Need advise on how to prepare a precocious kid to enter top Universities at 17/18 ?

Parent Cafe
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<p>You might want to read this article about a kid who graduated with 3 degrees from U-Dub at the age of 16.
[Local</a> News | 3 degrees aren’t enough for 16-year-old UW grad | Seattle Times Newspaper](<a href=“The Seattle Times | Local news, sports, business, politics, entertainment, travel, restaurants and opinion for Seattle and the Pacific Northwest.”>The Seattle Times | Local news, sports, business, politics, entertainment, travel, restaurants and opinion for Seattle and the Pacific Northwest.)</p>

<p>There is a hint in the article that involvement in sports helped the kid in his adjustment from home schooling to college life.</p>

<p>One useful tip: when you sign up your kid for swimming, stay off the pool deck and do not try to coach your own kid, like Andrew’s dad tried to do (my friend who used to officiate at local swim meets told me she had to kick that dad out of the “athletes, coaches and officials” areas quite often).</p>

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<p>Mathson could read adult material at 8, but unlike Mythmom was certainly not ready for most adult content. He read a lot of computer manuals, math books and adult fantasy at that age though. But it is a question - why is extreme precociousness so much more common in math and science? Or is that not ture, we just hear about it more?</p>

<p>I agree heartily there’s a lot of potential math curriculum that is not covered in the normal high school sequence, but could be. My son learned about matrix math in a CTY course on game theory and probability and didn’t see it again till a university course on quantum mechnanics.</p>

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<p>I think the adult level of performance in math (for most adults) is lower than the adult level of performance in reading and writing, so it is easier for a child to be amazing in math. Add to that the fact that many east Asian or south Asian immigrant parents had MUCH better math instruction than most Americans, which they pass on to their children in day-by-day home life in some cases, and you a lot of children of such immigrants showing up as mathematically precocious youth. </p>

<p>By the David Feldman definition of “prodigy” (someone who can perform like a competent adult practitioner of a domain by age ten), there is no such thing as a mathematical prodigy, although there are some very young teens who are as capable in math as many adults with a bachelor’s degree in math (from a typical university). </p>

<p>There was a kid in Taiwan a year or two ago who tested into National Taiwan University’s electrical engineering program at age fourteen or something like that. That was very impressive to me, because that implies quite a strong reading and writing ability in Chinese, which is time-consuming to attain.</p>

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<p>Dear ConcernFather,
Your screen name expresses you perfectly, and your thread has provoked an interesting conversation.</p>

<p>If you and your wife are interested in a movie about this issue, consider renting “Little Man Tate” with actress Jodie Foster.</p>

<p>Your quality home life is nothing like the poverty-stricken child genius in this tale, but the perspective of the child, trying to find his way between his great intellect and his childish emotions, might intrigue you. In the story, the child comes to the attention of a leader of a gifted program, and she struggles to get the child to come study with her. The mother is opposed, but it turns out the mother has some valid concerns to raise as well for the good of the child.</p>

<p>Jodie Foster was herself a child prodigy, I believe (not sure).</p>

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<p>

Warning: Thread Hijack I’m just wondering whether your own mom was aware of what you were reading. My d. was a precocious early reader, and by the time she was 5 I had decided that we needed to put some of the books in our house way out of reach. At ages 6 & 7 it was almost impossible to find text written at her level that I also considered acceptable/appropriate reading for a child. </p>

<p>I mean, if you understood adult motivations and sexuality at age 7… well I guess that worked out ok for you, but I didn’t want my 7 year old exposed to that. I wasn’t prudish – I was happy to answer questions about where babies come from, etc. and would have been equally happy to provide my child with a book on biology if she had been interested in learning more. I just didn’t want my little girl reading books about romance, sex and relationships intended for teenagers, much less those written for adults – for one thing, she also showed an early and quite precocious interest in the opposite sex, and I didn’t want her getting any more ideas beyond the ones she was coming up with on her own. </p>

<p>Anyway, it was a huge problem for me to find appropriate reading material for her, and the end result is that she became an avid reader of non-fiction, such as books about history or biographies – and never really found the joy of reading literature that my late-reading son has. </p>

<p>So that’s my personal story of the pitfalls of raising a daughter who was precocious in the humanities.</p>

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<p>ConcernFather, I’m not a parent, but I have a few thoughts to add to this discussion. </p>

<p>When I was a child, I was considered ‘gifted’ (although nowhere near the level of your child) and participated in a few of the programs that have already been mentioned. I took the SAT in 5th grade, enrolled in a few college courses in middle school, and participated in several of the ‘gifted’ summer programs. When I was a toddler, I would read and reread my mom’s medical textbooks and explain them to the family. I didn’t have a happy childhood. I could never really interact with other kids my age and didn’t have many friends. Adults (other than my parents) treated me as a sort of novelty. They patronized me and would make me recite things I’d memorized like a parlor trick. I remember wanting more than anything else to be normal. </p>

