How Do You Raise a Prodigy?

Photo illustration by Peter Yang for The New York Times

Drew Petersen didn't speak until he was 3½, but his mother, Sue, never believed he was slow. When he was 18 months old, in 1994, she was reading to him and skipped a word, whereupon Drew reached over and pointed to the missing word on the page. Drew didn't produce much sound at that stage, but he already cared about it deeply. "Church bells would elicit a big response," Sue told me. "Birdsong would stop him in his tracks."

May Armstrong

Kit Armstrong at 5; he graduated from high school at 9.

Sue, who learned piano as a child, taught Drew the basics on an old upright, and he became fascinated by sheet music. "He needed to decode it," Sue said. "So I had to recall what little I remembered, which was the treble clef." As Drew told me, "It was like learning 13 letters of the alphabet and then trying to read books." He figured out the bass clef on his own, and when he began formal lessons at 5, his teacher said he could skip the first six months' worth of material. Within the year, Drew was performing Beethoven sonatas at the recital hall at Carnegie Hall. "I thought it was delightful," Sue said, "but I also thought we shouldn't take it too seriously. He was just a little boy."

On his way to kindergarten one day, Drew asked his mother, "Can I just stay home so I can learn something?" Sue was at a loss. "He was reading textbooks this big, and they're in class holding up a blowup M," she said. Drew, who is now 18, said: "At first, it felt lonely. Then you accept that, yes, you're different from everyone else, but people will be your friends anyway." Drew's parents moved him to a private school. They bought him a new piano, because he announced at 7 that their upright lacked dynamic contrast. "It cost more money than we'd ever paid for anything except a down payment on a house," Sue said. When Drew was 14, he discovered a home-school program created by Harvard; when I met him two years ago, he was 16, studying at the Manhattan School of Music and halfway to a Harvard bachelor's degree.

Prodigies are able to function at an advanced adult level in some domain before age 12. "Prodigy" derives from the Latin "prodigium," a monster that violates the natural order. These children have differences so evident as to resemble a birth defect, and it was in that context that I came to investigate them. Having spent 10 years researching a book about children whose experiences differ radically from those of their parents and the world around them, I found that stigmatized differences — having Down syndrome, autism or deafness; being a dwarf or being transgender — are often clouds with silver linings. Families grappling with these apparent problems may find profound meaning, even beauty, in them. Prodigiousness, conversely, looks from a distance like silver, but it comes with banks of clouds; genius can be as bewildering and hazardous as a disability. Despite the past century's breakthroughs in psychology and neuroscience, prodigiousness and genius are as little understood as autism. "Genius is an abnormality, and can signal other abnormalities," says Veda Kaplinsky of Juilliard, perhaps the world's pre-eminent teacher of young pianists. "Many gifted kids have A.D.D. or O.C.D. or Asperger's. When the parents are confronted with two sides of a kid, they're so quick to acknowledge the positive, the talented, the exceptional; they are often in denial over everything else."

We live in ambitious times. You need only to go through the New York preschool application process, as I recently did for my son, to witness the hysteria attached to early achievement, the widespread presumption that a child's destiny hinges on getting a baby foot on a tall ladder. Parental obsessiveness on this front reflects the hegemony of developmental psychiatry, with its insistence that first experience is formative. We now know that brain plasticity diminishes over time; it is easier to mold a child than to reform an adult. What are we to do with this information? I would hate for my children to feel that their worth is contingent on sustaining competitive advantage, but I'd also hate for them to fall short of their potential. Tiger mothers who browbeat their children into submission overemphasize a narrow category of achievement over psychic health. Attachment parenting, conversely, often sacrifices accomplishment to an ideal of unboundaried acceptance that can be equally pernicious. It's tempting to propose some universal answer, but spending time with families of remarkably talented children showed me that what works for one child can be disastrous for another.

Andrew Solomon is a lecturer in psychiatry at Cornell. His book "Far From the Tree," from which this essay is adapted, will be published this month by Scribner.