Chapter 4

Growing a Prodigy

Can you create a prodigy?

If you focus on prodigy’s external markers—the astounding work with the brush, the early entrance to college, the excellence at the piano—it almost seems possible. Maybe with the right expertise, maybe with enough determination, you could get the right teachers, instill an unstoppable work ethic, and place a kid on the fast track to Carnegie Hall.

Or could you?

Between the summer of 2010 and the summer of 2011, Joanne zigzagged across the East Coast and the Midwest in pursuit of prodigies. Her sample swelled from two to nine. That may not sound like a big number, but it was the largest group of prodigies anyone had assembled in eighty years.

As Joanne went from one home to the next, she examined the kids and spent time with their families. She listened as the parents described their experiences raising their children. Did they share some little-known secret to unleashing prodigious abilities? What portion of the prodigies’ skills was the product of nurture, careful shaping in the hands of adept parents, and what portion was the product of nature?

It’s a question perhaps best investigated by exploring the lives of two of those nine prodigies: Jonathan Russell, the son of an expert, and Lauren Voiers, the daughter of an amateur.

Jonathan Russell is a twenty-year-old New York University student with curly dark hair, thick eyebrows, scruffy facial hair, and a near-encyclopedic knowledge of film scores. He recently released an independent album of fifteen original instrumental tracks, gives occasional violin performances in Central Park, and often rescores portions of popular movies, TV shows, and video games for fun.

The pieces that make it into Jonathan’s schoolwork or onto his album or YouTube channel are only a fraction of his original compositions. As Jonathan describes it, music is always on his mind: “My brain is in constant music mode a lot of the time. I kind of have this internal iPod, but instead of playing music that already exists, it composes completely by itself, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.”

The idea of having an internal music composition system operating on autopilot sounds incredible, but it’s something of a mixed blessing. The stream of music gets stronger the closer Jonathan gets to sleep. Sometimes he has to play the music or write it down, just to get it out of his head.

He has a similar, almost reflexive ability to imagine people’s voices. When he sleeps, every person he dreams about has a distinct voice. When he reads, he can easily conjure up the sound of a favorite TV character (often those with a British accent, like Stewie Griffin, the evil genius toddler on Family Guy) or a friend speaking the words, as if he were listening to a one-of-a-kind audiobook.

Music has been a part of Jonathan’s life for as long as he can remember. He was born into a musical household in Riverdale, an upscale part of the Bronx. His mother, Eve Weiss, is a guitarist; the New York Times chronicled her 1983 debut New York performance. She stopped performing when Jonathan was three or four, but she’s still a full-time guitar instructor; his father, Jim Russell, works in IT but minored in music in college.

Almost from birth, Jonathan seemed interested in sound. He loved to strum Eve’s guitar, and when Eve sang to him in the stroller, he dictated song choice with a shake of his head.

When Jonathan was eighteen months old, he pointed at a picture of a violin on a bag slung over a doorknob and said “violin”; he repeated the word whenever he saw an image of a violin in the house or on TV. Soon after, Jonathan picked out the sound of a violin on a recording and again piped up with his new favorite word: “violin.” At eighteen months, Jonathan recognized the instrument by sight and sound.

“My reaction was two things. It was, I have to become a Suzuki teacher—that’s the best method I’ve heard for teaching young kids—and let’s get him started as soon as we can,” Eve said.

Eve began teacher training for Suzuki around the time Jonathan turned two. It’s a “mother-tongue approach” to music instruction in which children learn an instrument just as they learn a language—by ear and with parental support. Jim and Jonathan tagged along when Eve had class, and father and son passed the time by strolling the music institute playing a game they called “looking for Mr. Bach.” Once, Eve and Jim put a “teeny tiny violin” under Jonathan’s chin, just to see what would happen. He got a huge grin on his face.

Eve and Jim played the introductory Suzuki violin CD for Jonathan at home and in the car (Eve tells her students’ parents to “play it till you want to throw it out the window”). They put Jonathan to bed listening to Bach’s Partita in D Minor on violin. At two, Jonathan’s grandfather gave him an old keyboard, and Jonathan tinkered with it for hours at a time, figuring out sounds.

