I have many random thoughts to share. I’ll start with the expectation many in society have regarding people with high intellect using it to serve society. I feel this is similar to society putting the expectation on people who are born beautiful to be Playboy or Play Girl centerfolds, nude models for artists, super models, or some other job which makes use of their looks to serve society’s “needs”. It’s also similar to feeling that someone born 6’11 who has a fantastic basketball talent would be lacking morals if a career in the NBA wasn’t entered into if offered, even if the person hates basketball or at least has other job opportunities which would make the person happier. I grant you that coming up with a cancer cure or various other things which are more gray matter dependent than physique dependent could better life for society in a more important way, but isn’t interesting that America pays it’s professional athletes and porn stars better than it does its scientists and even the person who runs the county politically? I feel people have a moral obligation to be self-supporting and not intentionally wronging others, but beyond that, I think people can go too far in their expectation of what people “should” do with their lives.
Next, I’d like to respond to the issue of parents who have kids reading at 18 months being pushy (and whatever worse words people might use). Our son wasn’t reading newspaper articles at 18 months, but he was reading words like “Happy” from a TV Guide FTD ad for Valentine’s Day flowers, “game” and “closed” at the mall, “clean” off a dishwasher, “Doh” off a Play Doh container, “edit” while sitting on his mother’s lap while she typed something on the computer, and other words, including “reading”. At 19 months, he was reading things like a banner that said, “Welcome to the neighborhood.” It was quite faschinating to see his gears turning; he said, “Hood, neighborhood!” It was like reading was this great little puzzle for him, and he was quite good at it. At age 2, he was reading books and magazines on his own, and was also correcting my spelling, reading my business letters and suggesting words which would be more descriptive, and correcting typos and grammatical errors in things like a concert program no sooner than did we take our seats. We never had ANY intention of teaching a tiny tot to read (I didn’t even know it was possible for anyone to teach a toddler to read), and never used any flashcards or phonics programs. Our son simply had a way of learning that was most unusual. Hours after he was born, he was already rolling from his stomach to his back. Again, we never tried to teach him to do this, as I had enough child psychology courses to “know” babies didn’t start doing this typically until 19 weeks of age (and I wasn’t completely delighted when he was rolling from stomach to back and back to stomach, either, as it meant he had to be kept an eye on all the closer). Our son also is pretty decent at math, and again, this is not because we have drilled math into him. As he learned to read by pointing to words and asking what they were, he learned math in large part by having an inquiring mind and parents who didn’t respond with, “Don’t worry about that. You are too young for it.” He was doing three digit negative number math in his head at age 2, and at age 5, he was doing algebra problems in his head while walking along the beach (solving for X and Y for given problems using factorials, square roots, exponents, etc.). Also at age 5, he asked what the “log” key on his father’s scientific calculator was for, and after a 5-10 minute discussion on logs, was that night in his head solving problems such as log base three of 1/9 (which is negative two). We were very fortunate in that our son’s pediatrician strongly urged us to homeschool our son when our son was 18 months old and had shown an interest in magnets, resulting in my taking out a puzzle I had of magnetic states, and then in two hours of studying the state shapes, he knew 30-some by memory (in any orientation, even flipped so that only the black side was showing). By the way, this doctor was married to someone with two Ph.D.s and had two sons attending the same public school system our son would have attended had we not homeschooled our son.
My point is that the notion that precocious kids (or exceptionally precocious kids) are the result of pushy, wacko parents is not always true (while I might be wacko, I am really rather laid back about most things, including our son’s education, for the most part), though I suspect it is true some portion of the time, and have no idea if William Sidis had pushy parents or not as I have not read but this article about him and would not base any such opinion on one article alone. Our son wasn’t turning around hours after birth because he taught him to, and the mere notion that this could be so is enough to make me laugh. When he was probably a few months from being born, I happened to pat my “belly” a few times, and noticed our son either kicked or punched back the same number of times. I felt it was probably coincidental, but tapped a different number of times, and again, he mimiced the number of taps. I wasn’t trying to teach our son to count or anything; this was purely a freak thing.
From what I could tell skimming the responses here, no parents of precocious kids had posted yet, and I want to share with you what an enjoyable ride it is having a kid who is so quick to learn, but more importantly, at least in our case, such a happy and good child. Our son used his quick reading ability (at 7, he could read about 700 words per minute with 100% comprehension using Speed Reading software to test himself, and we had not tried to improve his reading speed at all other than to spend a few minutes reading part of an Evelyn Wood book) at age 5 to raise over $1,350 in a Multiple Sclerosis read-a-thon, and at age 6 and 7, he raised even more (over $1,500 one year), making him the top fundraiser in the state all three years. Right after his 7th birthday, he entered a national essay contest for 4th and 5th graders on making the world a better place and won the grand prize of two new computers. He’s handed out wrapped books to kids in the hospital on Christmas Eve the last few years, and wanted to wear a Santa suit one year. When he saw an elderly man with a cane approaching a restaurant while we were in the middle of a lunch sometime ago, our son shot up out of his seat and ran to open the door for this man. He has always given his toys in Kid Packs to other kids, and when he’s gone trick-or-treating, he has tried to get candy that his parents like rather than himself. At age 7, he wrote to the library to ask if he could read to younger kids there, and got approval. He also signed up to volunteer at a local retirement home to read to residents there (some are in their 90s, and one is 100), which he does every week (he also invited them to our holiday party this year, and picked out Christmas gifts for each). It isn’t his IQ that makes him most special to us, it is his heart.
As our son tells me that people should show the good with the bad, I will also share with you that having a child who is this precocious is not always a piece of cake. No matter where he has gone since he started to talk (which was also, as you might guess, earlier than the norm; well before age 2, he had a vocabulary of over 1,500 words and over the average 4 year old’s vocabulary), people have nearly instantly turned their eyes and ears his way and made comments about how smart he is and how they will see him in the newspapers some day and right in front of him, said to me things such as, “You don’t need to save for retirement; he’s your retirement plan” or earlier today a 12 year old said to me, “He’s going to be supporting you soon.” I know people don’t mean harm with these comments, but I don’t like them for many reasons. First, we are NOT using our son for our retirement or to have a mansion someday (though our son did tell us years ago that if we don’t buy