ONE

Larisa Stephan became an adult without having experienced childhood. She now has all the markers of conventional sanity and, indeed, plenitude: a family of her own, and a flourishing career as an engineer. But the thirty-seven-year-old's travels there started too early. Her father began the educational enrichment when she was two. That was when she took her first IQ test, and began an activity-rife childhood west of Beverly Hills.

"My IQ was outlandishly high, 180 to 190, so my father believed I was a genius and that I was never up to my potential," says Stephan, her pale, unadorned face framed by light brown hair in a short bob. "The IQ test was taken when I was two—which means it was so high because I had the skills normal for a four-year-old when I was two," she says. "That doesn't mean I was a genius."

Her father held up other prodigies as examples, including child musician Dylana Jensen. Stephan remembers her father taking her to see Jensen play a concert; Jensen was then on the brink of adolescence. Larisa's father remarked forbiddingly that Dylana was experiencing a tough time in her young life—passing from a time when she was a prodigy to a time when she would be just like everyone else, competing with adult violinists who were as talented as she was—or more so. Stephan felt the chill of comparison in her father's words.

"I totally try to repress my childhood," she says. "The 'enrichment' bled the joy out of me. Today I don't do horse riding, or play the violin or do ballet," she says, her voice rising. "I do nothing that was part of that enrichment."

She shows me the pictures of her own childhood—indeed, she is doing something in all of them. Playing a violin, reading a book, accompanied by her blond hair and a big smile. The smile seems intended to reassure the onlooker that she is enjoying these pastimes.

Stephan lives in the Westchester section of Los Angeles. It is near the LAX airport, a part of town where, in homage to the flight industry, roads are named Boeing and Aviation. Stephan has worked in some capacity or other for the defense industry since she was seventeen. Today she is an electrical engineer for the defense company Raytheon, in El Segundo. Her one-story home, of a piece with its neighbors in an area of modest middle-class houses from the 1940s, houses her husband and their three children—Dylan, Tara, and Maya. It's just after Christmas, and her children's names have been painstakingly lettered with sparkle glue on stockings that hang near the tree.

"My father believed that there were these external success indicators of your value," Stephan says. "If you got those indicators, you were good and you were smart. If you could say that you learned to ride a horse at a gallop, you were a good equestrian, check. If you could say you took the Golden State Math Exam and scored in the top two percent, check. One built up a roster of indicators that made you feel all right. True achievement and true accomplishment, I believe now, is a process you enjoy. Adults who are good at playing violin are good at it because they enjoy playing the violin. I disliked it, even when I was three. I was angry at having to go to lessons all of the time. It was all a blur. I never had less than two or three things going on at one time: flute, violin, and chess, art lessons and guitar." If she ever showed interest in an activity, she says, her father "converted this interest into an education."

While she did achieve mightily—she attended Harvard at fifteen, and earned a master's degree in math from Berkeley when she was twenty-one—it all stemmed from her father's insistence that she had to achieve. To Stephan's mind, that demand emptied her achievements of value.

"My father was like, 'My child is a genius,'" says Stephan. "He tried to enrich me, enrich me like flour."

Stephan's experience was a precursor to the movement toward more intense parenting of recent years. The characteristics of that movement include a growth in enrichment activities; an increase in children's structured time as opposed to free play hours; an explosion of new classes, specialized camps, and competitions; and the enrollment of ever-younger kids in these competitions. One side effect of this is a tendency to professionalize play—to turn what children do for amusement into their vocation—as soon as possible.

Add to that the IQ testing of toddlers, and it's clear that child enrichment has filtered down into infancy, with such keystones as the baby sign language vogue and the fad for infant edutainment videos like the Baby Einstein series. I call it the Baby Genius Edutainment Complex.

And child enrichment has become even more precocious prenatal. BabyPlus, a product that we will encounter in the next chapter, promises maternal consumers that their infants will "have longer attention spans and reach developmental milestones more quickly" and "demonstrate expanded cognitive abilities—testing has shown higher than average IQs."

