It is rarely easy being young and brilliant. Parents of “average” children might find that statement difficult to accept. After all, many parents dream about giving birth to prodigies. It turns out, according to journalist Alissa Quart in “Hothouse Kids,” that those parents should be careful what they wish for.
Quart, a New York City journalist, briefly discusses her experience being labeled a “gifted” child. She found it a mixed blessing.
“I learned to read at 3, and my father counted on me to offer presentations on Modernist Art by the time I was five. ‘It was nice,’ I’d reply about a particular exhibit. ‘Nice?’ my father thundered. “‘Nice’ is such a boring word!’ For me, nothing would be nice again. Soon I was teaching my friends how to read. By 10, I was offered talking points on avant-garde film, lecturing on everything from film stock to astrology. I made sure to read a book a day. I identified with the Brontes – their youth of intertwined literary suffering. The stickers and pink sneakers of my peers seemed bizarre.”
Quart skipped a grade in school. She won a dozen creative writing awards before turning 17. Adults fawned over her, raising her expectations. When she left home at 17, though, she caved from the pressure. Quart says she became “child-like … I listened to bad sentimental music my father disdained.” Socially inexperienced, she confused superficiality for friendship.
Today, Quart says, after being “created and then deflated,” she lives with a “distinct feeling of failure … Because I did not live up to my precocity, I experience it to be like a cross between a has-been and a never-was …”
Quart understands that her father does not see himself as “an overbearing puppet master.” Throughout the book, however, Quart portrays parents who push their apparently brilliant children too hard as at least vaguely villainous. Many adults who profit from the dreams of parents are portrayed in an even less flattering light.
The book is built around the experiences of other hothouse kids; Quart uses first-person only briefly. The result is a thoroughly reported, wide-ranging, clearly written study of the gifted child industrial complex.
After setting the stage with a chapter about the frequent adult unhappiness of former hothouse kids, Quart presents the permutations in this order: profit-making products for smart babies (for example, Baby Einstein DVDs to allegedly stimulate the just-forming intellect at home); classes for pre-schoolers, teaching everything from piano to soccer; child labor, as the precocity for painting or chess is turned into an income-producing activity; controversial public school programs for children identified as gifted; the gurus of giftedness who say they can measure intelligence accurately at an early age-for profit; parents who home-school and otherwise take the lead in pushing their children beyond normal mental and physical limits; public competitions featuring children in tournaments ranging from Scrabble to debate; religious fundamentalism that pushes children to become preachers sharing divine revelations before reaching adulthood; the employment market on Wall Street and elsewhere for youthful math wizards.
By the end of the book, it will surprise no reader that Quart comes down on the side of decompression. Let children be children.
Steve Weinberg is a freelance writer in Columbia, Mo.
Hothouse Kids
The Dilemma of the Gifted Child
By Alissa Quart
Penguin, 272 pages, $24.95
