“When is a boy not a boy?” In the summer of 2005, a six-year-old named Marc Yu was eager to stump me as we stood in a hallway of the Colburn School of Music in Los Angeles before his cello and piano lessons began. An adorable little guy in a red Pacific Oaks Children’s Center T-shirt and matching red socks, he was deep into his repertoire of riddles, awarding a point for every punch line I came up with. “When he turns into a store,” I answered, after briefly debating whether to play dumb.
Marc practically danced into his classroom, ignoring the requests of his cello teacher and his mother, Chloe Hui, that he please settle down. An hour later, after I heard him play Vivaldi’s Concerto in G Minor for two cellos on a quarter-size instrument several inches bigger than he was, another answer occurred to me: “When he’s a prodigy.” During his next lesson, I watched Marc’s tiny hands racing through Bach’s Concerto in F Minor for the piano. His bony shoulders moved with the music and the effort of producing remarkable clarity and phrasing, and I felt the full force of the riddle. As he slipped down from his booster seat on the piano bench, begging his teacher to let him tackle at least a part of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto, I couldn’t help wondering what he might actually turn into.
Several months later, I watched as Marc became a poster boy for a mission to “stop wasting our brightest young minds” in an era of global competition. He was awarded a $10,000 fellowship for his “prodigious work” by the Davidson Institute for Talent Development, founded six years earlier to support and proselytize on behalf of “profoundly gifted” children. Sixteen mostly teenage superstars joined him, honored for their portfolios of intellectual and artistic feats, which they submitted along with testimonies about their labors and tributes to mentors. The fellows, hailed as a precious but imperiled national resource, got a taste of advocacy as well. As part of the celebratory festivities in Washington, D.C., the prizewinners paid visits to Capitol Hill to speak about their hard-won accomplishments.
For Marc, the classic child prodigy in a group of bigger and gawkier students, the credential brought crossover stardom, too. On a tour of the talk shows—Ellen DeGeneres, Oprah, The Tonight Show—he told jokes and got off funny one-liners. Then he removed the red gloves that kept his hands warm and played a sample from a repertoire that ranged from Mozart to Gwyneth Walker. (“She is still composing,” Marc deadpanned, “unlike most of the composers I like, who are decomposing.”) When a more earnest morning show interviewer asked him if he thought he was gifted, he looked flustered. “I don’t know.” He shrugged, mumbling a guess about a possible “gift from God.” What Marc wanted to talk about was his hard work, not a topic typically associated with child wonders, who are supposed to soar without sweating. In his many media appearances, he spoke out whenever he could as an ambassador for a resurgence of American excellence, ready with advice. Marc, who had lately lost three teeth, had come up with a lisping sound bite: “You should play Game Boy less, and you should practice more.”
The democratic zeal of the message, and of its six-year-old messenger, was inspiring. Marc wasn’t smug. He seized every chance to salute his immigrant mother and her tireless guidance. Marc didn’t scold. He delivered the counsel with sincere fervor and irrepressible energy. Here was a boy who sometimes stole to the piano at night, Chloe reported, drawn by a favorite passage he’d toiled over during the day. As Marc swayed on the bench, playing with unusual feeling, his eyes closed and face uplifted, his transport inspired a neck-prickling awe not just at the music pouring forth but at the mysteries of human potential. How often do we underestimate children’s untapped powers and phenomenal capacity to learn? “The possibilities are extraordinary for a child with a child’s imagination and a child’s heart,” marveled a conductor stunned by Marc’s adult-level mastery. With momentum like his, what might maturity bring?
At the same time, the spectacle of Marc couldn’t help but stir more mundanely discomfiting sensations, a variation on the what-is-American-youth-coming-to worry that every generation of parents, along with pundits and policy makers, succumbs to. Warnings about a rising China, and about widening achievement gaps in the United States, were hard to ignore. “Tiger parenting” had yet to enter the lexicon: Amy Chua’s shocker of a book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, about goading two daughters to virtuoso extremes, lay half a decade ahead. But the fraught ethos of early superachievement was already familiar enough, as hard to like as it was to shake.
