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How to Raise a Creative Child – Step One: Back Off (2016)

517 points by bensummers 9y ago

luckyt 9y ago
> just eight have won Nobel Prizes You pick 2000 teenagers, and 8 go on to win a Nobel Prize, and you're still not satisfied? High expectations much...
- mbroshi 9y ago
  Agreed. This article may or may not have made some good points, but I couldn't keep reading after that.
  - TheAlchemist 9y ago
    Same here - an instant blocker for me.
- liquidise 9y ago
  That means 1 in 250 go on to win a Nobel Prize. An absurd rate. I'd bet money that the only group to perform better over the same timeframe is the list Nobel Prize winners themselves. Edit: I stand corrected. Solvay Conference had 15/29 one year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solvay_Conference#Fifth_Conference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solvay_Conference#Fifth_Confer...
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - ChicagoBoy11 9y ago
    Isn't the group of CalTech alumns slightly worse but on around the same order of magnitude?
- jeffwass 9y ago
  Author also contradicts himself. First the author laments only 8 novel prizes of the batch. Then in the next sentence goes on to praise Lisa Randall for revolutionising physics, and notes that for every Lisa Randall there are dozens that fall short of their potential. Ironic because Lisa Randall didn't win a Nobel Prize in physics. Yet.....
  - 77pt77 9y ago
    > Ironic because Lisa Randall didn't win a Nobel Prize in physics. Yet..... And given her current work and experimental results there is no reasonable prospect she ever will, unlike people that you know that would win sooner or later (unless they died) > For every Lisa Randall who revolutionizes theoretical physics She did not revolutionize Physics. Not even close. She barely made a dent.
- pfarnsworth 9y ago
  Yeah this is actually a terrible article. The author keeps confusing creativity with success. And he keeps thinking that "creative" people are the ones that change the world, which is ridiculous. To change the world, you need to be almost insanely stubborn and almost insanely self-confident.
CuriouslyC 9y ago
My personal theory on this is twofold: 1.) High achievers are used to pushing at things to win. Creativity is like a garden - you have to do some tending, but then you have to back off and let the plants grow. Fiddling doesn't help, in fact you're liable to end up killing the plants. 2.) Smart people actually learn too fast. Creativity requires very broad neural connectivity, and I think fast learning tends to produce neural networks with sparse connectivity to different areas. This is supported to a degree by learning in artificial neural networks. When the learning rate in artificial neural networks is too fast, this can cause the network parameters to converge prematurely. This premature convergence typically results in poor generalization performance. It is also worth noting that human brains mature more slowly than those of previous hominids and great apes.
- nostrebored 9y ago
  Using neural networks as a machine learning concept to explain actual concepts in Neuroscience is a huge overstep. People have always thought the most advanced technology can be analogous to cognition, see steam engines and clocks.
  - OisinMoran 9y ago
    Your second sentence is definitely true and very interesting but maybe you'd agree that the gap between our most advanced technology and the brain is decreasing to the point where this will eventually be right.
    - princeb 9y ago
      > gap between our most advanced technology and the brain is decreasing first we need to understand the brain.
  - psyc 9y ago
    And those were progressively better analogies. These are great terms to think in, and it's not an overstep. It doesn't have to be absolutely true to be very useful for understanding.
hellofunk 9y ago
> The gifted learn to play magnificent Mozart melodies, but rarely compose their own original scores. Performing music and writing music are really very different art forms. I'm surprised this NY Times author has conflated the two. Writing music is not the next step after learning to play music.
- cardamomo 9y ago
  Within the Western classical music academy, these indeed are currently quite separate. That is not universal to all musical traditions.
blackkettle 9y ago
> In adulthood, many prodigies become experts in their fields and leaders in their organizations. Yet “only a fraction of gifted children eventually become revolutionary adult creators,” laments the psychologist Ellen Winner. Why on earth is that something to 'lament'?
- justinjlynn 9y ago
  I think their point is that, for some reason, it is lamentable that they did not fulfill the whole of their potential. Whether or not that is lamentable is its own argument. The privilege exhibited by the talented who consciously do not use their potential is the ultimate insult to those who are not given the opportunity - not only is it in no way controllable by humanity, it can in no way be granted by any kind of affirmative action. I imagine the lament is probably sourced there somehow.
padobson 9y ago
The parents of ordinary children had an average of six rules, like specific schedules for homework and bedtime. Parents of highly creative children had an average of fewer than one rule. I grew up in a household where compliance to parental authority was the prevailing rule. This made me fairly compliant as an adult (which opens you up for exploitation by peers and authority figures), but this wasn't too difficult to unravel with a few dozen sessions of therapy. As a result, I pass down very few rules as a parent, and it's been a joy to watch my daughter's creativity blossom. We've done what the article suggests - provided moral guidelines to live by, rather than any strict set of rules. She loves real estate - specifically interior design, but also analyzing neighborhoods, improving curb appeal, and understanding what makes a good school district. I think the seeds were planted when I was taking her with me in the evenings to do various handyman tasks at our rental property. We would stop for ice cream and she would sit there and eat it while I put together furniture or changed light bulbs or swept common areas. And while our lax rules have certainly inspired creativity and fed into her individuality, it hasn't done a great deal to build work ethic. I'm aware of the stereotype of parents believing their kids are lazy, so I'm open to being wrong here. Striking a balance between giving a kid a framework to discover herself but also emphasizing the importance of work ethic is probably my greatest concern as a parent. I don't want to stifle her from dreaming, but I want her to do what's necessary to accomplish those dreams too. My big question is this: when the time comes to put in the work the accomplish what she wants, is she going to be ready to put down the ice cream spoon and pick up a screw driver? I don't know. But I'm going to continue with the light touch and hope for the best.
- blowski 9y ago
  I have the same anxiety, on the opposite side of the spectrum. My parents were very relaxed, and now I'm trying to impose more structure on my son's life. You can't guarantee any outcome. I don't know what level of influence you can even have, there are so many variables involved. All you can do is what you think is right, and react to circumstances as you go along.
- aleem 9y ago
  From one of the comments on the article > Backing off will no more produce a creative genius than pushing your child. Neither strategy makes the slightest difference to what is essentially an autonomous process. Beethoven's father did not back off. And Lars von Trier's parents left him to his own devices. Both are geniuses and both hated their childhood. > My guess is that most parents who follow Adam Grant's spurious advice (one rule or none is better than six) will end up with the rude obnoxious brats whom you can see bouncing off the waiting room walls of any upscale Manhattan pediatrician's office. Maybe one of a million such brats will spontaneously become a creative genius as an adult but so will one out of a million drones who win spelling bees and piano competitions. > But guess what, a large proportion of the remaining brats will be all attitude and no skill while the drones will at least become doctors and corporate lawyers. By using creativity as the ultimate-and perhaps only-benchmark, Mr. Grant falls into the same trap as the Tiger Moms he so despises. > Enjoying a thing does make it more likely that a child will own it. But sometimes the initial drudgery is necessary to make the breakthrough to find something worth enjoying. > When it comes to raising children the golden rule is that there is no golden rule. The greatest scientific creative genius of recent memory, Richard Feynman realized this when he tried to teach his children and discovered that what worked for his son did not work for his daughter.
shouldbworking 9y ago