When Jonathan was two and a half, Eve contacted the head of the School for Strings, a Suzuki-based music school in Manhattan. “I said, ‘You know, my kid, he can hear the sound of a violin, he loves music, he’s very musical, he’s left-handed, and he’s not potty trained yet,’” Eve said. The director told her that the school didn’t take on kids who weren’t potty trained. He told her to wait a year. “I kind of said, ‘I know my kid, and he’s gonna be playing “Twinkle” on the violin before he’s potty trained.’”

Jonathan’s pediatrician put Eve in touch with Monica Gerard, a newly trained Suzuki instructor, and Jonathan began taking weekly lessons with Monica a few months before his third birthday. In place of a real violin, Jonathan and Eve wrapped a couscous box in paper, painted it, and stuck a ruler in it (a typical technique used when teaching young children to hold a violin); he named it Peter after the title character in Peter and the Wolf. Eve already knew how to play a bit of violin (“badly,” as she put it), so, as required in Suzuki training, she helped him at home.

Jonathan gave his first performance at three (using a real violin) as part of a recital for Eve’s students. His face lit up as he stood in front of the audience, his baggy checked pants held up by suspenders. “Jonathan got up onstage and took his bow and held his violin out, put it under his chin, picked up the bow, played one round of ‘Peanut Butter Crackers,’ and then he wouldn’t get off the stage,” Eve said. (“Peanut Butter Crackers” is the name Eve uses for a common introductory Suzuki rhythm.) “He just grinned—stared at the audience and grinned—and they applauded and we had to drag him off the stage.”

Jonathan picked up pieces quickly, but his motor skills were underdeveloped. He couldn’t hold the violin correctly; he had trouble positioning the bow. It was a struggle for him to bend his arm at the elbow. Sometimes he fell over while practicing posture.

Eve and Jim had been keeping a close eye on Jonathan’s development. He was hypersensitive to loud sounds: the rock music at a dolphin aquarium show made him hysterical. Smells, too, like the fumes from a car or the odors of a restaurant, could set him off. He was clumsy, zigzagged when he walked, and had trouble staying in a straight line in tap class. At his violin teacher Monica’s suggestion, Eve and Jim had Jonathan formally assessed. He was diagnosed with a sensory processing disorder—a condition in which people under- or overreact to sights, smells, or sounds (or some combination thereof).

His clumsiness made the technical aspects of the violin a struggle, but there were flashes of talent of a different sort. When Jonathan was three or four, Monica asked him to figure out the melody to “Old MacDonald.” When he played it for her, Jonathan put in a slide—a little embellishment of sorts. At first, Monica thought he had made a mistake. But when he played it back to her the same way, slide and all, three more times, Monica realized he was doing it on purpose; her pint-sized student was improvising.

It was no fluke. About a year later, Jonathan went with Eve’s mother to see a klezmer band, a group that played traditional eastern European Jewish music. One of the tunes was familiar to him—Eve’s mother had sung the popular “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen” to him before, replacing the words with “the bear missed the train”—and when Jonathan got home, he got his violin and pieced the song together.

It was impressive, but not a complete shock. “Okay, he’s a Suzuki kid, they’re trained to do things by ear,” Eve remembered thinking. But once he had the song nailed down, he began improvising on it; he left the melody intact but altered the rhythm at certain points, a technique often used by jazz musicians. “That was like, yeah, okay, five-year-olds don’t normally do that kind of thing,” Eve said. “My mouth kind of dropped open.”

A kid with a knack for jazz improvisation was a hot commodity. The next year, Eve took Jonathan, then six years old, to a recital for older children. After Jonathan gave an impromptu performance, a musician in the audience asked Jonathan to sit in with his jazz band, Dulit’s Dixieland Devils, at a Tarrytown restaurant. The group’s youngest member was a roughly fifty-year-old drummer. Some of the band members were supportive; some complained about Jonathan’s technical imperfections. It became a regular gig for Jonathan.

A string of referrals created a domino effect of performance opportunities: at seven, he began playing at Arthur’s Tavern, a live jazz joint in Manhattan’s West Village (“the oldest gig in New York,” as Eve described it), and the Cajun, a Chelsea venue. “I had reservations about the cigarette smoke, but not playing at a bar,” Eve said of those early gigs. “It wasn’t a honky-tonk kind of drunken bar. It was a jazz club.”