You didn’t have to be a parent with two overscheduled high school kids, though I was, to feel off-balance. In an ever more competitive world, what is the promise—and the price—of honing youthful potential ever earlier and more avidly? What happens to those imaginations and hearts? The not-so-democratic consequences of America’s meritocratic mystique were obvious: stressed-out, helicopter-parented, test-prepped, accelerated children bent on exceptional performance from cradle to elite college—and left-out children, lacking adult guidance and challenging goals, derailed by obstacles. I sighed at the proto-prodigy expectations: Was this a likely route to social equality, or resilient autonomy, or bold creativity? I signed up my privileged, omni-enriched kids for SAT prep anyway.
This is a book about prodigies like Marc, who aren’t merely amazingly good at something before they lose all their baby teeth or hit puberty. I’ve chosen young marvels in modern America who have also tapped into a very public concern about precocious achievement, which baby boomers and their successors are far from the first to feel. To display adult mastery as a child—or, in several cases in this book, as a teenager—is usually to draw notice. But different talents seem to attract heightened interest in different decades, inviting scrutiny as auguries for the rest of us. Over the past century, the zeitgeist has swept some prodigies to special attention as emblems of social progress or as victims of worrisome pressures—or often both at once. Who they are, and what particular skills they display and how, touches a nerve. Marc, a captivating miniversion of the virtuoso piano celebrity Lang Lang and, with his mother, an outspoken proponent of perspiration over inspiration, was a standout made to order for a China-focused, college-frantic moment preoccupied with “grit,” the latest lab-tested talent development secret on the lips of psychologists, educators, and parents.
At anxious junctures, in other words, you could say we single out the child wonders we deserve—which doesn’t mean those remarkable children get treated the way they deserve. Or, for that matter, the way parents and mentors, and other meddlers and an avid media, claim they are treated. This book began with curiosity to get to the bottom of stories about some American superchildren who seized the spotlight—and to tell those stories as unsentimentally, and unsensationally, as possible. My previous book, Raising America, was a cultural history of twentieth-century child-rearing theories peddled by a succession of experts, each promising—with great confidence and shaky evidence—that scientifically informed nurture would liberate untold human potential. Phenomenally accomplished children offered a chance to explore practice, rather than theory, at those eagerly anticipated new frontiers of performance.
My choices, from math prodigies at the start of the twentieth century on up to Marc, are glaring exceptions to prevailing rules—boys and girls whose exploits have seemed to offer timely discoveries about talent development. They aren’t representative or exemplary in the sense of typical, and that is the point: ours is an era, as a popular adviser of parents has put it, when Lake Wobegon–style insistence on above-average children is “yesterday’s news,” overtaken by an anxious credo that “given half a chance, all of our children would be extraordinary.” If versions of today’s message in fact go back further than we think, let’s take a closer look at prodigies who have been heralded as emissaries of that drive to excel early—the living, breathing, superbly high-performing proof of what is possible, and how, and with what results. Let’s revisit the public debates over their rare achievements and unusual regimens, and probe for the private realities behind the headlines. Not least, let’s listen hard for the prodigies’ side of the story. After all, how they understand their experience is what matters most, certainly for them as their lives unfold. And the rest of us—caught up in an ever less playful, increasingly purposeful ethos of childhood—could really use their advice.
I wasn’t fully prepared for how elusive the goal of getting at the child’s-eye view would be—though I set out to tackle it precisely because ignoring or misjudging kids’ perspectives is so easy to do, despite the best of intentions. Parental empathy runs deep but not straight. Though childhood was a country we all once inhabited, our early selves become foreigners: blurry forebears who pull at our sleeves, whispering mixed messages about the people we’ve become, and about how our children might redeem us. Parenting experts are hardly immune from the urge to project grown-up agendas either. Even the strictest advisers I wrote about in Raising America prided themselves on child-focused enlightenment. They touted empirical data about immature beings whose needs, their studies showed, were very different from ours. Yet again and again, the experts’ own hopes, fears, and memories—along with wider cultural anxieties—shaped their views more than rigorous science did.
