit: (I forgot.) As always, JMO.</p>
<p>Agree, curm…I think the worst quote in the article was the dad saying he was “good at advertising him”…WHY does an 8 year old child need advertising? Is he looking for sponsors? Let the kid be a kid.</p>
<p>But the kid is definitely talented and gifted. No doubt.</p>
<p>I just checked out the website again–the rude gesture has disappeared-- and followed the links to the websites of the other kids.</p>
<p>Can Mr. LaDue not see the difference? Nowhere on the OTHER kids’ sites does it proclaim that they are “geniuses.” No, Mr. LaDue’s website makes that claim for them. The websites of the other pianists are clearly commercial web sites aimed at launching performing careers and getting gigs. They are dignified and professional. The various competitions, certificates, and performances are presented as professional qualifications and references. Not only that, but the sites themselves are professional quality in design and presentation, unlike LaDue’s klunky boast-fest.</p>
<p>What I really want to know is this: did he have the permission of those kids or their adult guardians OR that of the teachers to link to their web sites? Do those kids and their families really want to have this man proclaiming them as “geniuses” on his controversial web site and linking his son to them simply by virtue of sharing a teacher?</p>
<p>The man simply has no sense of boundaries or propriety. Or, at least, he has a very different idea of them than I do.</p>
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<p>That’s exactly the question I had. </p>
<p>One of the other websites was particularly well-done.</p>
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<p>curmudgeon, you have GOT to issue RKAs when you come out with things like this!!!</p>
<p>I hope the dad will reconsider the new links to the other piano prodigies or that at the very least it’s cleared with the parents of these kids, with full knowledge of the kind of feedback he’s been encountering - they deserve to make a fully informed decision. In particular, I was concerned to see that one of these websites posts an 11 year old boy’s email address with an open invitation to contact the young man. If the links are to prove that he is not the only parent whose gifted child has a website - IMO both sets of parents should prioritize safeguarding their child’s privacy, especially with the backlash on this forum (and others) to the Schorn article, and I certainly acknowledge the possibility that misquotes and distorted facts presented there may have played a role in treating this family unfairly. Protecting one’s child is a visceral thing and I do understand how angry the parents must be at everyone involved from reporters to anonymous posters on blogs, and maybe even themselves for opening themselves up to all this. I’d take down the website in its current form altogether, at least for now.</p>
<p>marite noted:</p>
<p>“I hate it when people say someone does not have a life. What does it mean exactly?”</p>
<p>It means they feel a person isn’t living a life <em>they</em> feel is a good, healthy life, based on <em>their</em> view of what would be fun, useful, whatever. It often means “doesn’t get out enough with other people” or “doesn’t commune with nature enough” or such. And like you, I think it’s a nonsense phrase in general, though for some, I can see where it makes <em>some</em> sense (like for terminally ill people stuck in bed with a lot of pain, though even for <em>some</em> of them, they are feeling they DO have a life as after all, they are still alive, and again, it is due to how <em>I</em> wouldn’t want to live life like that which has me feeling at times that this “isn’t a life”, but at the same time, I certainly wouldn’t pull the plug on anyone living that life that wanted to go on living).</p>
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<p>I <em>do</em> have an academically gifted child (admitted to college at 8 and we allowed him to start at 9; two BS degrees at 13, worked as a consultant for a year and went to a top school for an M.S./Ph.D. program at 14 and had the M.S. at 16) and have never felt it wise to make any child a full-time job unless they truly need a caregiver to be there full-time (see the movie “Lorenzo’s Oil” for an example that applies) and even then, feel getting out on dates with the spouse and getting some exercise and such is going to help the caregiver better deliver that care.</p>
<p>We left our son with family and friends even at a few weeks of age to do stuff we wanted (be in the audience as an extra for a movie and the shoot was overnight, so our son stayed that night at my brother’s house; go to a wedding where babies weren’t invited; other stuff) and my husband and I have never let marriage or parenthood stop us from dating. It hasn’t seemed to hurt our son any that we can tell, and I suspect has helped him as he’s had a role model of happily married parents who go out and do things (like tonight, we’ll be getting back massages and playing racquetball and making taking advantage of the Cheesecake Factory’s $1.50/slice deal; last night, we went to a fancy steakhouse and saw a movie; tomorrow night, we have yet another dinner date). Now we didn’t go out every night when our son was little, but we did always get out quite a bit (probably at least three times a month when he was very young, and then more like three or four times a week by the time he was in college and living at home with us). We also believe in having time on our own and time with friends (we’ve belonged to happy hour groups with 20-something friends, 50-something friends, and mixed ages friends in recent years and also go to dinner with other couples and have dinner at our house and their homes and go dancing and take vacations with friends and so on).</p>
<p>Anyway, I just think devoting all of one’s life to a child is going to be really tough on a parent when the child someday grows up and moves out. The parent will lose their “job” (for those who consider the child a FT job) and their child both at once.</p>
<p>“Can Mr. LaDue not see the difference? Nowhere on the OTHER kids’ sites does it proclaim that they are “geniuses.” No, Mr. LaDue’s website makes that claim for them. The websites of the other pianists are clearly commercial web sites aimed at launching performing careers and getting gigs. They are dignified and professional. The various competitions, certificates, and performances are presented as professional qualifications and references.”</p>
<p>That was my reaction as well. The other websites showcased the children’s talents in a tasteful fashion.</p>
<p>“Don’t tell somebody you’re good. Let them tell you.”</p>
<p>Exactly. If you <em>show</em> you are good, you need not <em>say</em> you are good.</p>