That same year, Jonathan began making the jazz festival rounds, where his head barely reached the elbows of the adult musicians. His performances snagged enough attention that the New York Times profiled him, commending his “sophisticated improvisations on the melodies of jazz standards.” Over the next few years, more friend-of-a-fan referrals put Jonathan onstage with a ninety-one-year-old Les Paul at Iridium in New York City and an eighty-one-year-old Bucky Pizzarelli, a pairing of “the rotary phone and the cell phone” of jazz, at the North Carolina Jazz Festival.

For all his love of performing, Jonathan hated to practice, a characteristic that set him apart from most of the other prodigies. He knew all the pieces, but his motor skills were still behind the curve; he hated when Eve corrected his technical mistakes.

He rehearsed, but only because Eve told him it was one way or the other: if he didn’t practice, she would cancel his gigs. He practiced, about two and a half hours a day; neither Jonathan nor Eve could tolerate more than that.

That changed when, around the time Jonathan turned twelve, a friend played him a piece of the score from the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, I forgot how good this was,’” Jonathan recalled. “I started listening to all the albums, and I kind of memorized everything on the first listen through, which happens sometimes.”

He spent a year writing new arrangements for the music. He went to fiddle camp, but instead of playing the usual fiddle tunes, he corralled the other campers into performing Pirates music with him. He did the same thing with the Lord of the Rings trilogy. He listened to the music, he memorized the scores, he wrote new arrangements for it—for hours at a time.

Instead of having to urge him to practice, Eve finally told him to stop; she couldn’t take listening to Pirates music anymore. She urged him to compose his own stuff. Jonathan researched top-of-the-line composition equipment on discussion forums and Web sites and, using the money he earned from his jazz gigs, bought a new computer for composing.

Sometimes he sat at the piano and improvised, but for the most part songs came to him fully formed. During high school, he got up at 5:30 a.m. to compose because it was a time when he felt particularly inspired.

Jonathan set his sights on film scoring. Eve asked around about composition lessons, and a friend put her in touch with an NYU composition professor who took a thirteen-year-old Jonathan on as a student. Jonathan developed a huge knowledge bank of scores and score trivia. During one conversation, he noted that Hans Zimmer wrote parts of the score for the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie but his contribution is uncredited; Peter Jackson knew the composer Howard Shore had found the theme for Rohan in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers when he started humming it in the car; in Batman Begins, Zimmer composed an incomplete theme for an incomplete human being. Jonathan began an annual tradition of creating a medley of the best original score Oscar nominees and posting it online.

The performances continued, often influenced by Jonathan’s fascination with film scores. There were jazz festivals throughout the United States (he “pluckishly improvised—using the Lone Ranger’s theme” at the Sacramento Jazz Jubilee) and a music tour in Hungary (he watched Star Wars in Hungarian). Jonathan put out a few self-produced CDs, all of which included his improvisations. He played with Wynton Marsalis at Rose Hall at Jazz at Lincoln Center as part of the Nursery Song Swing concert series when he was thirteen. At fifteen, he performed the improvised violin segment of One Night with Fanny Brice, an off-Broadway production, three nights a week—“sprightly contributions,” as described by the New York Times. But Jonathan’s heart was in composing movie scores—a path that Eve, herself a classical musician, had never envisioned for him.

“We did have to make him practice; that’s what he hated doing about everything. But the improv came from him. Nobody could have taught this kid to improvise when he was younger, and the composition end, which he owns even more, that was the driving force behind him,” Eve said. “We couldn’t have made him compose, we couldn’t have made him sit for hours like he did, but we made him practice.”

Lauren Voiers grew up in Westlake, a suburb on the west side of Cleveland. She’s five feet eleven inches with long hair—sometimes blond, sometimes brunette—a round face, and caramel-colored eyes. Her father, Doug, is a cosmetic dentist, her mother, Nancy, a nurse turned stay-at-home mom who has now returned to nursing.

From the time Lauren was two or three, she had, as her father put it, “a very, very, very, extremely strong desire” to create. “Sometimes I would come home from work, and my wife would brace me for the carnage that had occurred at the home,” Doug said. “She did destroy good parts of our home over the years.”

At three years old, Lauren got her hands on a permanent marker and drew on all four walls of a bedroom, “broad strokes, as high as she could reach,” Doug recalled; the Voierses had to tear the wallpaper down. She drew on the carpet until it had to be ripped off the floor. She carved designs into the woodwork, once etching into a custom-made window seat in her bedroom.