I may be biased from my own experience, but I remember being incredibly frustrated at a young age from the lack of help understanding things I was "too young" for. My role models and teachers made zero efforts to help me learn analog circuit design and my first programming language, Perl. This made it much harder than it would have been if I was attending actual classes, and probably set back my understanding many years. I'm not sure how much of an outlier I am, but our education system is not built for creative types. It's too hard to get placed in anything significantly above your grade level, especially if your brilliance is restricted to a single subject. I remember showing an bistable flipflop design to my science teacher in 5th grade and getting a puzzled "that's nice Johnny" type look when I wanted help figuring out why my breadboard version wouldn't oscillate. A few of my skills were so beyond what anyone expected that they didn't know what to do with me, or what they were even looking at, so they did nothing. It took another eleven years before I had contact with any teachers that matched my experience level with programming and circuit design. During that time I advanced my skills slightly, but not having any peers made me an outcast and certainly left me far behind where I could have been. Backing off is a bad idea. You need to take your child's curiousity and do everything you can to keep it alive. I'm sure a lot of kids started out like me but eventually let their dreams die.
- nnfy 9y ago
  I share your frustration. Unfortunately, public schools are not places where remarkable people tend to congregate, and those near the mean are typically not equipped to teach such technical subjects, or even recognize the value in having young children learn them. There is vast potential wasted in our [U.S.] public school system.
  - shouldbworking 9y ago
    The problem for me, and perhaps many others, is that the "smart" are sorted out early and carted out of regular classrooms. If you miss the boat it gets substantially more difficult, almost impossible, to get back on that track. I remember my parents trying to get me into advanced classes in sixth grade but the school rules said it needed to be done by third grade. I couldn't skip a year either, it was too late. The second (harder) way into double advanced classes was to pass a test going into high school. That test contained math that only those already in advanced classes had been taught. I aced the reading portion, scoring at 11th grade reading level, but it wasn't enough. The same year I was sponsored to be an exchange student to Europe but my family couldn't afford the plane tickets. A year later, bored out of my skull and disappointed, I gave up completely on public school. I embraced mediocrity because I figured out I could get by with no real effort. I concentrated my creativity outside of school and learned more programming languages and electronics. I never got above a C average again until college. Some teachers saw promise but I let them down because I didn't show up to class and was always in trouble. I knew I had missed the boat to the good classes that led to good scholarships and onto good colleges, and I was bitter and didn't give a shit anymore. To get into the caliber of school I dreamed about I would have needed more than just good grades in regular classes, and all the windows except sports closed before highschool even started. There's been some articles about "lost diamonds", which may explain why smart people do better as a whole but the large majority still end up living average lives and doing nothing of note. I might not have been any smarter than average, but I definitely feel like I was one of those kids who the system left behind. I knew many others I considered smart that shared my company at the troublemaking fringe of highschool society, definitely a pile of wasted potential at the bottom.
kiyanwang 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r#Education_and_career https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r#E... I remember reading some of László Polgár work after becoming interested in how he raised three daughters, two became chess prodigies, the third a concert musician. He posited that "that any child has the innate capacity to become a genius in any chosen field, as long as education starts before their third birthday and they begin to specialise at six". This seems at odds with the notion that parents should "back off".
- ziikutv 9y ago
  Bookmarked! Additionally, as I mentioned in another post. Many parts of the world have some of the most creative children and adults and their parents did the opposite. Not saying either of these is right or wrong, but I am beginning to think creativity, like anything else, is more affected by culture and the surrounding of a child rather than just parenting. Kids are seen more by their peers and teachers than their parents ffs.
- SamReidHughes 9y ago
  At least it works if your kid has the genes of a parent with the patience to read through 400 biographies.
paganel 9y ago
> When Dr. Bloom’s team interviewed tennis players who were ranked in the top 10 in the world, they were not, to paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld, doing push-ups since they were a fetus. And then you see a clip of 5-year old Messi (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DWZ0fD64Uk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DWZ0fD64Uk) demolishing the other 5-year old kids who happened to share the same football field as him and realize that "letting your kid be creative" and all this mumbo-jumbo talk doesn't mean anything unless your kid doesn't have the inside genius-like quality. Bonus link, the Maradona childhood tricks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAjQ7NF8Hj0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAjQ7NF8Hj0
- revelation 9y ago
  It's even more laughable for any sort of endurance sports, where the genetic components are very well known. The best marathon runner is probably sitting on a couch eating a bag of cheetos.
  - fjdlwlv 9y ago
    The best marathon runners are from an African community of genetically strong marathoners , who run a lot all their lives. Nature + nurture beats either alone
ziikutv 9y ago
Being a good parent is becoming an increasing concern of mine as I am reaching an age where I could probably get married in some parts of the world. Its giving me anxiety, wanting to be not a shitty father... Digression aside: > Creativity may be hard to nurture, but it’s easy to thwart. There are many parents though that do just to opposite by not backing off no? This is sort of generalizing, but kids from Asian countries are a great counterpoint to this. With that in mind, couldn't we also amend that theory, and add culture as a factor? Furthermore, isn't it also the case that since kids are getting into school earlier than they used to (say 50 or so years ago; random number, don't goto imright.com and disprove it xD), wouldn't they be more susceptible to other kids/teachers? I mean now a days parents see their kids less than their teachers. They basically work 9-5 just like adults. Addendum: Forgot which famous book this is from: But appraising a child for their hardwork over natural talent is one of the best things we can do. So to that end, creativity should be garnered as something one has to work towards. Man.. I can't wait to test all this shit on my kids.. (obviously joking) Edit: Change wording and add more meaningful question.
- mseri 9y ago
  The book might be 'Brain Rules for kids' by John Medina. A scientific account of what we know and don't know of brain development from the womb to 5. Really enjoyable and full of useful insights
  - goodJobWalrus 9y ago
    or 'Nurture Shock' that also has a chapter on that.
nnfy 9y ago
Nurture should follow nature. No single parenting style will fit every child. Some children need to be pushed harder, some need more freedom; what's important is to recognize what works and what doesn't and accommodate as necessary. Of course, this is not an easy task, and you only get one chance. I think the most important thing, however, is to provide resources for learning, far beyond what is available in our pitiful public education system, which is designed more to cater to the mean and less to allow remarkable students to fully excel.
siliconc0w 9y ago
I think 'genius' is more about tuning the innate plasticity of a child's mind to be good at a certain type of task. World class chess players see positions and variations like how 'normals' might recognize an old friend. The 'creative' part comes in when you have brain that is marvelously tuned for one thing, you can iterate and experiment very quickly.
deleted 9y ago
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zxv 9y ago
There is no way quite as certain to accelerate a child's pursuit of great goals, than to instill confidence in them. In my experience, it is the first and most important step with which they begin to choose their own pace in learning new skills, by convincing them that any failures are temporary, and that they can believe in their vision because those they trust believe in them. I believe that the second step, making things fun, mostly consists of letting young people be with their friends, with no more than some open space, and only the minimum adult involvement needed to maintain safety.
kendallpark 9y ago
Let's take a big step back and remember that even if you set up the most creativity-nurturing environment, it does not guarantee that your kids are going to flourish creatively. Kids are autonomous creatures that still choose their own activities. My siblings and I had the same imperfect parenting, same resources, similar genetics, etc, and at the end of the day I was the one that went hardcore down creative pursuits during childhood. I could see a similar spark in my siblings, but for whatever reason they put their 10,000 hours elsewhere. It was only during college that one of my brothers picked up writing and the other picked up music. The potential (and opportunity!) was always there, but for whatever reason they didn't capitalize on it in childhood.