But the process of encouraging and developing children's talents is not always as extreme as tutoring one's "prenate." While many extravagant products claim to encourage brightness in the womb and shortly after, encouraging an already visible cultural fixation on the most flagrantly gifted, many children remain on the more prosaic end of the gifted spectrum. Such children attend gifted and talented programs at their local schools or perhaps take an honors class. They may be cast as intelligent in their schools and families, but not extraordinary: while the very gifted are defined by IQs of 145 and above, and the profoundly gifted check in at 160 and above (on the few intelligence tests with the possibility of such high scores), the children who attend public school gifted programs tend to score 120 and above on intelligence tests. The adjective gifted dates back to 1644, according to Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary. It means "having great natural ability: talented" and "revealing a special gift." But the muddled nature of being "gifted," which can mean everything from scholastic competence and the ability to ice skate at a young age to being something closer to a prodigy, comes out more clearly in the Webster's definition of the noun gift. Synonyms for gift, according to Webster's, include such related but varied nouns as faculty, aptitude, bent, talent, genius, and knack. The dictionary's second definition for gift also gives some insight into why those with the range of qualities that commonly earn the term gifted are subject to resentment from those who feel they have not been deemed gifted, as well into public debate on whether "gifted" children should have special accommodation and funding in the schools: a gift, according to Webster's, is "something voluntarily transferred by one person to another without compensation." In other words, a "gift" may not be reciprocated and may even be undeserved.

The causes for the growth of the gifted complex—from baby videos to promote infant reading, to sports and physical enrichment programs (for example, soccer classes for kids as young as a year and a half), to a rising "prodigy industry" of experts who locate and encourage the profoundly gifted—are many. Most important, parents perceive an increasing competitiveness in the world, and feel they must do everything they can to enhance their children's abilities—as early as possible—according to David Anderegg, a psychology professor at Bennington College and author of Worried All the Time: Rediscovering the Joy in Parenthood in an Age of Anxiety.

Nor are parents mistaken to focus on early learning. Anders Ericsson, a psychology professor at Florida State University who has long studied the relationship between talented adults and their youthful "deliberative practice"(i.e., hard work), argues that it is practice and enrichment rather than natural gifts that create talent and "gifted" children. Ericsson writes that each individual in a group of elite musicians were estimated to have spent over ten thousand hours practicing alone by the time they turned twenty. The same is true in other "performance domains," such as ballet, gymnastics, and figure skating—"a similar progression through increasingly difficult tasks, in which the guidance of a teacher is critical for success." Ericsson's research bears out the old saw that practice makes perfect. When parents send their children to early music lessons and push them to achieve mightily and publicly, they believe they are preparing the children for an adulthood of ever-greater achievement—and sometimes they are.

A classic longitudinal study of gifted children begun by Stanford University psychologist Lewis Terman supports Ericsson's findings about deliberative practice, and the value of discovering and developing the intellectual talents of strong learners not only in private lessons but also in public schools. Terman's study, begun in 1921, followed 1,500 children with IQs of 135 culled from California's urban areas. Published as Genetic Studies of Genius, the study generated many articles and findings. One of the many positive outcomes was that by 1951, the 1,528 Terman subjects had already published 46 nonfiction books, 21 novels, 1,411 scientific papers, 313 short stories and plays, and 55 essays and works of poetry and criticism.

The Terman study may have launched the idea of championing the early discovery and enrichment of talented children, but a host of similar scholarship followed. The Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY), started by the late Julian Stanley (who as the founder of Johns Hopkins University's Center for Talented Youth was in a sense Terman's intellectual heir), has so far examined 5,000 people who scored very well on their SATs in junior high school. Like the Terman study, SMPY has tended to affirm the benefits of locating and developing intellectually precocious children. A supergifted clan of 320 students, skimmed off the top of the larger SMPY sample, was found to have pursued doctorates at fifty times the normal rate. Members of the clan had also made noteworthy literary, scientific, or technical accomplishments by their early twenties. The study's authors felt safe in concluding that "precocious manifestations of abilities foreshadow the emergence of exceptional achievement and creativity."

Copyright © Alissa Quart, 2006.