The hothouse effect

The author of a new book about gifted children talks about the big business of "enrichment" and the joys of just being average.

By Sarah Karnasiewicz

Read more: Marketing, Education, Schools, Prodigy, Life

Aug. 31, 2006 | Never before has raising a talented kid seemed such an exhaustive, expensive undertaking. IQ-enhancing baby formulas. "Brainy-baby" toys in stimulating shapes and scientifically approved colors. Infant DVDs designed to inspire mini van Goghs and mold budding Olympic champs -- and imprint children with crucial skills while their brains and bodies are still soft. If the shelves of Babies R Us are any evidence, it is these props -- not blankets and bottles -- that are the new necessities for devoted parents. Whether such extreme parenting is the byproduct of swollen middle-class egos or a genuine anxiety about the demands of an increasingly competitive world, the result remains the same. Across America, for those who can afford it, childhood has begun to look a lot less like a summer camp and a lot more like a training camp.

In her new book, "Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child," author Alissa Quart dubs this conflation of childhood, competition and commerce the "Baby Genius Edutainment Complex." While careful not to vilify parents who want the best for their kids, Quart -- who was herself a gifted youngster who discussed modernist painting at age 5 and entered national writing competitions at 13 -- turns a skeptical eye on the growing genius-building business and paints a bittersweet picture of what the life of a child prodigy really looks like. Along with the social isolation that comes with odd obsessive interests (who can a 6-year-old carnivorous plant expert talk shop with?), the hothouse kid is burdened by a premature emphasis on maturity and professionalism. And unfortunately, as Quart discovers, for every well-adjusted child math ace who sails smoothly into life as a financial service wiz, there are two prodigies whose adult lives never live up to their fantasies. Echoing the sentiments of many of her subjects, Quart herself admits that despite her family's pride, as she grew, even her own relatively tame talents started to seem like an albatross around her neck -- one that "deform[ed] the rest of my life, giving me great expectations that I wouldn't be able to fulfill, and suffusing all of my actual accomplishments with the scent of failure."

It might be tempting to roll one's eyes at the sufferings of kids who are showered with language tutors or ushered into concert piano careers before they're even 9. Indeed, though bemoaning the "overburdened" lives of kids has of late become a familiar refrain in magazines and newspapers, it's a credit to Quart's work that she confronts the fact that students who are stressed out by too many extracurricular gigs remain a tiny, privileged minority in a country where gifted programs are being gutted from public schools, and the bare-bones mandates of No Child Left Behind have driven the divide between the haves and the have-nots even wider.

What can our schools be doing better, to help discover and nurture giftedness, whether a child lives in Beverly Hills, Calif., or Bedford-Stuyvesant, in New York? In the end, Quart's book leaves educators and parents with more questions than easy answers. Is genius born, or can it be taught? Is there an age when it is too late to learn? How much is enrichment a blessing, and how much is it a curse? That is the dilemma of giftedness.

Salon spoke with Quart in New York to talk about boredom, the allure of the wild-child artist -- and why there's nothing wrong with being average.

You begin the book talking about your own memories of being a gifted child. How much of your interest in this subject was born out of your own experiences?

I was in no way a prodigy -- not like many of the kids in my book. I want to make that clear. I was just a bright, driven kid. But having grown up like that, and around a lot of people who were also that way, I'm interested in what a mixed blessing that was. Giftedness gives you this amazing tool kit for handling self-discipline, and gives you an area of knowledge, but then it also gives you this weird set of aspirations. Everyone I spoke to had that feeling that they had these fantasies about who they would grow up to be that really exceeded the ordinary. And those grand expectations had a real effect on them.

Is that one of the problems gifted kids face? That they are forced to confront the question of who they are at a much earlier age than most people?

Yes, though another way of looking at it is that they are not just forced to think of that question, but that they actually are something at an earlier age than most people. But the other model of childhood, which I would argue is not so great either, is the one in which the child is nothing -- the child is a cipher.

Right now what I find interesting is that besides giftedness there are all these other supposed markers of "specialness" to contend with as well, like learning disabilities and ADHD [attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder]. Every child is special in a certain way in contemporary culture. Every child was always special, but there's a particular focus on naming that now.

What does "gifted" actually mean? And is the amorphousness of the term part of the problem people have when talking about giftedness?

Yes, I do think the term has gotten amorphous. Also, a parent has to be able to say their kids are gifted and then they are gifted. So that's a class marker -- you may as well just say I have a middle-class child. In fact, one education professor said to me, and this is arguable, but that IQ is just a test of middle-class social behaviors. So it is a predictor of how well a child will perform, but just not for the reasons we might think.

The class issue seems really thorny, because not only does one need money to pay for extracurricular classes, but if you want your child to qualify for a gifted program, you not only have to know about those programs in the first place, you also have to be able to afford the proper qualifying tests.

Yes, and doing the reporting for this book I saw clearly how much parental access was a factor. It's about cultural capital. Once you can confidently assert a child's capabilities and needs, then it's much easier to get services. But that takes a lot of confidence as well as money. While working on the book, I went to one program called the Oliver Program, which is sort of like a Prep for Prep program, which matches kids of color with independent schools, and when I heard parents there speak, almost all their stories and questions were practical or about access -- like whether they could visit a private school. And that's really not just an economic issue, it's a confidence issue. So my bromide on this subject is that the enriched kid is now likely to be overenriched while the deprived kid is likely to not have access. It's as though another achievement gap is opening up around giftedness.

But selling the promise of "giftedness" to parents is big business.

Yes, definitely. It's everywhere. To me the idea of "smart" baby formula was a real revelation. I don't know what the numbers are now, but while I was researching, something like 50 percent of the formula market purported itself as "smart-making." All this just happened within the past three or four years and there are now vitamins that are meant to be taken prenatally that are supposedly intelligence producing -- all of which is just a funny packaging trick. But it tells us a lot about ourselves. The assumption that we can do these concrete things to make our kids smarter is just really appealing to us.

Next page: "If achieving 'expert' status takes 10,000 hours of practice, when else are you going to get that time in?"