slantaclaus 9y ago
Having not yet read the article, I would say yes, there is truth in that statement, but holding people accountable is a big part of what drives success. Compromise: Tease them into and help them create some of their own rules but enforce them(?)
ucontrol 9y ago
A dull article ridden with blatantly false claims and oversimplification of an otherwise complicated topic. >Gifted children who have a noticeable head start and whose skill development begins remarkably early _do not_ usually end up being game changing professionals in their respective fields. Really now? >Developing a skill set early on leads to competence in what is learned but stumps creativity and chances of innovation. So having an deep, innate, intuitive grasp of a certain set of knowledge, made possible by said early exposure and disciplined training, has nothing to do with genius and potential inventive achievement in later life? But rather, it only allows for uncreative competence in what is learned and practiced, that and only that? Really? Is this man serious? How does something like this even pass for an article? How much thinking goes into writing something like this? Christ almighty. I love it because the very things that Mr. Grant here paints as inhibitory to creativity are exactly the essential components of creative genius! His information is not only incorrect, it is the exact opposite of how things do work in real life. It's not a zero sum game. Both of aspects in question - Disciplined skill development as well as Creativity - are essential for intellectual success and are interdependent. Structure, discipline, strong parent engagement and emphasis on learning and skill development, AS WELL AS creative undertakings, play, leisurely engagement, passionate tinkering / creation - both aspects are crucial. In order to be able to create, the child has to imitate first. In order to fall in love with a pursuit, it has to be exposed to it first. And in order to be creatively successful in a pursuit, the child has to be very skilled in it first. And parents' intervention, guidance and support are very important in this regard.
- gabrielgoh 9y ago
  All I see here are your opinions, while the article has numerous citations and data to back up its claims. The reason why the article is interesting is because it goes against the common wisdom "you need to know the rules to break em", and backs its claim up with peer-reviewed science. And while you may find the findings unpalatable, isn't this how progress is made?
  - replicatorblog 9y ago
    The main data the author cites is a 32-year-old pop psychology book where n=120. The rest is expert opinion. He also avoids making a case for why trying raising a child who is merely hyper-competent is less desirable goal than creating one who remakes a field of inquiry. After all, why would you want your child to become a run-of-the-mill Oncologist if they're not also going to win a Nobel Prize. For all the author's dressing up a horrid argument with strained "statistics," he misses a key fact. True breakthroughs in most fields come around rarely, in time frames usually measured in decades. In the meantime, the market for high-end practitioners is evergreen. For every Mozart, there are thousands of musicians to play in world-class orchestras. For every Jonas Salk, there are hundreds of thousands of doctors. On a risk-adjusted scale, shooting for competent if slightly less creative seems like a much wiser bet.
replicatorblog 9y ago
In adulthood, many prodigies become experts in their fields and leaders in their organizations. Yet only a fraction of gifted children eventually become revolutionary adult creators. My daughter is being treated for Leukemia by some amazing doctors at Boston Children's Hospital. To my knowledge, none of the health care professionals at this world-class institution have won Nobel Prizes in medicine. All the same, for my daughter's sake, I'm still glad they hit the books for a couple decades. There are great honor and value in doing an important job consistently and well. This idea that a life is wasted if you don't remake a field in your image seems hollow when these prodigies often end up with the power to save lives.
- Spooky23 9y ago
  That's a thing that always bothers me about these articles. If the standard of success for a gifted grade school kid is to be a Nobel laureate, that's a little warped. My grandfather was one of the smartest guys I ever met. Through the circumstances of fate, he couldn't get education beyond the 8th grade. Yet he tutored my mom in calculus and did all sorts of good things for people. By any standard of mine, he lived a long, fruitful and successful life... yet he's a failure in the debate of an article like this.
  - ilyaeck 9y ago
    +1000
- smackingly 9y ago
  Maybe I'm biased because I'm a no-name physician at a community hospital, but the "best doctors" in my eyes are the ones with the best outcomes, lowest utilization, highest efficiency and highest patient satisfaction. These measures don't correlate well with the physician's credentials. I learned this in residency, which I did just down the street from a "top" university hospital. We out-performed that place on every level except our doctors went to "lesser" medical schools. They simply spent more money (on wild things like ECMO, which makes everyone feel they're making more of a difference even though the outcomes are the same without it). Our profession is moving toward identifying these doctors and promoting their behavior to the entire field. There's a study that showed lower heart attack mortality when all the "top" cardiologists were out of the hospital attending a cardiology meeting. Too many confounders to make any real conclusions from that, but it lines up with my point. Of course, if your child has a serious life-threatening and/or rare disease, then you want her to be treated at a vanguard institution like the one you took yours to. No dispute from me on that one. But in the system as a whole, we make the most difference reducing complications of cardiovascular disease, sepsis, pneumonia, COPD, and kidney disease (which are orders of magnitude more common). And we're starting to find out how to identify doctors that do it better, with fewer complications, and with much higher efficiency than others. I think those are the best doctors and it's what I'm striving to be.
replicatorblog 9y ago
Tiger Woods and Serena and Venus Williams are arguably the most iconic players in their sports in the last two decades and both are famous for overbearing fathers who forced them to practice from the time they could hold clubs and racquets.
- haimez 9y ago
  They're also famous as athletes and not creatives.
  - replicatorblog 9y ago
    The article's author referenced athletes as well as creatives: Even the best athletes didn’t start out any better than their peers. When Dr. Bloom’s team interviewed tennis players who were ranked in the top 10 in the world, they were not, to paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld, doing push-ups since they were a fetus. Few of them faced intense pressure to perfect the game as Andre Agassi did. A majority of the tennis stars remembered one thing about their first coaches: They made tennis enjoyable.
- sanswork 9y ago
  And on the other end you have Todd Marinovich.
noonespecial 9y ago
Step zero: Get to know them. Then decide if you should back off or do any other of a thousand things that might help them. All kids are different. Child rearing is as far from "one weird trick" territory as you can get.
aliceyhg 9y ago
In cultures like Korea, hierarchy and unconditional respect for their elders is so deeply rooted that it is evident in the language itself (When addressing elders or someone more important, you have to speak a specific way). This gives a false sense of righteousness and superiority. In societies like these, could the culture itself be an obstacle to creative growth?
- geomark 9y ago
  It is similar in many countries. In Thailand, where I live, it is also built into the language. There are many different pronouns for addressing others based on your relative social standing. There are pronouns not only for normal societal interactions, but special pronouns for when you are speaking to monks and another set when speaking to/about royal family members. In fact, there are even different verbs that are used when talking about common activities of monks and royalty. Makes for a very pretentious culture and it certainly does inhibit critical thinking in much of the population.
lacampbell 9y ago
Why do you feel entitled to foist your own or other peoples problems onto strangers?
- c22 9y ago
  Why do you assume kids are problems to begin with? I have met hundreds of kids during my adult life and the highest any of them has risen to for me is minor annoyance. I've had more trouble from my cars.
  - lacampbell 9y ago
    I'm not the one that used "problem" to describe kids, btw. FWIW I quite like kids. But saying strangers kids are my responsibility because of "society" is not true at all.
    - jackvalentine 9y ago
