Whiz Kids (original) (raw)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart began playing the piano at age 3. At age 4, he had picked up the violin. By 8, he had already written his first symphony. By 12, his first opera.
Mozart is perhaps history's best known example of a child prodigy. But despite our collective fascination with pint-sized geniuses, there is limited research into prodigies--and almost no consensus on what causes them, or even an exact definition.
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“You find, not unlike in other fields, a full range [of explanations],” says David Henry Feldman, a professor of development psychology at Tufts University and author of Nature’s Gambit: Child Prodigies and the Development of Human Potential. “It’s very difficult to make an argument, especially in the extremes, that biology and genetic endowment have nothing to do with it.”
The very definition of a child prodigy has been widely debated over time--it's sometimes difficult for even experts to recognize "genius" in a 5-year-old. At the moment, the most widely accepted definition is a child, typically under the age of 10, who has mastered a challenging skill at the level of an adult professional.
But this much is certainly clear: Prodigies tend to appear almost exclusively in "rule-based" fields like music, chess or mathematics. Sam Vaknin, author of Malignant Self Love--Narcissism Revisited, likens child prodigies to computers: Both excel in symbol manipulation, but fail to impress when it comes to the fuzzier undertakings.
“Fields like literature require maturity and life experience,” he explains. “Prodigies, no matter how gifted, rarely possess the requisite emotional spectrum, an acquaintance with the nuances and subtleties of human relationships, or the accumulated knowledge that comes from first-hand exposure to the ups and downs of reality.”
Some scholars, however, have argued that brilliant young minds like H.P. Lovecraft (who composed long poems by age 5) and John Stuart Mill (who knew several dead languages by age 8) were indeed gifted enough to qualify as prodigies. But they are in the minority.
“In contrast,” Vaknin adds, “the manipulation of symbols--in mathematics, music or chess--does not require anything except the proper neurological ‘hardware and software’ and access to widely available objective knowledge.”
No matter the field, the leap from child prodigy to adult genius is rare. While prodigies often become experts, they often fall short of developing into major innovators, explains Ellen Winner, professor of psychology at Boston College and author of Gifted Children: Myths and Realities.
“The skill of being a child prodigy is the skill of mastering something already invented,” she says. “The skill of being a major creative adult requires innovation, rebelliousness, dissatisfaction with the status quo.”
The role of parents is crucial in a prodigy’s development. While that role can be positive (cellist Yo-Yo Ma is generally credited with having appropriately supportive parents), they can quickly become the problem, especially when they begin to demand and depend on the success of their gifted children.
According to Vaknin, the real damage occurs when parents come to love their children’s achievements more than they do their children. “The child is taught to ignore reality and to occupy the parental fantasy space,” he says. “The prodigy becomes the vessel of his parents' discontented lives … the magic brush with which they can transform their failures into successes, their humiliation into victory and their frustrations into happiness.”