<p>The best piece of advice I can give is don’t make assumptions about who your child is and what he wants to become. When I was a kid, my parents and teachers saw me as a little professor and pushed me into ‘academic’ activities like chess and puzzles. Nobody would believe that I wanted to play sports and go to other kid’s birthday parties. Don’t assume that just because your child is gifted, he is better off pursuing ballet or non-competitive sports, rather than soccer or football. I’m not saying you shouldn’t encourage your son to engage in intellectual stimulating activities, just keep in mind that he is a 10 year old and, if he is anything like the way I was, probably wants many of the same things that other 10 year olds do. </p>

<p>One last piece of advice: do something to help your son with his social skills (if they seem deficient). So much of success in life is dictated by the ability to hold a good conversation. And, ultimately, your son will probably want to be able to make friends, date girls, etc…</p>

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<p>Samsonite you make many good points, I agree with you that you shouldn’t make assumptions and Mathson had one grandpa that drove him crazy quizzing him. </p>

<p>But as far as the sports thing goes I have observed that some (not all!) bright kids have trouble with team sports because their understanding of the rules, though not necessarily their playing ability, is beyond their peers. My son would get horribly frustrated by kids not understanding about offsides and stuff. This was one arena though where the other kids caught up.</p>

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<p>In teachers college we learned a simple model: growing children have needs in 3 realms: cognitive (intellect), social (friends) and emotional (personal feelings).</p>

<p>The triangle is one of the strongest forms in nature. A 3-legged stool can stand, but if one of the legs is weak, the whole stool wobbles. </p>

<p>Simple stuff, but memorable!</p>

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<p>I think what samonite and mathmom are saying are two sides of the same coin. Children who are intellectually gifted (or advanced or whatever you want to call them) *need * to play with kids their own age at age appropriate activities, but are often frustrated and ostracized because of their intellectual differences.</p>

<p>That’s why summer camps or any activities that get gifted kids together are so wonderful. It’s a chance for the little braniacs to “just be kids” with their own age group who share the same speed of light or off-beat thought processes. For once, the other kids get their jokes.</p>

<p>I think that it’s easier to judge precociousness in math/science than it is to evaluate gifted verbal and reading comprehension skills especially in very young children as their brains are sometimes ahead of their vocabulary and ability to put abstract thoughts into words. Even testing can be misleading as the words that the gifted kid may choose to express his thoughts may be unconventional and difficult to evaluate.</p>

<p>My son wasn’t so interested in reading advanced texts but he would listen to and fully absorb (to the point of memorization) anything we were inclined to expose him to. I found the 19th century novelists to be the best options – Dickens, Mark Twain, Stevenson, Kipling for example. Of course, you can appreciate these authors from different prospectives at any age, but I found them to be both age appropriate and challenging for my grade schooler – and darn good stories as well.</p>

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<p>Both my kids read MAUS, Art Spiegelman’s comic book version of the Holocaust, when they were about eight. The vocabulary is not challenged, but the concepts of morality and history are. Neither had a problem with it.</p>

<p>D could follow the plot of a complex movie by eighteen months. </p>

<p>S had Searching for Bobby Fischer, a fairly involved movie about children and chess, when he was four.</p>

<p>I think kids are capable of understanding a lot. Teachers always said S and D had an extremely developed idea of the reality principle. I remember D, who started dancing at two and acting at three, planning to be a professional actress when she was four. She asked if i would wait in the wings so she could nurse her babies when she was offstage. Have no idea of how she came up with this.</p>

<p>Kids can direct their own paths. It’s totally ungeneralizable what they can master and what they will be interested in.
S was on this school’s varsity academic team and he knew Bloomsday was June 16th and that it was the day Ulysses takes place. The refs reading the questions had no idea. </p>

<p>My friends and I read Moby Dick when we were twelve. I’m sure none of our parents had ever read it or had any desire to. Our favorite group activity when we were thirteen was readng Thus Spake Zarathustra. </p>

<p>I actually don’t think this relates to intellectual precocity; I think our understanding was an emotional sophistication. BTW: Although I was a very good math student I was not precocious in any way. Someone had to teach me to do binomial equations when I was fourteen.</p>

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<p>Many excellent postings- definitely get in touch with the Davidson Institute, you need help with raising a highly gifted child. The post about social/emotional and academic/intellectual needs all needing attention is worth remembering forever. Boy Scouts will not necessarily be helpful- agemates will not be classmates, the typical boy will not relate to the same interests at the same level. There are students who take college courses at their local, non-elite colleges at young ages so they can progress academically but still get the needed parenting to progress socially and emotionally as well. Miss Wisconsin of one year was at least 4 grades ahead- some people around here noticed that her answers to the questions in the Miss America Pageant reflected a lack of some common knowledge- be sure your son gets a well rounded education, as suggested by other posters. Now might be a good time to have him even out his academic accomplishments, focusing on his areas of relative weakness. </p>