      Kids are a part of society, and society has a stake in what kind of adult they become. In the same way drug addicts are society's problem, or unemployed people are society's problem, or sociopathic second generation rich never-worked-a-day drunk drivers are society's problem. This isn't to say that you'll be conscripted in to a psudo-parent role against your will, but they are your responsibility as a member of society in a very abstract way.
      - lacampbell 9y ago
        In that case, I revoke my membership to society. I have my own problems.
        jackvalentine 9y ago
        You can do so by moving out in to the middle of nowhere and becoming a self-sufficient hermit. Anything less and sorry, but you're a part of society.
lucidguppy 9y ago
Every child must be raised by the book - unfortunately every child has their own book...
Jimmy 9y ago
>What holds them back is that they don’t learn to be original. More than likely, they simply lacked the capacity to be original (as in, world-class historical originality, which is the subject under discussion here), just in the same way that almost all people lack this capacity. It's only particularly surprising that child prodigies rarely become adult geniuses if you confuse genius with the capacity to learn information and acquire skills. Mastering calculus at age 6, though highly unusual, does not in itself constitute original work, and, going off of the data, is not an extremely strong indicator of the presence of the capacity to do original work. So you can't necessarily expect creativity-focused interventions on child prodigies to produce more revolutionary geniuses than normal.
- hacknat 9y ago
  Excellent point. If anything the anecdotal data points to the opposite being true. Hendrix didn't learn guitar until 17. Einstein showed signs of having a genius for math and science in his education, but not anything above warranting anything, but being accepted to a middling teachers college. Edison didn't graduate high school and invented the phonograph in his spare time in his late 20s as a telegraph operator.
bitJericho 9y ago
It's so important to let your kid think. I see parents helicoptering and it's very damaging. I had met a couple at a friendly gathering that brought their 2 year old. Not only could he hardly talk, which was surprising to me, he had no chance to make any decision. The child and his parents were paging through a sales flyer, because they didn't think to bring suitable activities, and they were ogling over toys. So I pointed to the knives on a page that came up and joined in, "oh let's get these" and the child instinctively said yeah! Then I could see the clockworks moving and before the kid could say anything the parents chimed in. A missed opportunity to let the kid make his own, good, decision. I fear he'll grow up and fail to make decisions at all. Conversely, with my children, I try to talk with them as much as I can, and let them talk too. I let them order food themselves and I demand good table manners. That doesn't mean they can't be children, but they are not allowed to climb under or on the table, or be a nuisance. An easy fix for a problem child in a restaurant is to leave. The child must learn that there are consequences. The child wont go? Leave without them and they will freak and catch up. They fail that drag them out. Saying no and sticking with it is important, but equally important is giving the child a chance to catch up, mentally, with decision making and situational awareness.
- KyleJune 9y ago
  I didn't talk at all till I was 5 years old. I turned out well. But my parents were the opposite of helicopter parents though. I literally just did whatever I wanted all the time. I use to walk around a swamp near by, by myself or with friends, to catch turtles and snakes. Never got in trouble for grades. Got in a fight once when I was in 5th grade. Most my Mom did was ask me if I got any good hits in. lol
  - bitJericho 9y ago
    I think extemes in general are bad, but off the cuff I would suspect no parenting to be better than overparenting. At least you got to see the consequences of poor choices, and that the world really doesn't give two shits about you (or anyone).
Havoc 9y ago
>prestigious award for scientifically gifted high school students I find this somewhat offensive. Gifted kids should be encouraged (cautiously & organically) - not be turned into a beauty pageant style competition.
YCode 9y ago
While there is plenty to criticize about this article, knowing when not to intervene or help is one of the tougher and critical tasks of parenting. As an anecdotal example my toddler was often the smallest kid in a given group of playing children. He was at the mall play area one day and he kept getting knocked down onto the foam floor. I kept thinking man I've got to step in and helicopter a bit. I almost did, but right as another kid was about to bump into him he did something new. He bowed at the legs, leaned and braced with his elbows causing the kid to bounce off harmlessly and they both ran on. I'm often reminded of that moment now when I see him in safe but precarious situations. I'm always there for him if he needs me, but I have to wonder if I step in am I denying him a life lesson?
deleted 9y ago
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justjonathan 9y ago
"From its inception in 1942 until 1994, the search recognized more than 2000 precocious teenagers as finalists. But... just eight have won Nobel Prizes." Just?!? Said differently: slightly less than 1/2% of identified gifted teenagers in this group went on to win Nobel prizes. Given the rarity of Nobel prize winners and the difficulty of predicting future Nobel prize winners (as teenagers) that strikes me is pretty amazing.
- hexane360 9y ago
  To put that in perspective (thanks to another comment), there have only ever been 8 Nobel Prize winners from India.
mathattack 9y ago
Consider the nation’s most prestigious award for scientifically gifted high school students, the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, called the Super Bowl of science by one American president. From its inception in 1942 until 1994, the search recognized more than 2000 precocious teenagers as finalists. But just 1 percent ended up making the National Academy of Sciences, and just eight have won Nobel Prizes. 8 out of 2000 is a lot higher than most any other sample group.
- beloch 9y ago
  This is a classic "sounds small, but is actually huge" statistic. Most of these pop up when people are trying to be deceptive, but this one looks like a mistake. I'm surprised it slipped past both the author and editor.
- mlechha 9y ago
  Exactly! 2000 in 8 is fucking ridiculous! For some context, there have been only 8 Chinese and 7 Indian Nobel Laureates. That's two of the most populated countries in the world!
- myle 9y ago
  The article "forgets" that the pool of gifted children is much smaller than the general population. Of course, when you have a group of x people, and another group of λx people, you need to check whether you are getting the desired outcome from the two groups on a ration 1:λ and not on a 1:1 ratio. The article is missing this point.
- plafl 9y ago
  Yes, but I'm sure they are no Einsteins, which is of course the minimum we expect.
ilzmastr 9y ago
This article in the NYTimes is like Duchamp's urinal in a museum.
ezhil 9y ago
I don't think there is a fixed pattern in raising a creative child. Every child is different. Instilling creativity is not like a program running under specific conditions.
dnprock 9y ago
Over time, I see articles bouncing between discipline your children (aka tiger parenting) and let them free (aka nuture creativity.) There are passionate camps and black/white discussions. I think the most successful professionals need to have both. So it's best to work on both. In the case where you can't have both. I think it's better to focus on discipline. At least you'd get something tiny done, not just wandering around.
greggman 9y ago
I'd be really curious to hear from engineers that were made to play a musical instrument in childhood. I know some people believe there's a correlation between good engineers and musical study (no idea if that's true, only that I've read it before) I also know that I've rarely met a child that wants to practice their musical instrument. Usually they have to be made to do it "No TV, no internet, no video games until you've finished your piano practice!" "But Mom!!!!!" I know lots of adults that are happy they can play a musical instrument or speak a second language (parents sent them to language school as a child) but I know of few children who would chose to do either of them.
- InclinedPlane 9y ago
  100% true. Learning to play a musical instrument in childhood has positive long term effects in a variety of ways (improved neural plasticity past middle age, improved spatial reasoning ability throughout life, etc.) There's a pretty substantial and growing body of research on the subject now.
toepitt 9y ago
I'd like to know how to make an adult creative, not just a child.
Profragile 9y ago
My Step 1 would be: Don't listen to an internet article on how to raise a fucking child... specially if it's a NYT article.
gejjaxxita 9y ago
In adulthood, many prodigies become experts in their fields and leaders in their organizations. Yet only a fraction of gifted children eventually become revolutionary adult creators. This sentence, which the article hinges around, has no meaning. A tiny fraction will become revolutionary adult creators by definition - if their achievements were more commonplace then our understanding of what a revolutionary creator was would change to become more exclusive.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