<p>Our son isn’t a musical prodigy, though lots of people called him such ever since he was 3 (and doing things like playing a bunch of songs by ear, and looking at the play-by-numbers notes to “Twelve Months” (5654/3445/234/345/5654/345/222555/311) and said it looked like “London Bridge” (5654/345/234/345/5654/345/25/31) and was not looking at the “London Bridge” page as he made this observation) and he clearly has some innate talent as without training, he can hear chords and play them rather than just melodies - which i didn’t even realize was unusual from someone without lots of musical training till a music professor and another musician informed me of this earlier this week, just as I didn’t realize until this week that his “fooling” musicians - some with 50+ years experience - into thinking the improvisational pieces he played off the top of his head were “real” published pieces by professional composers would be so unusual. Now when I heard he picked up a new invention in his lab where a person can draw lead marks and then put a finger on the lead and tap the pencil and make sounds and our son (within 3-5 seconds according to the inventor who witnessed our son do this and asked to meet us when we were in town for our son’s graduation so that he could tell us "Thanks for giving us [son’s name]), played a recognizable tune with the device, something the inventor had no clue could even be done before hearing our son do it, I felt <em>that</em> was a sign of innate musical talent as he had never even seen the device before nor been told to try to make <em>music</em> with it to even know it could be done, yet he somehow knew it could be and in lightning speed, figured out how to do it… </p>
<p>He also has had rather little in the way of music training, though he had more than many children as many children never get <em>any</em> and he had some group music classes as a very young child (where the teacher told me his beating a rhythm with one hand and a melody or something with the other hand was something even most adults have difficulty doing and she had never seen a child so young be able to do that), and then two or three private piano lessons at age 3 when people pressured us into giving him lessons and three piano teachers - two being college teachers in addition to working out of their home - tested his ability and told us they would take him as a student even though they hadn’t even taken anyone under 5 before, and then a few more at age 6 when he again said he wanted piano lessons, and then three more at 9 when he wanted electronic keyboard lessons but the music studio screwed up and registered him for piano lessons (and the conductor of the Reno Symphony Orchestra soon after that lectured me and my husband badly about how we were wronging our son by not trying teacher after teacher till our son found one he felt a good match as he felt our son had true talent and that it should be nurtured, and I do feel a bit guilty for not doing more for our son whenever I hear him play and hear people oooh and aaah as I feel like we closed a door on his being a professional musician based on his saying <em>at age 3</em> that wouldn’t be a career he’d ever want and not thinking he might just change his mind, fools that we can be). </p>
<p>Anyway, despite having no website, TV plugs, etc. advertising our son’s musical ability, he got a job offer to be a pianist on a cruise ship when he was 14 (Carnegie Mellon Concert Hall it’s not, but for a kid with so little training, it shocked me) simply by playing the piano in the lounge before getting kicked off by the paid professional and the passengers complaining to the cruise staff that they liked our son’s playing better and wanted HIM to be their entertainer. He was also able to sell the CDs he made at age 9 (using a keyboard the inventor of that keyboard gave him back when he was 8 and the laptop that inventor also gave him) to people who didn’t know him personally and only heard him play at an open mike night, and is currently working on a professional studio recording (paid for by another musician who asked our son to help compose, mix, etc. the music)…not anything that will ever be heard on the radio, we don’t expect, but still a fun project for our son and one we feel it is an honor for our son to have been asked to be involved with.</p>
<p>But say our son <em>had</em> wanted to be a concert pianist at age 3. Would we have advertised him on a website? I sort of doubt it, as I would think people would just hear him play and the opportunities would open up and he’d get the training he needed and gigs he wanted, etc. just as has happened in the tech world for him merely by his opening his mouth at parties he attended and conferences he attended and such. Good things come to those who show, but is the Internet really the best place to show? Again, I really can’t say for sure. Our son sold his photos and fractal art to raise money for a study abroad program, and he used an online site to help do so (and did sell some through that site), but mostly he sold his work at local juried festivals, exhibits where he was invited to show his work, restaurant walls (and owner saw his work and asked if he would be interested in displaying it for sale at the restaurant), etc.</p>
<p>Since the parents are reading this site (and I do feel sorry for them with all the scorn they are getting as that just can’t be pleasant and I doubt that people would be so blunt in person), I will toss out that they could be <em>hurting</em> their son’s odds of getting proper mentoring, etc. by having a website advertising the child as many people (including some who could no doubt help the child) will (rightly or wrongly) get the impression the parents are stage parents and not want to get involved in helping the child as it would mean having to also work with (what they could perceive to be) pushy parents (the middle finger would certainly not give visitors to the site a feeling of “Oh, these would be happy people to deal with”). Where adults get jobs no matter what the parents are usually like, the same is not the case for children overall…mentors interact with the child <em>and</em> the parents (if for nothing else but to have the child dropped off to the mentor) and so being likable parents will go a long way in helping the child get opportunities. Which isn’t to say the parents have to be perfect or close to it - I turn off lots of people here (though thankfully, I also have supporters) and no doubt do in 3D, too, but have also been “fun enough” (or “good enough”) for many people to want to mentor our son despite me if not because of me. If I had myself with a middle finger raised on a public site that was about my son yet, I doubt anyone would want to touch me with their own finger and similarly, would keep a distance from the entire family.</p>