<p>Never expect him to be “normal”, or have a “normal” childhood, he is as much out of synch with the average child as an equally ■■■■■■■■ child is- I have read that the highly gifted think differently. Your job is to let him progress at his natural pace and make sure he learns the other skills that he needs as an adult-especially the social/emotional ones. One skill in particular is to cope with a ■■■■■■■■ world- he constantly will be dealing with people who don’t think as fast or as intellectually as he does, he should get a lot of reading in the social sciences/ humanities to help him understand how the rest of us think.</p>

<p>Always remember he is still a child, his intellectual abilities are far ahead of his other developmental stages (this asynchrony is part of being gifted). Encourage involvement in physical activities with agemates… Good luck- it is a challenge, my son was only 2 grades ahead and I know how much I worried about making sure he fit in and didn’t miss out on things. The GT experts should be helpful in making sure your son continues to thrive and doesn’t miss anything he needs. They should also help YOU with your needs as a parent.</p>

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<p>I am wondering about tradeoffs of waiting to enter HYPSM at regular age vs early college at younger age.</p>

<p>For top colleges, it might actually be an advantage for him to wait till he is regular age, instead of trying to rush him. Actually, he won’t stand a chance right now, because of several deficient areas (see below).</p>

<p>The other alternative would be to put him into places like Davidson or Robinson Center. He might be able to get into this programs at an earlier age (compared to regular college), but again, what are the tradeoffs?</p>

<p>I am actually more incline to wait till he is much older for him to enter college. Here is my accessment of him in other areas :</p>

<ol>
<li>Social Skills -
good - can mix well with both age level, high school and college kids
have many acquaintances, but few friends</li>
<li>Academics -
good for math and science
slightly above age level for liberal arts subject</li>
<li>Reading Skills -
good, can read adult fiction as well as textbooks</li>
<li>Writing Skills -
good for lab report, AP essay, computer codes
age level for literary analysis, comparative essays, critique.</li>
<li>Verbal Skills -
good. participate actively in high school class discssions.</li>
<li>Knowledge -
good for head knowledge,
age level for experiential knowledge.<br></li>
</ol>

<p>Some more details :
He seems to be able to adjust well with different circles of friends/acquaintances for different activities.

  1. activities with age peers -elementary school, piano recitials and skating
  2. activities with high school - AP classes, Robotics Team, Math Club, Precollege Music Academy
    He also have friends that are college / graduate school level. He visits them, and they feed him dessert and discuss with him various advance math and science topics. There are also several profs in the local U that mentor and spend some time with him too.
    Socially he seems to be doing quite OK. However, he seems to have many acquaintances and few friends. The lack of strong friendship concerns me slightly.</p>

<p>Reading/Writing : His reading is advance, but his writing is just slightly above his age level. He reads adult fiction and bestsellers like Da Vinci Code, and books with complex themes like Fahrenheit 451 (intellectual suppression) or Animal Farm (communism). He is however very resistant to writing, especially Literature Analysis or on Liberal Arts topic. He would prefer to write lab report, AP essays or computer codes instead. I am hoping that the resisitance would go away when he grows older, and am trying to wait it out. Hopefully in a few years time, he would be discipline enough to do things that he don’t like, because that is part of being responsible.</p>

<p>Verbal Skills and Maturity : The thing that really help him this year is the AP Statistics small group discussion with 18 year old. They have class discussion almost every class lessons, and he participates actively in the discussion. For example, they discuss “correlation vs casuality” and have topics like “Does exposure to industrial chemicals cause miscarriage”. From knowledge in his AP Bio, my son can tell them 10 ways that the fetus can get damage, causing miscarriage. However I reallised that he only have “head knowledge”. After all, he is only 10 years old, and have yet to experience the complex emotion that come with dating / breakup, etc. Who is going to listen to a 10 year old talking about “miscarriage” without life’s experience? I want him to take his time to grow up. Perhaps that is one of the reason why I want to defer matriculating him in college until he is much older.</p>

<p>I want him to write a good entrance essay, and he simply won’t be ready at this point. He also will not do well in liberal arts subjects like History, Government, Philosophy until he is much older. Since his abiltiies on these subjects are close to age level, I don’t want him to spend disappropriate amount of time on such subjects if he goes to early college. I want him to enjoy doing internship or going to summer programs like SUMAC, RSI etc. I am sure these places won’t accept him until he is much older. Perhaps, patience is the virtue here. I am open to him taking a few college level courses in the near future, but matriculation is a different issue and I feel he should really wait till he is much older.</p>

