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Feb. 25th, 2016 03:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnI have fifty other things that actually need to get done, and other posts I'm supposed to be making (I have two more posts still left on January meme, never mind that it's almost March), but I have to rant about this awful editorial on How to Raise a Creative Child. Step One: Back Off. It's an editorial about how child prodigies don't necessarily grow up to be geniuses, and how perhaps one can in fact raise a creative child.
The thing is, I don't actually disagree with that first part of what he's saying. (I was a bit of a child prodigy, although I grew up in a small enough town that it didn't take much for other people to think so (I would probably not be a child prodigy by, oh, present-day New York City standards), and I became a reasonably competent though not particularly exceptional adult, so I am basically both a great example of and target audience for this kind of thing.) I just… think it's really poorly written. (And I actually strenuously disagree with the second part of his conclusions, but there, I'm getting ahead of myself.)
I… don't even know where to start with this… First of all, let's say these kids would have started winning Nobels at age 40 or so, which means we should look at the Nobels between 1970 and now. In the US, there have been 252 prizes given in that time period. Of those prizes, a substantial number were for Literature, Peace, and Economics; and many of them were born outside the US. But let's say we're working from a number of 150 or so. That's… a highly artificially small number. So out of these 2000 kids, Westinghouse managed to predict five percent of the US Nobel prize winners during this time? That's actually kind of amazing!
Also, Lisa Randall has not won a Nobel, so I'm not sure why he is saying "OMG, only 8 won a Nobel!" when… his example of creative scientific thinking… didn't either…
Also, I'm not sure what this has to do with raising a creative child, exactly. I mean, it has some interesting things to say about incomplete correlation of science achievement detection measures in high school with actual adult science achievement, but… that's kind of a different topic…
This part is also… uh:
Seriously? Seriously???? You just used Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to make a point of not dreaming of raising superstar kids? Mozart whose father was the original Tiger Dad who forced both his kids to learn multiple instruments as early as humanly possible? Mozart whose father took him and his sister touring around Europe as a child prodigy superstar?? That Mozart?
Yeah, Mozart is basically the counterexample to this whole editorial.
Okay, so, I couldn't read the actual study, but I did read the first page which was available for free, and… nothing from that page made me think at all that anything was proved about causation rather than correlation. I mean, I could easily think of situations where creative kids might be in an atmosphere with fewer rules, but where the fewer rules does not cause them to be creative. (…hi, Mozart!) AUGH. This is the kind of thing that gives psychologists a bad name among hard scientists. (I am not saying that all psychologists do this, not by a long shot, but when one of them does it just Does Not Help.)
We don't really do schedules in our family. Okay, E. has a specific time for meals and bedtime, but mostly because she gets super cranky if she doesn't eat or sleep enough. But homework (yes, she has homework, this is a whole separate rant) gets done whenever it gets done, practice gets done whenever it gets done… Clearly, our kids will be super-creative!
…yeah, it doesn't work like that. In fact E., while not wholly uncreative (she has started drawing these adorable dinosaur pictures), is delayed in creativity and imaginative play; she was four before we saw any evidence of imaginative play at all, and it's only in the last year that she's really gotten to the point where she's doing things like telling us make-believe stories. She has also been much less inclined from day one to do things like bang out random notes on our keyboard. (A. has already surpassed her in this regard, and he's not a year old yet!)
Could it maybe be that children are different? And some of them will be more creative, and some of them will be less creative? And that maybe, just maybe, it's okay not to expect that your child will be The Best At Everything? And that trying to mold your kid into being more creative, or the next Mozart, or whatever, may well not succeed no matter how hard you try either to tiger-parent or dispense with scheduling?
Yeeeah, he's making it sound like all these kids had the potential to be geniuses and change the world, and I don't really buy that. Maybe some of them did and had them quashed, but maybe others of them didn't. Maybe what "holds them back" are exactly the qualities that identified them as child prodigies. Maybe what defines a child prodigy does not correlate that well to what defines a genius who changes the world.
In my "child prodigy" case, I happened to have some talents that come in really handy for looking smart as a child: I had a really excellent fact-memory (by which I mean that I was really good at memorizing facts and looking really smart when I regurgitated them) [1], a talent for taking standardized tests (the advantages of this should be obvious), and an appetite for books (which meant my vocabulary and exposure to random facts was quite extensive). It turns out that none of those things, taken by itself, is particularly indicative of super achievement as a result, although the memory and the reading have certainly helped me in non-obvious ways to be a reasonably competent adult (e.g., my grammar is way better than that of most of the engineers I work with, which gives me an edge in things like proposal writing).
My sister was by no standard a "child prodigy." She has relatively poor fact-memory and was relatively terrible at standardized tests, mostly because she is the sort who had to understand why something worked before she could memorize it or accept the algorithm to just do it. I would rate her by far the more "creatively" successful of the two of us (she's a medical doctor who does groundbreaking research and runs a popular YA-lit blog and makes a little money at a manuscript editing service in all her spare time, and has taken some stabs at writing a novel though to be fair she hasn't published anything).