517 points by bensummers 9y ago

> just eight have won Nobel Prizes You pick 2000 teenagers, and 8 go on to win a Nobel Prize, and you're still not satisfied? High expectations much...

mbroshi 9y ago
Agreed. This article may or may not have made some good points, but I couldn't keep reading after that.
- TheAlchemist 9y ago
  Same here - an instant blocker for me.
liquidise 9y ago
That means 1 in 250 go on to win a Nobel Prize. An absurd rate. I'd bet money that the only group to perform better over the same timeframe is the list Nobel Prize winners themselves. Edit: I stand corrected. Solvay Conference had 15/29 one year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solvay_Conference#Fifth_Conference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solvay_Conference#Fifth_Confer...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- ChicagoBoy11 9y ago
  Isn't the group of CalTech alumns slightly worse but on around the same order of magnitude?
jeffwass 9y ago
Author also contradicts himself. First the author laments only 8 novel prizes of the batch. Then in the next sentence goes on to praise Lisa Randall for revolutionising physics, and notes that for every Lisa Randall there are dozens that fall short of their potential. Ironic because Lisa Randall didn't win a Nobel Prize in physics. Yet.....
- 77pt77 9y ago
  > Ironic because Lisa Randall didn't win a Nobel Prize in physics. Yet..... And given her current work and experimental results there is no reasonable prospect she ever will, unlike people that you know that would win sooner or later (unless they died) > For every Lisa Randall who revolutionizes theoretical physics She did not revolutionize Physics. Not even close. She barely made a dent.
pfarnsworth 9y ago
Yeah this is actually a terrible article. The author keeps confusing creativity with success. And he keeps thinking that "creative" people are the ones that change the world, which is ridiculous. To change the world, you need to be almost insanely stubborn and almost insanely self-confident.

CuriouslyC 9y ago

My personal theory on this is twofold: 1.) High achievers are used to pushing at things to win. Creativity is like a garden - you have to do some tending, but then you have to back off and let the plants grow. Fiddling doesn't help, in fact you're liable to end up killing the plants. 2.) Smart people actually learn too fast. Creativity requires very broad neural connectivity, and I think fast learning tends to produce neural networks with sparse connectivity to different areas. This is supported to a degree by learning in artificial neural networks. When the learning rate in artificial neural networks is too fast, this can cause the network parameters to converge prematurely. This premature convergence typically results in poor generalization performance. It is also worth noting that human brains mature more slowly than those of previous hominids and great apes.

nostrebored 9y ago
Using neural networks as a machine learning concept to explain actual concepts in Neuroscience is a huge overstep. People have always thought the most advanced technology can be analogous to cognition, see steam engines and clocks.
- OisinMoran 9y ago
  Your second sentence is definitely true and very interesting but maybe you'd agree that the gap between our most advanced technology and the brain is decreasing to the point where this will eventually be right.
  - princeb 9y ago
    > gap between our most advanced technology and the brain is decreasing first we need to understand the brain.
- psyc 9y ago
  And those were progressively better analogies. These are great terms to think in, and it's not an overstep. It doesn't have to be absolutely true to be very useful for understanding.

hellofunk 9y ago

> The gifted learn to play magnificent Mozart melodies, but rarely compose their own original scores. Performing music and writing music are really very different art forms. I'm surprised this NY Times author has conflated the two. Writing music is not the next step after learning to play music.

cardamomo 9y ago
Within the Western classical music academy, these indeed are currently quite separate. That is not universal to all musical traditions.

blackkettle 9y ago

> In adulthood, many prodigies become experts in their fields and leaders in their organizations. Yet “only a fraction of gifted children eventually become revolutionary adult creators,” laments the psychologist Ellen Winner. Why on earth is that something to 'lament'?

justinjlynn 9y ago
I think their point is that, for some reason, it is lamentable that they did not fulfill the whole of their potential. Whether or not that is lamentable is its own argument. The privilege exhibited by the talented who consciously do not use their potential is the ultimate insult to those who are not given the opportunity - not only is it in no way controllable by humanity, it can in no way be granted by any kind of affirmative action. I imagine the lament is probably sourced there somehow.

padobson 9y ago

The parents of ordinary children had an average of six rules, like specific schedules for homework and bedtime. Parents of highly creative children had an average of fewer than one rule. I grew up in a household where compliance to parental authority was the prevailing rule. This made me fairly compliant as an adult (which opens you up for exploitation by peers and authority figures), but this wasn't too difficult to unravel with a few dozen sessions of therapy. As a result, I pass down very few rules as a parent, and it's been a joy to watch my daughter's creativity blossom. We've done what the article suggests - provided moral guidelines to live by, rather than any strict set of rules. She loves real estate - specifically interior design, but also analyzing neighborhoods, improving curb appeal, and understanding what makes a good school district. I think the seeds were planted when I was taking her with me in the evenings to do various handyman tasks at our rental property. We would stop for ice cream and she would sit there and eat it while I put together furniture or changed light bulbs or swept common areas. And while our lax rules have certainly inspired creativity and fed into her individuality, it hasn't done a great deal to build work ethic. I'm aware of the stereotype of parents believing their kids are lazy, so I'm open to being wrong here. Striking a balance between giving a kid a framework to discover herself but also emphasizing the importance of work ethic is probably my greatest concern as a parent. I don't want to stifle her from dreaming, but I want her to do what's necessary to accomplish those dreams too. My big question is this: when the time comes to put in the work the accomplish what she wants, is she going to be ready to put down the ice cream spoon and pick up a screw driver? I don't know. But I'm going to continue with the light touch and hope for the best.

blowski 9y ago
I have the same anxiety, on the opposite side of the spectrum. My parents were very relaxed, and now I'm trying to impose more structure on my son's life. You can't guarantee any outcome. I don't know what level of influence you can even have, there are so many variables involved. All you can do is what you think is right, and react to circumstances as you go along.
aleem 9y ago
From one of the comments on the article > Backing off will no more produce a creative genius than pushing your child. Neither strategy makes the slightest difference to what is essentially an autonomous process. Beethoven's father did not back off. And Lars von Trier's parents left him to his own devices. Both are geniuses and both hated their childhood. > My guess is that most parents who follow Adam Grant's spurious advice (one rule or none is better than six) will end up with the rude obnoxious brats whom you can see bouncing off the waiting room walls of any upscale Manhattan pediatrician's office. Maybe one of a million such brats will spontaneously become a creative genius as an adult but so will one out of a million drones who win spelling bees and piano competitions. > But guess what, a large proportion of the remaining brats will be all attitude and no skill while the drones will at least become doctors and corporate lawyers. By using creativity as the ultimate-and perhaps only-benchmark, Mr. Grant falls into the same trap as the Tiger Moms he so despises. > Enjoying a thing does make it more likely that a child will own it. But sometimes the initial drudgery is necessary to make the breakthrough to find something worth enjoying. > When it comes to raising children the golden rule is that there is no golden rule. The greatest scientific creative genius of recent memory, Richard Feynman realized this when he tried to teach his children and discovered that what worked for his son did not work for his daughter.