To say that eager champions of prodigies are prone to be even more buffeted by their dreams and frustrated desires is not to deliver news: the stage mother stereotype thrives. And unlike Dr. Spock and his expert ilk, whose advice is more often invoked than studiously obeyed, on-the-ground mentors and parents of young wonders exert real clout. Prodigies are children, after all, small people who rely on all kinds of help from those who loom over them. Exceptionally talented and driven though they may be—their feats are astonishing—they aren’t in the driver’s seat. Adults may revere them, and families revolve around them, but prodigies remain dependents, subject to circumstances they didn’t choose and usually have limited power to change. They get many chances to show off but may have to wait until they’re grown up, and looking back, to fully and truly tell their elders off.
Yet as I’ve pursued their stories, I haven’t simply discovered tales of voiceless victims and myopic, narcissistic oppressors—or of triumphant young talents and model mentors either. Except, not surprisingly, in the press. In just about every case, media accounts have been short on veracity, long on lurid voyeurism, and very aware that suspenseful dramas sell. Is this or that early bloomer a weirdo headed for burnout, true to popular lore? Or is the wunderkind bound for creative glory, as modern experts have hoped to prove? And what behind-the-scenes forces other than his or her genius explain precocious mastery? Such loaded questions are the underside of off-the-charts expectations. They’re writ large in prodigy media coverage, and they lurk between the lines for lesser superkids groomed to excel, too: the same intense anticipation that can help spur children onward sets them up to disappoint as well, saddling them with goals that can daunt and doubts that corrode. Adults also pay a price for the high-stakes prospects. As they anxiously eye the future, they’re prone to forget that childhood happens only once and goes by very fast.
Every one of the stories gathered here has sad or shocking moments; a few are tragic. But my goal isn’t to pile on the stark cautionary fare. Nor am I aiming to crack some “talent code,” though the children in these pages do share remarkable curiosity and stubbornness—and that latter quality, predictably, distinguishes many mentors and parents as well. Instead, I’ve taken my cue from Norbert Wiener, the turn-of-the-twentieth-century child prodigy who opens the book and who, as a grown-up, warned against the allure of told-you-so lessons or seven-steps-to-stardom advice. In his memoir Ex-Prodigy (1953), the founder of cybernetics laments that the only young marvels “the public ever hears of are those who ‘point a moral or adorn a tale,’ ” when untidy life arcs can reveal much more:
There is a tragedy in the failure of a promising lad which makes his fate interesting reading; and the charm of the success story is known to all of us. Per contra, the account of a moderate success following a sensationally promising childhood is an anticlimax and not worth general attention.
I can imagine Wiener pausing to tug on his white goatee and push up his heavy-rimmed glasses before proceeding to type, “I consider this attitude of extremes toward the infant prodigy false and unjustified. In addition to being unjustified, it is in fact unjust.”
It also misses, he might have noted, what is most fascinating about the unfolding of exceptional childhoods. From Norbert Wiener at one end to Marc Yu at the other, I probe legends—Bobby Fischer, Shirley Temple—along with now-forgotten girl writers, pioneering computer geeks, an autistic jazz pianist and composer, and more. Psychologists obsessed with giftedness—Lewis Terman, Julian Stanley—make appearances, too. In every case, confident predictions and programmatic methods morph into wishful projections and unanticipated challenges.
Look closely at personalities, families, and actual trajectories, with detours and snags included; step back to scan the historical scene, since talents, however unbidden, thrive in particular times and places. The revelation is that off-the-charts achievers aren’t good grist for moralistic fables after all, whether about ill-fated freaks or about superstars for a meritocratic century. That is the real virtue of stories at once strange and familiar. They expose very recognizable confusions behind a zeal for early prowess that by now has gone mainstream—fueling hopes of success, and no end of stress. Not least, prodigies offer reminders writ large that children, in the end, flout our best and worst intentions.
I was expecting to encounter an oppressively elitist tone among champions of exceptional childhoods but was surprised to discover instead an upstart rebelliousness, in young and old alike. Norbert Wiener’s father, proudly touting his twelve-year-old college matriculant as a model, hoped to jolt genteel Americans into following suit in their families, but he wasn’t betting on it. Like so many of the excited promoters of prodigies in later chapters, Leo Wiener was an outsider (a Jewish immigrant from Russia) who held forth as a liberator of children. A version of his message gathered momentum over the century: freed from the unscientific prejudices of their complacent and conformist elders, boys and girls could surge forward amazingly quickly, given the right guidance. What’s more, the remarkable young achievers would do it easily and eagerly, without getting spoiled or stigmatized or snooty.