<p>Can someone point me to some threads discussing the advantages of entering places like HYPSM instead of just a regular university. I am sure that there are parents with very smart kids that waited to go to top universities even though their kids might qualify for early entrance programs. I would like to hear from their point of view too, and I am sure they would be eye-opening for me.</p>

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<p>Without having read anything but the first post in this thread (I’ve been out of town for a week), I’ll just mention that
a) this is a wonderful problem to have
b) my son entered MIT at 16, having known since he was 12 that he wanted to go there; he graduated last June after 7 semesters.
c) you’re probably getting great advice from the rest of the thread, but keep in mind that you’ll always have to be your kid’s advocate in a system that is geared toward educating the middle 90% and poorly serves the top 5% and the bottom 5%.</p>

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<p>One other thought, concernfather:
I’m the mom of three, 17, 15 and 13. They are all purty smart, but they are all growing, changing teenagers. Do not underestimate your child’s need to be with you, and be parented by you until age 17-18. Even at 17, children swing from complete independence to utter reliance on you. </p>

<p>We enjoy being with our teenagers so very much: skiing, hiking, talking at dinner, driving them around and listening to their conversations with friends. I don’t enjoy waiting up until after midnight, but other than that, they are very interesting people to be around. </p>

<p>Don’t be in a hurry to give away these years with your child. The man your son will become will depend somewhat on what he observes you doing and saying in the next 8 years. If you can find a way to balance his intellectual needs with his need for family connectedness, that would get my vote.</p>

<p>My oldest is waiting on a HYP decision. She chose one of these schools because she believes the education will be the best available in the world, the selected peer group will be an interesting, motivated group, access to outstanding facilities and opportunities (excellent undergraduate housing, fine and performing arts performances/collections, visiting speakers, internships, study abroad) and lastly, opportunity to participate in her sport and music, exceed anything offered at other universities.</p>

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<p>It is not uncommon for students to enter HYPSM at 16, a bit less so at 15. But to enter at 10 or 11 would deprive your S of the ability to make real friends rather than acquaintances. He might be tolerated, but as a kid brother rather than as an equal. </p>

<p>Given his uneven development, I suggest waiting a few more years. He will mature and be willing to read different kinds of books (he’s currently reading the sort of books my mathy S did) and to explore the social sciences and humanities. A kid who is that advanced can master surface meaning, follow the plot line, figure out who the baddies or goodies are. But it’s taken Marjorie Garber a lifetime of teaching Shakespeare to be able to write the Shakespeare Plays. If he were to go to college and take a class on Shakespeare, being 10-year old would not be an excuse for lack of maturity in analyzing the plays. </p>

<p>You have good instincts on this; your S is lucky to have so much support available from his school to the local university. Make the most of it.</p>

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<p>From Marite :

</p>

<p>I am not thinking of 10 or 11. I am actually thinking of 17/18!!!
I want him to go through normal education without anymore acceleration. He skip 4th grade, and we won’t accept anymore skipping, so that he can prepare for his deficiency in other areas. I just need to find interesting things for him to do for the next 7/8 years, and I have got lots of interesting suggestions on this board :). Thanks so much to everyone.</p>

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<p>Yes. 17/18 is normal. There are several posters on CC whose kids entered college at 16. S entered at 17 and is doing fine. Everybody he knew in his first year was a year or two older. Three years later, he has friends who are younger, same age or older.</p>

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<p>I went to Harvard and I don’t think HYPSM are the be all and the end all. When the time comes you may or may not want to cast a wider net.</p>

<p>I wouldn’t be too concerned about the lack of many close friends. Both my boys tend to be introverts. They seem to be happy to have just a few close friends. My older son in particular gets a bit overstimulated by too many people. It really is hard when there are so few kids with similar interests. He made more friends in high school when it was easier to locate the kids with common interests through the clubs and there was a bigger pool to choose from.</p>

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<p>I don’t know where you live, but I would consider a magnet school in math/science. Classes would be more advanced, and there would be more common interests among peers.</p>

<p>I don’t think its terribly unusual to enter college at 16/17. Much depends on the maturity of the student. My S has hosted younger kids at Caltech, and has noted that some would fit in perfectly, but others don’t have the maturity.</p>

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<p>To the OP.</p>

<p>It seems you’ve been given tons of good advice. The only thing I wanted to add was at Cornell I had tons of classmates that started at 17 and quite a few that started at 16 … not unusual at all. I do not remember kids younger but I didn’t ask either. Among my friends who started younger I do not think their age created any issues by deifnition … however, living in dorms at 16 can be challenging depending on the emotional maturity of the kid.</p>