shouldbworking 9y ago

I may be biased from my own experience, but I remember being incredibly frustrated at a young age from the lack of help understanding things I was "too young" for. My role models and teachers made zero efforts to help me learn analog circuit design and my first programming language, Perl. This made it much harder than it would have been if I was attending actual classes, and probably set back my understanding many years. I'm not sure how much of an outlier I am, but our education system is not built for creative types. It's too hard to get placed in anything significantly above your grade level, especially if your brilliance is restricted to a single subject. I remember showing an bistable flipflop design to my science teacher in 5th grade and getting a puzzled "that's nice Johnny" type look when I wanted help figuring out why my breadboard version wouldn't oscillate. A few of my skills were so beyond what anyone expected that they didn't know what to do with me, or what they were even looking at, so they did nothing. It took another eleven years before I had contact with any teachers that matched my experience level with programming and circuit design. During that time I advanced my skills slightly, but not having any peers made me an outcast and certainly left me far behind where I could have been. Backing off is a bad idea. You need to take your child's curiousity and do everything you can to keep it alive. I'm sure a lot of kids started out like me but eventually let their dreams die.

nnfy 9y ago
I share your frustration. Unfortunately, public schools are not places where remarkable people tend to congregate, and those near the mean are typically not equipped to teach such technical subjects, or even recognize the value in having young children learn them. There is vast potential wasted in our [U.S.] public school system.
- shouldbworking 9y ago
  The problem for me, and perhaps many others, is that the "smart" are sorted out early and carted out of regular classrooms. If you miss the boat it gets substantially more difficult, almost impossible, to get back on that track. I remember my parents trying to get me into advanced classes in sixth grade but the school rules said it needed to be done by third grade. I couldn't skip a year either, it was too late. The second (harder) way into double advanced classes was to pass a test going into high school. That test contained math that only those already in advanced classes had been taught. I aced the reading portion, scoring at 11th grade reading level, but it wasn't enough. The same year I was sponsored to be an exchange student to Europe but my family couldn't afford the plane tickets. A year later, bored out of my skull and disappointed, I gave up completely on public school. I embraced mediocrity because I figured out I could get by with no real effort. I concentrated my creativity outside of school and learned more programming languages and electronics. I never got above a C average again until college. Some teachers saw promise but I let them down because I didn't show up to class and was always in trouble. I knew I had missed the boat to the good classes that led to good scholarships and onto good colleges, and I was bitter and didn't give a shit anymore. To get into the caliber of school I dreamed about I would have needed more than just good grades in regular classes, and all the windows except sports closed before highschool even started. There's been some articles about "lost diamonds", which may explain why smart people do better as a whole but the large majority still end up living average lives and doing nothing of note. I might not have been any smarter than average, but I definitely feel like I was one of those kids who the system left behind. I knew many others I considered smart that shared my company at the troublemaking fringe of highschool society, definitely a pile of wasted potential at the bottom.

kiyanwang 9y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r#Education_and_career https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r#E... I remember reading some of László Polgár work after becoming interested in how he raised three daughters, two became chess prodigies, the third a concert musician. He posited that "that any child has the innate capacity to become a genius in any chosen field, as long as education starts before their third birthday and they begin to specialise at six". This seems at odds with the notion that parents should "back off".

ziikutv 9y ago
Bookmarked! Additionally, as I mentioned in another post. Many parts of the world have some of the most creative children and adults and their parents did the opposite. Not saying either of these is right or wrong, but I am beginning to think creativity, like anything else, is more affected by culture and the surrounding of a child rather than just parenting. Kids are seen more by their peers and teachers than their parents ffs.
SamReidHughes 9y ago
At least it works if your kid has the genes of a parent with the patience to read through 400 biographies.

paganel 9y ago

> When Dr. Bloom’s team interviewed tennis players who were ranked in the top 10 in the world, they were not, to paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld, doing push-ups since they were a fetus. And then you see a clip of 5-year old Messi (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DWZ0fD64Uk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DWZ0fD64Uk) demolishing the other 5-year old kids who happened to share the same football field as him and realize that "letting your kid be creative" and all this mumbo-jumbo talk doesn't mean anything unless your kid doesn't have the inside genius-like quality. Bonus link, the Maradona childhood tricks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAjQ7NF8Hj0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAjQ7NF8Hj0

revelation 9y ago
It's even more laughable for any sort of endurance sports, where the genetic components are very well known. The best marathon runner is probably sitting on a couch eating a bag of cheetos.
- fjdlwlv 9y ago
  The best marathon runners are from an African community of genetically strong marathoners , who run a lot all their lives. Nature + nurture beats either alone

ziikutv 9y ago

Being a good parent is becoming an increasing concern of mine as I am reaching an age where I could probably get married in some parts of the world. Its giving me anxiety, wanting to be not a shitty father... Digression aside: > Creativity may be hard to nurture, but it’s easy to thwart. There are many parents though that do just to opposite by not backing off no? This is sort of generalizing, but kids from Asian countries are a great counterpoint to this. With that in mind, couldn't we also amend that theory, and add culture as a factor? Furthermore, isn't it also the case that since kids are getting into school earlier than they used to (say 50 or so years ago; random number, don't goto imright.com and disprove it xD), wouldn't they be more susceptible to other kids/teachers? I mean now a days parents see their kids less than their teachers. They basically work 9-5 just like adults. Addendum: Forgot which famous book this is from: But appraising a child for their hardwork over natural talent is one of the best things we can do. So to that end, creativity should be garnered as something one has to work towards. Man.. I can't wait to test all this shit on my kids.. (obviously joking) Edit: Change wording and add more meaningful question.

mseri 9y ago
The book might be 'Brain Rules for kids' by John Medina. A scientific account of what we know and don't know of brain development from the womb to 5. Really enjoyable and full of useful insights
- goodJobWalrus 9y ago
  or 'Nurture Shock' that also has a chapter on that.

nnfy 9y ago

Nurture should follow nature. No single parenting style will fit every child. Some children need to be pushed harder, some need more freedom; what's important is to recognize what works and what doesn't and accommodate as necessary. Of course, this is not an easy task, and you only get one chance. I think the most important thing, however, is to provide resources for learning, far beyond what is available in our pitiful public education system, which is designed more to cater to the mean and less to allow remarkable students to fully excel.

siliconc0w 9y ago

I think 'genius' is more about tuning the innate plasticity of a child's mind to be good at a certain type of task. World class chess players see positions and variations like how 'normals' might recognize an old friend. The 'creative' part comes in when you have brain that is marvelously tuned for one thing, you can iterate and experiment very quickly.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

zxv 9y ago

There is no way quite as certain to accelerate a child's pursuit of great goals, than to instill confidence in them. In my experience, it is the first and most important step with which they begin to choose their own pace in learning new skills, by convincing them that any failures are temporary, and that they can believe in their vision because those they trust believe in them. I believe that the second step, making things fun, mostly consists of letting young people be with their friends, with no more than some open space, and only the minimum adult involvement needed to maintain safety.

kendallpark 9y ago

Let's take a big step back and remember that even if you set up the most creativity-nurturing environment, it does not guarantee that your kids are going to flourish creatively. Kids are autonomous creatures that still choose their own activities. My siblings and I had the same imperfect parenting, same resources, similar genetics, etc, and at the end of the day I was the one that went hardcore down creative pursuits during childhood. I could see a similar spark in my siblings, but for whatever reason they put their 10,000 hours elsewhere. It was only during college that one of my brothers picked up writing and the other picked up music. The potential (and opportunity!) was always there, but for whatever reason they didn't capitalize on it in childhood.