Of course, the promise has never been as simple as that sounds. Who calls the shots, and how, can be murky. That was true back when grown-ups like Leo presumed they were boss and children, however exceptional, did their bidding. It was true generations before that in the Old World as well. “Next to God comes Papa,” wrote twelve-year-old Wolfgang Mozart, the patron saint of modern prodigies, a century and a half earlier. Papa’s sway was indeed vast, but he also knew he owed his son a dose of obeisance: Leopold hailed Wolfgang as a “miracle, which God has allowed to see the light in Salzburg”—and counted on him to keep the family afloat. The current term is codependency: prodigies capitalizing, as best they can, on the resources of elders who are vicariously invested in their glory. And by the post–World War II era, as old rules of deference to maturity eroded, enterprising young standouts made the most of their new authority. Later chapters in this book attest to that. As adults became more solicitous and systematic in their enabling, prodigies became more defiant handfuls, proudly intent on doing things their way. Bobby Fischer didn’t just imitate the masters; he knew how to intimidate. So did Bill Gates. Lang Lang lashed out.
Introducing her portraits of eminent Victorian marriages in Parallel Lives, Phyllis Rose astutely wrote that at the core of every alliance between spouses is a pair of narratives about power relations. Trouble arises when those views cease to mesh, when “the understanding about the balance of power breaks down, when the weaker member feels exploited or the stronger feels unrewarded for his or her strength.” The same holds for child prodigies and their mentors—with a vengeance. After all, no matter how richly collaborative a bond children forge with grown-up guides, some version of divorce is inevitable. It’s what modern experts would call developmentally appropriate. That doesn’t mean the process is smooth. In the case of prodigies, the usual age-based scripts get rewritten from the start, as they speed ahead of their peers to the applause—and unease—of adults keen to facilitate the phenomenal progress of their talents. Upheaval is guaranteed: however carefully monitored or mentored an extraordinary childhood may be, power relations get recast in the turmoil of adolescence. And all along the way, twists and turns in family circumstances may propel, or derail, a prodigy’s course. So may social pressures or opportunities that nobody saw coming.
Just about all the unusual children assembled here implicitly or explicitly convey a version of the same message to the eager promoters of an American meritocracy over the century: back off. That is not what proponents of whisking the best and the brightest onward, starting the younger the better, have ever really wanted to hear as they champion youthful genius as a crucial national resource. But if you listen closely to these prodigy stories, which play out in successive decades in a country increasingly committed to fine-tuning and fast-tracking talent development, the message gets louder and clearer.
It’s not that these children are desperate to chill out, or slow down, or quit striving, or even cease astounding their elders. What they want, and need, is the chance to obsess on their own idiosyncratic terms—to sweat and swerve, lose their balance, get their bearings, battle loneliness, discover resilience. How else does anyone shape a self, never mind a phenomenal skill? Extraordinary achievement, though adults have rarely cared to admit it, takes a toll. It demands an intensity that rarely makes kids conventionally popular or socially comfortable. But if they get to claim that struggle for mastery as theirs, in all its unwieldiness, they just might sustain the energy and curiosity that ideally fuel such a quest. That is no guarantee of mature creative genius, but it is a good bet for future happiness.
Like us, our predecessors over the course of a century have been thrilled by the thought that rapidly growing young bodies and flexible brains are primed to navigate change and meet new challenges in ways that adults can’t. Like us, our predecessors have also been unnerved by upstart impulses and lopsided young lives, not to mention uncertain futures. The urge to domesticate prodigious children—to anoint them not as misfits but as marvels whose streamlined paths promise to realize our hopes and ambitions—has proved understandably hard for modern American strivers to resist. Phenomenally talented boys and girls have been swept along, though not as effortlessly as their mentors have wanted to suggest—and not as obediently either. Decade after decade, prodigies in the spotlight have stirred up debates, weathered ordeals, and delivered surprises, as the stories in this book reveal. Their experiences betray secrets about their struggles—with their gifts and with their guides—from which they learn a lot, sometimes too late. It’s time to resurrect their stories and see what they might tell us.