Child Prodigy--One Form of Giftedness
Like all aspects of gifted education, the topic of child prodigies is controversial. Adequate research seems to be lacking.
According to Wikipedia, “A child prodigy is someone who is a master of one or more skills or arts at an early age. One generally accepted heuristic for identifying prodigies is the following: a prodigy is someone who, by the age of roughly 11, displays expert proficiency or a profound grasp of the fundamentals in a field usually only undertaken by adults.”
According to D. Feldman in Child Prodigies: A Distinctive Form of Giftedness, a child prodigy may have a reasonably high, but not necessarily exceptionally high, IQ. Prodigies tend to be unusually focused, determined, and highly motivated to reach the highest levels of their fields. They are often marked by great confidence in their abilities, along with a naive sense of these abilities.
The Myth of Prodigy and Why it Matters summarizes a talk given by Malcolm Gladwell at this year’s convention of the Association for Psychological Science. The best-selling author of Blink and The Tipping Point was considered by some to be a child prodigy. Society often assumes that great ability in any given field that is manifested early on is a predictor of the continued success in that field when one becomes an adult, but Gladwell questions any evidence of that.
Another way to look at precocity is to work backward—to look at adult geniuses and see what they were like as kids. A number of studies have taken this approach and they find a similar pattern. Gladwell cites a study of 200 highly accomplished adults that found just 34 percent had been considered in any way precocious as children. He also read a long list of historical geniuses who had been notably undistinguished as children. The list included Copernicus, Rembrandt, Bach, Newton, Beethoven, Kant, and Da Vinci. We think of precociousness as an early form of adult achievement, and, according to Gladwell, that concept is much of the problem. “What a gifted child is, in many ways, is a gifted learner. And what a gifted adult is, is a gifted doer. And those are quite separate domains of achievement,” Gladwell notes.
I would like to add to the list of Other Gifted Blogs that I recently posted here. The Boy Who Knew Too Much: A Child Prodigy is a blog written by the father of a young boy in Singapore, deemed to be a scientific child prodigy. It is interesting to hear about the development of the child and the reaction of the parents and other adults.
In Celebrating the Child in Child Prodigy, J.K. Ward cautions parents of highly precocious children to help them find balance in their lives—including just being a kid. Because the focus is often so strong on the strength of the child, it may be easy to forget to teach the child basic ways to take care of himself. Also, because a prodigy is often told how wonderful she is, she may actually stop trying to develop her talents further.