slantaclaus 9y ago

Having not yet read the article, I would say yes, there is truth in that statement, but holding people accountable is a big part of what drives success. Compromise: Tease them into and help them create some of their own rules but enforce them(?)

ucontrol 9y ago

A dull article ridden with blatantly false claims and oversimplification of an otherwise complicated topic. >Gifted children who have a noticeable head start and whose skill development begins remarkably early _do not_ usually end up being game changing professionals in their respective fields. Really now? >Developing a skill set early on leads to competence in what is learned but stumps creativity and chances of innovation. So having an deep, innate, intuitive grasp of a certain set of knowledge, made possible by said early exposure and disciplined training, has nothing to do with genius and potential inventive achievement in later life? But rather, it only allows for uncreative competence in what is learned and practiced, that and only that? Really? Is this man serious? How does something like this even pass for an article? How much thinking goes into writing something like this? Christ almighty. I love it because the very things that Mr. Grant here paints as inhibitory to creativity are exactly the essential components of creative genius! His information is not only incorrect, it is the exact opposite of how things do work in real life. It's not a zero sum game. Both of aspects in question - Disciplined skill development as well as Creativity - are essential for intellectual success and are interdependent. Structure, discipline, strong parent engagement and emphasis on learning and skill development, AS WELL AS creative undertakings, play, leisurely engagement, passionate tinkering / creation - both aspects are crucial. In order to be able to create, the child has to imitate first. In order to fall in love with a pursuit, it has to be exposed to it first. And in order to be creatively successful in a pursuit, the child has to be very skilled in it first. And parents' intervention, guidance and support are very important in this regard.

gabrielgoh 9y ago
All I see here are your opinions, while the article has numerous citations and data to back up its claims. The reason why the article is interesting is because it goes against the common wisdom "you need to know the rules to break em", and backs its claim up with peer-reviewed science. And while you may find the findings unpalatable, isn't this how progress is made?
- replicatorblog 9y ago
  The main data the author cites is a 32-year-old pop psychology book where n=120. The rest is expert opinion. He also avoids making a case for why trying raising a child who is merely hyper-competent is less desirable goal than creating one who remakes a field of inquiry. After all, why would you want your child to become a run-of-the-mill Oncologist if they're not also going to win a Nobel Prize. For all the author's dressing up a horrid argument with strained "statistics," he misses a key fact. True breakthroughs in most fields come around rarely, in time frames usually measured in decades. In the meantime, the market for high-end practitioners is evergreen. For every Mozart, there are thousands of musicians to play in world-class orchestras. For every Jonas Salk, there are hundreds of thousands of doctors. On a risk-adjusted scale, shooting for competent if slightly less creative seems like a much wiser bet.

replicatorblog 9y ago

In adulthood, many prodigies become experts in their fields and leaders in their organizations. Yet only a fraction of gifted children eventually become revolutionary adult creators. My daughter is being treated for Leukemia by some amazing doctors at Boston Children's Hospital. To my knowledge, none of the health care professionals at this world-class institution have won Nobel Prizes in medicine. All the same, for my daughter's sake, I'm still glad they hit the books for a couple decades. There are great honor and value in doing an important job consistently and well. This idea that a life is wasted if you don't remake a field in your image seems hollow when these prodigies often end up with the power to save lives.

Spooky23 9y ago
That's a thing that always bothers me about these articles. If the standard of success for a gifted grade school kid is to be a Nobel laureate, that's a little warped. My grandfather was one of the smartest guys I ever met. Through the circumstances of fate, he couldn't get education beyond the 8th grade. Yet he tutored my mom in calculus and did all sorts of good things for people. By any standard of mine, he lived a long, fruitful and successful life... yet he's a failure in the debate of an article like this.
- ilyaeck 9y ago
  +1000
smackingly 9y ago
Maybe I'm biased because I'm a no-name physician at a community hospital, but the "best doctors" in my eyes are the ones with the best outcomes, lowest utilization, highest efficiency and highest patient satisfaction. These measures don't correlate well with the physician's credentials. I learned this in residency, which I did just down the street from a "top" university hospital. We out-performed that place on every level except our doctors went to "lesser" medical schools. They simply spent more money (on wild things like ECMO, which makes everyone feel they're making more of a difference even though the outcomes are the same without it). Our profession is moving toward identifying these doctors and promoting their behavior to the entire field. There's a study that showed lower heart attack mortality when all the "top" cardiologists were out of the hospital attending a cardiology meeting. Too many confounders to make any real conclusions from that, but it lines up with my point. Of course, if your child has a serious life-threatening and/or rare disease, then you want her to be treated at a vanguard institution like the one you took yours to. No dispute from me on that one. But in the system as a whole, we make the most difference reducing complications of cardiovascular disease, sepsis, pneumonia, COPD, and kidney disease (which are orders of magnitude more common). And we're starting to find out how to identify doctors that do it better, with fewer complications, and with much higher efficiency than others. I think those are the best doctors and it's what I'm striving to be.

replicatorblog 9y ago

Tiger Woods and Serena and Venus Williams are arguably the most iconic players in their sports in the last two decades and both are famous for overbearing fathers who forced them to practice from the time they could hold clubs and racquets.

haimez 9y ago
They're also famous as athletes and not creatives.
- replicatorblog 9y ago
  The article's author referenced athletes as well as creatives: Even the best athletes didn’t start out any better than their peers. When Dr. Bloom’s team interviewed tennis players who were ranked in the top 10 in the world, they were not, to paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld, doing push-ups since they were a fetus. Few of them faced intense pressure to perfect the game as Andre Agassi did. A majority of the tennis stars remembered one thing about their first coaches: They made tennis enjoyable.
sanswork 9y ago
And on the other end you have Todd Marinovich.

noonespecial 9y ago

Step zero: Get to know them. Then decide if you should back off or do any other of a thousand things that might help them. All kids are different. Child rearing is as far from "one weird trick" territory as you can get.

aliceyhg 9y ago

In cultures like Korea, hierarchy and unconditional respect for their elders is so deeply rooted that it is evident in the language itself (When addressing elders or someone more important, you have to speak a specific way). This gives a false sense of righteousness and superiority. In societies like these, could the culture itself be an obstacle to creative growth?

geomark 9y ago
It is similar in many countries. In Thailand, where I live, it is also built into the language. There are many different pronouns for addressing others based on your relative social standing. There are pronouns not only for normal societal interactions, but special pronouns for when you are speaking to monks and another set when speaking to/about royal family members. In fact, there are even different verbs that are used when talking about common activities of monks and royalty. Makes for a very pretentious culture and it certainly does inhibit critical thinking in much of the population.

lacampbell 9y ago

Why do you feel entitled to foist your own or other peoples problems onto strangers?

c22 9y ago
Why do you assume kids are problems to begin with? I have met hundreds of kids during my adult life and the highest any of them has risen to for me is minor annoyance. I've had more trouble from my cars.
- lacampbell 9y ago
  I'm not the one that used "problem" to describe kids, btw. FWIW I quite like kids. But saying strangers kids are my responsibility because of "society" is not true at all.
  - jackvalentine 9y ago
    Kids are a part of society, and society has a stake in what kind of adult they become. In the same way drug addicts are society's problem, or unemployed people are society's problem, or sociopathic second generation rich never-worked-a-day drunk drivers are society's problem. This isn't to say that you'll be conscripted in to a psudo-parent role against your will, but they are your responsibility as a member of society in a very abstract way.
    - lacampbell 9y ago
      In that case, I revoke my membership to society. I have my own problems.
      - jackvalentine 9y ago
        You can do so by moving out in to the middle of nowhere and becoming a self-sufficient hermit. Anything less and sorry, but you're a part of society.

lucidguppy 9y ago

Every child must be raised by the book - unfortunately every child has their own book...