As she got a bit older—four, five, six—Lauren’s creative urge persisted, but she channeled it onto more traditional surfaces. She drew faces and objects in great detail without looking at any sort of reference material. She painted by number; she painted on backpacks and clothes. She assembled jewelry from kits, made a jewelry box out of clay, and poured colored sand into bottles. She had a knack for making posters that won her a couple of school contests. In middle school, Lauren grew interested in architecture and sketched out designs on graph paper, creating modern, angular homes and geometric spaces.

Nancy and Doug both enjoyed the arts—Nancy played the piano; Doug took a ceramics course in college and dabbled with watercolors—and they bought Lauren markers and crayons and other art supplies on Christmas and her birthday to support her interest. Art, they thought, made for a great hobby.

In seventh grade, Lauren’s eye wandered to her dad’s painting supplies. Inspired by one of her dad’s art books, she borrowed a canvas and some paints and tried to replicate a Thomas Kinkade painting of a river running through a forest. Over the next few months, she produced a few other small landscapes—a couple of houses, another nature scene. She painted a couple of times a week for four or five hours at a time. “Eventually, it got to the point where she was producing things that were fairly amusing,” Doug said. “But of course, we wound up with four kids, so we’re making babies, and my wife’s a critical care nurse, and I’m a cosmetic dentist and building a business, and we’re living our lives, so we’re not paying much attention to the quality of what she’s doing.”

When Lauren was thirteen, she saw Marla Olmstead, a then-four-year-old artist with big eyes and chin-length hair, on The Jane Pauley Show. She was riveted by the girl’s story and even more so by her paintings. “It was filled with a lot of micro-detail and smaller areas,” Lauren said of one of Marla’s works, a large, fiery piece punctuated by dark splotches. “It was kind of 3-D, kind of like creepy in a way.”

Lauren sought out more images of similar artwork. During breaks at school, she went to the library and studied the abstract paintings on artists’ Web sites. When she got home, she did the same thing, poring over artists’ Web sites and examining art books until she was spending two and a half hours a day inhaling art. “I absolutely became obsessed,” Lauren said.

She abandoned the landscapes she had been painting and tried her hand at abstracts (“using my fingers, using my hands, just kind of experimenting with paint”). She quickly moved toward cubism, depicting objects as composed of—and alongside—an array of geometric shapes or, as Lauren put it, “breaking things down to their simplest form.”

She hustled to the art room during lunch and free periods; she stayed after school to paint. The school art teacher called Doug and Nancy after she saw Lauren’s early abstracts. She thought their daughter had a gift. After that, the Voierses bought Lauren paints and the large canvases she wanted. She completed fifteen, some as large as three by four feet, that year.

Her production accelerated once she started high school. She spent six hours a day painting, then seven, eight, nine hours a day. Her other activities—tennis, basketball, schoolwork—fell by the wayside. She pieced together a couple of hours of painting at school; study hall, lunch, any extra time she had went toward her artwork. But she did the bulk of her painting at night, after everyone had gone to bed. Doug converted their attic space into an art studio for Lauren during her junior year of high school, and Lauren stayed up past 3:00 a.m., past 4:00 a.m., sometimes not sleeping at all before school and then crashing during first and second periods. “I went kind of crazy on it,” Lauren remembered.

Her artwork again spilled over onto the walls, this time the walls of her own room, which she decorated according to a different theme every year—sophisticated jungle, “hippy dippy trippy” murals, metallic green with graffiti.

There were a series of victories. Her painting Sisters, a crimson-and-orange work in which two girls appear to be embracing (“showing the love I have for my sister”), was a regional finalist in the 2006 Ohio Governor’s Youth Art Exhibition. The next year, Transparency, an autumnal-colored piece in which a woman is visible among an array of shapes (“a more stained-glass effect . . . with many layers and dimensions”), won Scholastic’s National Gold Key Award. A friend’s mother commissioned her to paint a landscape of their house. A Cleveland art dealer sold a few of her pieces, including The Cellist, a nine-by-four-foot bronze-and-violet cubist piece that spanned three canvases (“one of the best paintings I ever made”). To the Voierses, though, art still felt more like a hobby than a viable career. “Everyone knows artists are starving,” Lauren said. “The odds of becoming an artist that can actually make a living at it is—I don’t know what the odds are, but they’re ridiculous.”

