<p>@MommaJ-</p>
<p>I completely agree. I think many of these kids are exceptional when they are young and they’re being compared to their young peers. However, once they get out into the REAL world, they are compared to EVERYONE. For many, the world just catches up.</p>
<p>another thing is when you are young and smart you can just be treated like an older student and continue learning, but once you finish your phd research and so on, you can no longer just follow the road paved by the university, as you might by then know as much about your particular area of interest in your specialty (at least in newer fields) as almost anyone else in the world. Then you have to do the much slower and less certain work of paving new roads yourself.</p>
<p>I actually enjoy and am usually intrigued/in awe of child prodigies, but after watching the CNN video of this particular child, I was astounded by how much he actually sounded exactly like a 9 year old (which is great! but it also led me to google his name). Reading this wiki entry made me cringe. Clearly the parents of these kids are taking this wayyyy too seriously. This is not to criticize the little boy but makes me really wonder about his parents (sure be prideful…but this seems like ridiculous overkill…at least if you’ve spent any time on CC): </p>
<p>[Tanishq</a> Mathew Abraham - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanishq_Mathew_Abraham]Tanishq”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanishq_Mathew_Abraham)</p>
<p>I think the four year old needs some more leadership activities to round out her ap, but if she can give voice to her passion in her essays and get good recs she should be okay.</p>
<p>I can’t believe the Wikipedia article says “they have participated in trick or treating for UNICEF”.</p>
<p>Maybe they read the “hidden ECs” thread on CC!</p>
<p>My dad’s a doctor and whenever he used to read these newspaper stories, he would comment that the parents who claimed the child talked at two or three months were insane. I remember him noting that while some mental feats might indeed occur, some things are simply physiologically impossible. It had something to do with motor control, as I recall.</p>
<p>The nice thing about the video camera age is that people can show their kids doing something at age 4 months - that others simply dismissed.</p>
<p>Yes, there are physical milestones that need to be reached and some children reach them earlier than others. Some children way earlier. That does not make the parents insane.</p>
<p>It sickens me how much praise child prodigies get. They never do anything to deserve the high degrees of intelligence they have that others haven’t. It’s all in the cards. My guess is that they don’t really like all the attention when it happens yet crave it once it fades away after they peak.</p>
<p>According to my parents, I could count to twenty in English and Spanish and read children’s books and road signs when I was two. As an incoming senior in high school (no, I haven’t skipped any grades, though I was offered the opportunity once), I’m no more successful than the next guy, and I’m sure as hell not winning any prizes anytime soon (though I wouldn’t consider myself to have been intelligent enough to have been in the prodigy pool). Conversely, some of my peers who, I’d guess, have average to above-average IQs, are very charismatic, have perfect or almost perfect GPAs, are dominant in several clubs each, and are inspirations to those around them, and they’ll likely be much more successful in life than I will.</p>
<p>Intelligence is far from being a scale-tipping factor in determining one’s success in life, and the more we act like it is, the more unhealthily d#$%-waving our society becomes.</p>
<p>I wonder why this boy does not stay with the Stanford program for gifted kids. The kids in this program can take university courses. The Stanford courses, one would think, would be more challenging than community college courses, he could continue to be in touch with similar kids, and the faculty includes people like Condaleeza Rice. This is not to disparage community colleges. I attended a community college as a young student and felt a bit like an oddball around the adult learners. As an adult, I’ve taught community college, and found that the gifted students don’t find the coursework–or the faculty–challenging enough, and can get bored.</p>
<p>What do you fellow posters think?</p>
<p>IQ doesn’t measure a lot of verbal ability in my opinion, something which is vital for creativity. From my recollection, it seemed like a memory test. I remember having to recite a story that was told to me. The number series were so easy they didn’t really test mathematical reasoning/ability. The pattern recognition part where you have to be able to visualize shapes and move them around in your head was important and directly related to having intuition in physics.</p>
<p>In the analogy section, I did well, but I also remember thinking of a lot of different links between the first two words that were not intended by the people who wrote the test. That ability to find new relationships between things beyond the obvious is valuable in research but isn’t really tested by the IQ. </p>
<p>I tend to hate it when people say that IQ doesn’t measure creativity, but in many respects it doesn’t.</p>
<p>On another note, I think it’s really unfortunate that people’s first thought when hearing about a prodigy is that said prodigy will probably sink back into mediocrity. There is a lot of scrutiny and other garbage that goes along with being a prodigy, even if your parents aren’t trying to attract attention. Namely, people are constantly challenging you to see if you’re legitimate, that is, the real thing. If a professional (e.g., doctor or lawyer) had to go through the same level of abuse and/or scrutiny during their childhood years, they probably would have ended up in a menial labor job.
If you saw a 6-year-old get 3 hits in a little league game, would you walk up to him and tell him he is probably on steroids? Or that he’s only doing well because his parents are probably forcing him to do drills at home (with no evidence to suggest this is taking place)? This sort of thing happens when you have talent in academic areas.</p>
<p>^ Good point, but for the most part almost all of this terrible nonsense can be avoided by not putting your prodigy into the news circuit or writing wiki articles about them. Seriously, this really truly works superbly well! As for ‘sinking back into medicocrity’, the actual data shows that such kids often do end up leading unspectacular lives (which IMHO is not remotely a bad thing at all, and it is both true for early blooming IQs as well as young star athletes).</p>
<p>Why are posters in this thread so concerned with the parents?</p>
<p>I have several friends who were child prodigies. My college did have a program where they did accept young students on a systematic basis for a few years, so there are a number of those graduates (and drop outs) running around out there, even at my age. One is a very successful attorney with her own practice, another a professor at a state university branch, and yet another owns a successful business after finishing up at MIT. Don’t know what the others are doing.</p>
<p>One young lady I know got her law degree at an age too young to take the bar! Don’t know what she is doing now. </p>
<p>I wish them luck. I see no issues in studying subjects at the level of comprehension. Hopefully other parts of life are also being addressed by the family.</p>
<p>Emberjed: I don’t usually feel that way about parents of prodigies, but in this case, after reading the wiki entry, I absolutely got a bad impression about one of the parents (assuming they wrote it).</p>
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<p>Where one can work alone.</p>
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<p>And where the field is more of a meritocracy.</p>