Y'know what? My sister and I had the same stereotypical Asian tiger parenting. We were both made to practice musical instruments, get good grades, get good scores on standardized tests. In fact, of the two of us, my sister got a LOT more "programming" because she didn't naturally get good test scores. My parents tried to engineer success and didn't particularly believe in letting us pursue our passions. And guess what? Maybe I turned out an ambitious robot, sure, I'll buy that (at least by the definition this guy has set forth in this post [2]), but my sister didn't. [3] And neither did W.A. Mozart (whose father was WAY worse than my parents). So while I agree you can't program a child to become creative, I'm… unconvinced by the rest of his point.
(Now, if you want your child to be happy, that's different. My sister still has some scars from this whole process. But that's another story for another time.)
[1] I no longer consider myself to have an excellent fact-memory — probably my brain is too full of Les Mis lyrics now -- but I definitely did as a child. (Actually, although it's probably true about Les Mis, I think there's in addition a more interesting explanation that has to do with emotional labor and how my brain now has to juggle a relatively large amount of personal memory, relationship memory, and logistical memory for our family, which is not a strength of mine [4]. D continues to have an excellent memory for facts, but his personal/relationship memory is terrible, even by my poor standards.)
[2] Although I'd rather be an ambitious robot than writing this kind of crap editorial.
[3] There's certainly an argument to be made that my parents' parenting style set up some bad habits/processes for her. But there's an equal argument to be made that it equipped her with skills that she wouldn't have otherwise. We talk about this a lot.
[4] My sister, in addition to her other awesome qualities, also has excellent personal/relationship/logistical memory, to the point where our entire family has used her, since she was young, as the arbiter to "what really happened back then?"
The thing is, I don't actually disagree with that first part of what he's saying. (I was a bit of a child prodigy, although I grew up in a small enough town that it didn't take much for other people to think so (I would probably not be a child prodigy by, oh, present-day New York City standards), and I became a reasonably competent though not particularly exceptional adult, so I am basically both a great example of and target audience for this kind of thing.) I just… think it's really poorly written. (And I actually strenuously disagree with the second part of his conclusions, but there, I'm getting ahead of myself.)
Consider the nation’s most prestigious award for scientifically gifted high school students, the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, called the Super Bowl of science by one American president. From its inception in 1942 until 1994, the search recognized more than 2000 precocious teenagers as finalists. But just 1 percent ended up making the National Academy of Sciences, and just eight have won Nobel Prizes. For every Lisa Randall who revolutionizes theoretical physics, there are many dozens who fall far short of their potential.
I… don't even know where to start with this… First of all, let's say these kids would have started winning Nobels at age 40 or so, which means we should look at the Nobels between 1970 and now. In the US, there have been 252 prizes given in that time period. Of those prizes, a substantial number were for Literature, Peace, and Economics; and many of them were born outside the US. But let's say we're working from a number of 150 or so. That's… a highly artificially small number. So out of these 2000 kids, Westinghouse managed to predict five percent of the US Nobel prize winners during this time? That's actually kind of amazing!
Also, Lisa Randall has not won a Nobel, so I'm not sure why he is saying "OMG, only 8 won a Nobel!" when… his example of creative scientific thinking… didn't either…
Also, I'm not sure what this has to do with raising a creative child, exactly. I mean, it has some interesting things to say about incomplete correlation of science achievement detection measures in high school with actual adult science achievement, but… that's kind of a different topic…
This part is also… uh:
When the psychologist Benjamin Bloom led a study of the early roots of world-class musicians, artists, athletes and scientists, he learned that their parents didn’t dream of raising superstar kids. They weren’t drill sergeants or slave drivers. They responded to the intrinsic motivation of their children. When their children showed interest and enthusiasm in a skill, the parents supported them.
Top concert pianists didn’t have elite teachers from the time they could walk; their first lessons came from instructors who happened to live nearby and made learning fun. Mozart showed interest in music before taking lessons, not the other way around.
Seriously? Seriously???? You just used Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to make a point of not dreaming of raising superstar kids? Mozart whose father was the original Tiger Dad who forced both his kids to learn multiple instruments as early as humanly possible? Mozart whose father took him and his sister touring around Europe as a child prodigy superstar?? That Mozart?
Yeah, Mozart is basically the counterexample to this whole editorial.
So what does it take to raise a creative child? One study compared the families of children who were rated among the most creative 5 percent in their school system with those who were not unusually creative. The parents of ordinary children had an average of six rules, like specific schedules for homework and bedtime. Parents of highly creative children had an average of fewer than one rule.
Okay, so, I couldn't read the actual study, but I did read the first page which was available for free, and… nothing from that page made me think at all that anything was proved about causation rather than correlation. I mean, I could easily think of situations where creative kids might be in an atmosphere with fewer rules, but where the fewer rules does not cause them to be creative. (…hi, Mozart!) AUGH. This is the kind of thing that gives psychologists a bad name among hard scientists. (I am not saying that all psychologists do this, not by a long shot, but when one of them does it just Does Not Help.)
We don't really do schedules in our family. Okay, E. has a specific time for meals and bedtime, but mostly because she gets super cranky if she doesn't eat or sleep enough. But homework (yes, she has homework, this is a whole separate rant) gets done whenever it gets done, practice gets done whenever it gets done… Clearly, our kids will be super-creative!