A phone call changed everything. When Lauren was seventeen, a California art agent contacted her parents. He had seen an image of Sisters that Lauren’s mother, Nancy, had posted online. He wanted to take Lauren on as a client. “Our first conversation on the phone, my wife got all excited and I said, ‘Okay, I want to talk to this guy, because he’s full of it,’” Doug said. “I was very, very worried for her going into that world. My wife was excited about it, about the prospect, and I was very dubious and I was skeptical.”

The agent proposed a trial online auction, just to see how things went. He sold around $179,000 worth of Lauren’s art; Lauren’s cut amounted to more than $40,000. Lauren signed a representation agreement with the agency a couple of months later on her eighteenth birthday. Her parents contacted the school to help her set up a reduced schedule for the last semester of her senior year so she could travel to art events.

“Right after that, it was bam, bam, bam, bam, bam,” Lauren said. She zipped off to shows and auctions across the country, making her way to New Jersey and New York, La Jolla and Las Vegas, Virginia and Maryland. “It’s something I had been dreaming about,” Lauren said. “Every time I would be working on my art, I’d have it in the back of my mind, imagining, what if I’m painting this for a show? I always dreamed it would be going somewhere else besides sitting in the attic.” Her price tags shot upward, with her large canvases eventually selling for around $20,000 each.

In the midst of her immersion in the professional art world, Lauren graduated from high school. She rented studio space in Cleveland—a loft downtown with big windows, hardwood floors, and redbrick walls—and then in a church on the east side where she worked in a converted space in the rafters. When she met Joanne in September 2010, she was officially a professional.

“Other people began recognizing her talent far before we did, mainly because they had the context,” Doug recalled. “So here they are comparing what she is doing to all of these other children of the same age-group. We didn’t really have that ability to compare; we just saw what she was doing.”

Jonathan’s and Lauren’s families aren’t polar opposites. Both kids come from financially stable, two-parent homes. Both families provided their kids with the supplies they needed to pursue their interest—a violin for Jonathan; paints and canvases for Lauren.

But their families weren’t exactly following the same playbook, either. Lauren was almost entirely self-taught; Jonathan took violin lessons, piano lessons, and composition courses. Lauren’s family knew little of the art world; as she put it, “The whole art business—that was brand-new to all of us.” Jonathan’s parents knew the ropes. “I’m a musician,” Eve said. “A lot of the parents of prodigies aren’t musicians or aren’t this or aren’t that and are kind of lost, but my thing was, I’m a musician, I know what all the pitfalls are. I was gonna make it much easier for him to succeed than it was for me.”

The question of how significantly parents contribute to their children’s achievements is an old one, and it’s one that prodigy parents often face. While many families seem bewildered by their child’s advanced abilities, there have, historically, been parents eager to take credit for their children’s achievements. In the 1910s, for example, a small group of parents proclaimed that they had turned their children into prodigies. One of these parents, Leo Wiener, a Harvard professor whose children included Norbert Wiener, a famous prodigy and eventual MIT mathematician, claimed that his children were “not precocious,” “not geniuses,” and “not even exceptionally bright.” “I could take almost any child and develop him in the same way,” Wiener said. “It is merely the method of imparting learning.”

In other words, these parents claimed that their prodigies were normal children. They had no inherent advantage in the smarts department. In the parents’ telling, these children excelled because their education began at a young age—perhaps at two or three—well before the age at which formal schooling typically began. Other common threads among the parents included rejecting baby talk; introducing letters, numbers, languages, and other areas of study at a young age; and making learning interesting. According to these parents, their children’s outcomes were the product of their parents’ efforts.

The view that parents could create a prodigy out of almost any child is an extreme nurture take on prodigy, one that bestows on parents great control over their children’s minds and abilities. This nurture-oriented perspective is oddly reminiscent of some of the darkest moments in the history of autism. For decades, scientists and the public debated whether parents might be to blame for their children’s autism.