Jimmy 9y ago

>What holds them back is that they don’t learn to be original. More than likely, they simply lacked the capacity to be original (as in, world-class historical originality, which is the subject under discussion here), just in the same way that almost all people lack this capacity. It's only particularly surprising that child prodigies rarely become adult geniuses if you confuse genius with the capacity to learn information and acquire skills. Mastering calculus at age 6, though highly unusual, does not in itself constitute original work, and, going off of the data, is not an extremely strong indicator of the presence of the capacity to do original work. So you can't necessarily expect creativity-focused interventions on child prodigies to produce more revolutionary geniuses than normal.

hacknat 9y ago
Excellent point. If anything the anecdotal data points to the opposite being true. Hendrix didn't learn guitar until 17. Einstein showed signs of having a genius for math and science in his education, but not anything above warranting anything, but being accepted to a middling teachers college. Edison didn't graduate high school and invented the phonograph in his spare time in his late 20s as a telegraph operator.

bitJericho 9y ago

It's so important to let your kid think. I see parents helicoptering and it's very damaging. I had met a couple at a friendly gathering that brought their 2 year old. Not only could he hardly talk, which was surprising to me, he had no chance to make any decision. The child and his parents were paging through a sales flyer, because they didn't think to bring suitable activities, and they were ogling over toys. So I pointed to the knives on a page that came up and joined in, "oh let's get these" and the child instinctively said yeah! Then I could see the clockworks moving and before the kid could say anything the parents chimed in. A missed opportunity to let the kid make his own, good, decision. I fear he'll grow up and fail to make decisions at all. Conversely, with my children, I try to talk with them as much as I can, and let them talk too. I let them order food themselves and I demand good table manners. That doesn't mean they can't be children, but they are not allowed to climb under or on the table, or be a nuisance. An easy fix for a problem child in a restaurant is to leave. The child must learn that there are consequences. The child wont go? Leave without them and they will freak and catch up. They fail that drag them out. Saying no and sticking with it is important, but equally important is giving the child a chance to catch up, mentally, with decision making and situational awareness.

KyleJune 9y ago
I didn't talk at all till I was 5 years old. I turned out well. But my parents were the opposite of helicopter parents though. I literally just did whatever I wanted all the time. I use to walk around a swamp near by, by myself or with friends, to catch turtles and snakes. Never got in trouble for grades. Got in a fight once when I was in 5th grade. Most my Mom did was ask me if I got any good hits in. lol
- bitJericho 9y ago
  I think extemes in general are bad, but off the cuff I would suspect no parenting to be better than overparenting. At least you got to see the consequences of poor choices, and that the world really doesn't give two shits about you (or anyone).

Havoc 9y ago

>prestigious award for scientifically gifted high school students I find this somewhat offensive. Gifted kids should be encouraged (cautiously & organically) - not be turned into a beauty pageant style competition.

YCode 9y ago

While there is plenty to criticize about this article, knowing when not to intervene or help is one of the tougher and critical tasks of parenting. As an anecdotal example my toddler was often the smallest kid in a given group of playing children. He was at the mall play area one day and he kept getting knocked down onto the foam floor. I kept thinking man I've got to step in and helicopter a bit. I almost did, but right as another kid was about to bump into him he did something new. He bowed at the legs, leaned and braced with his elbows causing the kid to bounce off harmlessly and they both ran on. I'm often reminded of that moment now when I see him in safe but precarious situations. I'm always there for him if he needs me, but I have to wonder if I step in am I denying him a life lesson?

deleted 9y ago

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justjonathan 9y ago

"From its inception in 1942 until 1994, the search recognized more than 2000 precocious teenagers as finalists. But... just eight have won Nobel Prizes." Just?!? Said differently: slightly less than 1/2% of identified gifted teenagers in this group went on to win Nobel prizes. Given the rarity of Nobel prize winners and the difficulty of predicting future Nobel prize winners (as teenagers) that strikes me is pretty amazing.

hexane360 9y ago
To put that in perspective (thanks to another comment), there have only ever been 8 Nobel Prize winners from India.

mathattack 9y ago

Consider the nation’s most prestigious award for scientifically gifted high school students, the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, called the Super Bowl of science by one American president. From its inception in 1942 until 1994, the search recognized more than 2000 precocious teenagers as finalists. But just 1 percent ended up making the National Academy of Sciences, and just eight have won Nobel Prizes. 8 out of 2000 is a lot higher than most any other sample group.

beloch 9y ago
This is a classic "sounds small, but is actually huge" statistic. Most of these pop up when people are trying to be deceptive, but this one looks like a mistake. I'm surprised it slipped past both the author and editor.
mlechha 9y ago
Exactly! 2000 in 8 is fucking ridiculous! For some context, there have been only 8 Chinese and 7 Indian Nobel Laureates. That's two of the most populated countries in the world!
myle 9y ago
The article "forgets" that the pool of gifted children is much smaller than the general population. Of course, when you have a group of x people, and another group of λx people, you need to check whether you are getting the desired outcome from the two groups on a ration 1:λ and not on a 1:1 ratio. The article is missing this point.
plafl 9y ago
Yes, but I'm sure they are no Einsteins, which is of course the minimum we expect.

ilzmastr 9y ago

This article in the NYTimes is like Duchamp's urinal in a museum.

ezhil 9y ago

I don't think there is a fixed pattern in raising a creative child. Every child is different. Instilling creativity is not like a program running under specific conditions.

dnprock 9y ago

Over time, I see articles bouncing between discipline your children (aka tiger parenting) and let them free (aka nuture creativity.) There are passionate camps and black/white discussions. I think the most successful professionals need to have both. So it's best to work on both. In the case where you can't have both. I think it's better to focus on discipline. At least you'd get something tiny done, not just wandering around.

greggman 9y ago

I'd be really curious to hear from engineers that were made to play a musical instrument in childhood. I know some people believe there's a correlation between good engineers and musical study (no idea if that's true, only that I've read it before) I also know that I've rarely met a child that wants to practice their musical instrument. Usually they have to be made to do it "No TV, no internet, no video games until you've finished your piano practice!" "But Mom!!!!!" I know lots of adults that are happy they can play a musical instrument or speak a second language (parents sent them to language school as a child) but I know of few children who would chose to do either of them.

InclinedPlane 9y ago
100% true. Learning to play a musical instrument in childhood has positive long term effects in a variety of ways (improved neural plasticity past middle age, improved spatial reasoning ability throughout life, etc.) There's a pretty substantial and growing body of research on the subject now.

toepitt 9y ago

I'd like to know how to make an adult creative, not just a child.

Profragile 9y ago

My Step 1 would be: Don't listen to an internet article on how to raise a fucking child... specially if it's a NYT article.

gejjaxxita 9y ago

In adulthood, many prodigies become experts in their fields and leaders in their organizations. Yet only a fraction of gifted children eventually become revolutionary adult creators. This sentence, which the article hinges around, has no meaning. A tiny fraction will become revolutionary adult creators by definition - if their achievements were more commonplace then our understanding of what a revolutionary creator was would change to become more exclusive.

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