…yeah, it doesn't work like that. In fact E., while not wholly uncreative (she has started drawing these adorable dinosaur pictures), is delayed in creativity and imaginative play; she was four before we saw any evidence of imaginative play at all, and it's only in the last year that she's really gotten to the point where she's doing things like telling us make-believe stories. She has also been much less inclined from day one to do things like bang out random notes on our keyboard. (A. has already surpassed her in this regard, and he's not a year old yet!)
Could it maybe be that children are different? And some of them will be more creative, and some of them will be less creative? And that maybe, just maybe, it's okay not to expect that your child will be The Best At Everything? And that trying to mold your kid into being more creative, or the next Mozart, or whatever, may well not succeed no matter how hard you try either to tiger-parent or dispense with scheduling?
Child prodigies rarely become adult geniuses who change the world. We assume that they must lack the social and emotional skills to function in society. When you look at the evidence, though, this explanation doesn’t suffice: Less than a quarter of gifted children suffer from social and emotional problems. A vast majority are well adjusted — as winning at a cocktail party as in the spelling bee.
What holds them back is that they don’t learn to be original. They strive to earn the approval of their parents and the admiration of their teachers. But as they perform in Carnegie Hall and become chess champions, something unexpected happens: Practice makes perfect, but it doesn’t make new.
The gifted learn to play magnificent Mozart melodies, but rarely compose their own original scores. They focus their energy on consuming existing scientific knowledge, not producing new insights. They conform to codified rules, rather than inventing their own.
Yeeeah, he's making it sound like all these kids had the potential to be geniuses and change the world, and I don't really buy that. Maybe some of them did and had them quashed, but maybe others of them didn't. Maybe what "holds them back" are exactly the qualities that identified them as child prodigies. Maybe what defines a child prodigy does not correlate that well to what defines a genius who changes the world.
In my "child prodigy" case, I happened to have some talents that come in really handy for looking smart as a child: I had a really excellent fact-memory (by which I mean that I was really good at memorizing facts and looking really smart when I regurgitated them) [1], a talent for taking standardized tests (the advantages of this should be obvious), and an appetite for books (which meant my vocabulary and exposure to random facts was quite extensive). It turns out that none of those things, taken by itself, is particularly indicative of super achievement as a result, although the memory and the reading have certainly helped me in non-obvious ways to be a reasonably competent adult (e.g., my grammar is way better than that of most of the engineers I work with, which gives me an edge in things like proposal writing).
My sister was by no standard a "child prodigy." She has relatively poor fact-memory and was relatively terrible at standardized tests, mostly because she is the sort who had to understand why something worked before she could memorize it or accept the algorithm to just do it. I would rate her by far the more "creatively" successful of the two of us (she's a medical doctor who does groundbreaking research and runs a popular YA-lit blog and makes a little money at a manuscript editing service in all her spare time, and has taken some stabs at writing a novel though to be fair she hasn't published anything).
Hear that, Tiger Moms and Lombardi Dads? You can’t program a child to become creative. Try to engineer a certain kind of success, and the best you’ll get is an ambitious robot. If you want your children to bring original ideas into the world, you need to let them pursue their passions, not yours.
Y'know what? My sister and I had the same stereotypical Asian tiger parenting. We were both made to practice musical instruments, get good grades, get good scores on standardized tests. In fact, of the two of us, my sister got a LOT more "programming" because she didn't naturally get good test scores. My parents tried to engineer success and didn't particularly believe in letting us pursue our passions. And guess what? Maybe I turned out an ambitious robot, sure, I'll buy that (at least by the definition this guy has set forth in this post [2]), but my sister didn't. [3] And neither did W.A. Mozart (whose father was WAY worse than my parents). So while I agree you can't program a child to become creative, I'm… unconvinced by the rest of his point.
(Now, if you want your child to be happy, that's different. My sister still has some scars from this whole process. But that's another story for another time.)
[1] I no longer consider myself to have an excellent fact-memory — probably my brain is too full of Les Mis lyrics now -- but I definitely did as a child. (Actually, although it's probably true about Les Mis, I think there's in addition a more interesting explanation that has to do with emotional labor and how my brain now has to juggle a relatively large amount of personal memory, relationship memory, and logistical memory for our family, which is not a strength of mine [4]. D continues to have an excellent memory for facts, but his personal/relationship memory is terrible, even by my poor standards.)
[2] Although I'd rather be an ambitious robot than writing this kind of crap editorial.
[3] There's certainly an argument to be made that my parents' parenting style set up some bad habits/processes for her. But there's an equal argument to be made that it equipped her with skills that she wouldn't have otherwise. We talk about this a lot.
[4] My sister, in addition to her other awesome qualities, also has excellent personal/relationship/logistical memory, to the point where our entire family has used her, since she was young, as the arbiter to "what really happened back then?"
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Date: 2016-02-28 06:07 pm (UTC)And yes to limited number of Nobels, which... I mean... your article in fact brings up examples of people you think are geniuses who don't have the Nobel! WHAT.