The groundwork for this debate was laid early. In his earliest writings on autism in the 1940s and 1950s, Leo Kanner entertained the idea that parents might have played some role in their children’s condition. In particular, he questioned the impact of two practices he believed were common among the parents of the autists he saw: “stuffing” the children with “verses, zoologic and botanic names, titles and composers of victrola record pieces, and the like” and subjecting them to “emotional refrigeration.” He eventually concluded, though, based on the fact that his patients exhibited autism symptoms almost from birth, that autistic tendencies must be innate: the environmental influence, he wrote, was “not sufficient in itself” to cause autism.

Others disagreed. Bruno Bettelheim, the vocal, long-term director of a children’s residential treatment center at the University of Chicago, was convinced that autism was a product of nurture. He believed that autistic children internalized the perceived negative emotions of their closest caregivers—most often, their mothers. Drawing on the tale of Hansel and Gretel, Bettelheim claimed in his 1967 book, The Empty Fortress, that an autistic child would see his or her mother as the “devouring witch” of the fairy tale and that his or her withdrawal was a defense mechanism against the mother’s perceived “destructive intents.”

Eventually, scientific research, particularly twin studies, swept the nurture conception of autism aside. In the first of these, a 1977 study, the psychiatrists Susan Folstein and Michael Rutter found that among sets of twins in which at least one of each pair was autistic, the second twin was far more likely to have autism if the twins were identical than if they were fraternal. Their finding suggested a strong genetic component to autism because the identical twins had more DNA in common with each other than the fraternal twins (nature), but all the twins shared a prenatal environment and a home environment (nurture). These findings were buttressed by other twin studies and by studies that identified a higher prevalence of autism-related traits in autists’ family members—a finding that suggested a genetic basis for such traits. It has since become conventional wisdom that autism has a large genetic component. In most parts of the world, the idea that parents are to blame for their children’s autism has been tarnished and cast aside.

But what about child prodigies? Are their behaviors, too, largely the product of genetics? After spending more than a decade investigating prodigies, David Feldman thought there was an innate core to prodigious skill. He and Lynn Goldsmith concluded in Nature’s Gambit that all six of their subjects had “striking and extreme” talents—abilities with which they were born. “If these children themselves were not truly gifted,” they wrote, “they would not emerge as prodigies.”

There are occasionally cases in which a child’s story can serve as an almost undeniable example of such extreme innate talent. Kelvin Doe, for example, grew up in Freetown, Sierra Leone, with few resources; he’s the youngest of five children and was raised by a single mother in a community that had electricity only once a week. At eleven, he began rooting through trash heaps for scrap electronic parts. He used what he found to create a battery to power the lights in his house. The self-taught inventor later assembled a generator and an FM radio transmitter. He’s since been invited to visit MIT, given a TEDxTeen talk, and signed a $100,000 contract to develop solar panel technology in Sierra Leone.

It’s easy to imagine, though, that other prodigious children never fully develop their talents. According to Feldman and Goldsmith, while innate talent was the engine for the achievements of the children they studied, most prodigies could never reach their potential without catching a few breaks. They explained that even children endowed with magnificent abilities benefit from significant familial support and superb teachers and from choosing a field both valued by society and conducive to the rapid development of expert ability. Only when all of these factors work in unison, in “a beautifully choreographed co-incidence of forces,” can a child’s full potential be revealed.

It’s an insightful conclusion; it illuminates the circumstances under which the abilities of a prodigiously talented child might fully develop. It suggests that even if prodigies have a baseline innate capability that can’t be taught, most still need a certain environment to maximize their talent. But providing that environment, figuring out how to raise children who, as one reporter put it, “stand out like Gulliver among the Lilliputians,” is a challenging parental task.

These families find themselves unexpectedly confronted with a child’s ravenous need for new information. They scramble to find materials or teachers to satisfy and engage a mind with a seemingly endless capacity to learn. It’s an urgency-infused struggle; the kids often seem to need to develop their skills in the same way that they need to breathe (the music prodigy Jay Greenberg once told his mother that if he wasn’t composing, he would be dead).

So how do you raise a prodigy? It’s not an easy question to answer. Among the prodigies’ families, there’s relatively little consensus on some of the toughest questions.

How, for example, should you educate a prodigy? Lauren and Jonathan followed similar, and relatively traditional, education tracks—Lauren graduated from a public school, Jonathan from Manhattan’s Professional Children’s School—and both followed a normal grade-level progression. Two of the music prodigies, on the other hand, rely on homeschooling, an option that gives them schedule flexibility, lets them set the pace, and allows for a deep dive into interesting subjects.

William did a few years of mainstream education at grade level while pursuing his “real learning” at home, but this turned out to be a short-term solution. At six, he got fed up with what was, for him, a simple and tedious multiplication test, and he refused to complete it. Instead, he handed in a test he made himself in which he calculated the square roots of the numbers 1 through 10. For the more difficult numbers, he wrote out the answer to the sixth decimal place. “He then put his pencil down and said ‘I’m NOT doing this anymore!’” Lucie recalled. The school promoted him to sixth-grade math, and his teachers gave him seventh- and eighth-grade math exercises to keep him busy.

There’s a media question, too. The press loves a child prodigy, but how to handle the interview requests? Partly due to the way in which Joanne selected the first batch of prodigies—searching news stories for reports of children with preternatural abilities—many of the kids were media savvy. They gave interviews freely and had their own Web sites; they eventually had Facebook pages and Twitter accounts.

Some of the coverage resulting from prodigy interviews is warm and fuzzy and a way to further the career of a child whose inner engine has been shifted into high gear since birth. But there are risks to media exposure, too. There’s always the chance that an interview will lead to a less-than-favorable piece. Even if the initial coverage is kind, once the information is out there, it can be rehashed, recut, and reconsidered by people to whom the family never entrusted their story. For the more prominently featured children, there is also the prospect of being forever followed, forever documented—even if they no longer want any part of the limelight.

It was only later in Joanne’s career, once her research began attracting journalists’ attention, that she heard from media-shy prodigy families, people who wanted to help advance her research but didn’t want a reporter anywhere near their home. Alex and William’s parents, for example, shielded their boys and their family from the press. “I think we’ll just avoid all that and leave it as so,” Lucie said of interview opportunities. “We love our quiet lives that are undisrupted.”

These parents often face unexpected financial burdens (who budgets for professional art courses for a teenager?) and social struggles (what does a kid who studies theoretical physics talk to other eight-year-olds about?). There are as many answers to these questions as there are prodigy families. On the social front, for example, some seek out potential common ground the children may share with their age-mates; others focus on nurturing relationships with siblings; still others try to help ease their children into environments that offer common ground with intellectual (but far older) peers. Often the same family will try out different approaches as time and circumstances change. There is, for better and for worse, no single way to raise a child, even if that child is a prodigy.

While parental capabilities and resources and the home environment in which the kids are raised may impact the prodigies’ ultimate level of achievement, these factors don’t explain the source of what Feldman and Goldsmith described as the prodigies’ “striking and extreme” talent.

Despite their parents’ differing levels of expertise in their fields, Jonathan and Lauren share a couple of traits that seem essential to their abilities. Both walloped the working memory section of the Stanford-Binet IQ test, just like the other prodigies. And once they discovered their areas of specialty, both Jonathan and Lauren demonstrated a dizzying need to pursue that interest.

It’s this passion that seems to drive the prodigies. It’s a popularized principle of psychology that it takes ten thousand hours to become a world-class expert in something, and the prodigies’ insatiable passion explains how they might manage to get their ten thousand hours in by such a young age. In Lauren, the source of that passion was clearly internal. For most of her teenage years, her parents didn’t think an art career was realistic; they were happy to provide Lauren with supplies, but they wanted her to focus on school. Jonathan’s case looks somewhat different. His mother knew the ins and outs of a music career. Eve encouraged Jonathan, though for a time she could only cajole him into practicing a couple of hours a day. But when Jonathan discovered film scoring, the area in which he is truly prodigious, he demonstrated an internal “rage to master.”

Every parent Joanne met similarly insisted that the determination to paint, play, compose, or study originated with the child. Most of the parents recount their children seeking out endless information, music practice, or time at the easel despite their parents’ pleas that they go outside, run, climb, dance, or play soccer. Terre Grossman worries about Greg’s falling asleep with his cell phone in hand and waking up to answer business e-mails. Lucie gets William out of the house by baiting him with chalk; if he is going to write equations, at least he’ll do it outside.

So where do the prodigies get their relentless drive? The answer may be a connection with autism. Just like extraordinary memory, this tendency toward obsessive, almost all-consuming interests is another trait the prodigies share with autists and autistic savants.