8- not like other kids
Last summer, after serious thought, Toby Rosenberg announced to his friends and family that he was changing his name. "Toby," he felt, was "a little boy's name." Instead, he would be called Karl, like his father before him. His school accepted the switch. His parents had no argument. Toby—now Karl—was five years old.
And he had a point: regardless of his age, Kart has never been a little boy. At 14 months, he began to read aloud from the posters he viewed from his stroller. It would be another full year before he talked on his own: but once he did. he spoke fluent English and Polish (his mother, Anna, is from Krakow) and several other languages. He trained himself to write Japanese after studying the label on a bottle. He taught himself the Hebrew alphabet after seeing the characters on a dreidel. a type of toy. Last year, after seeing a book in a museum shop on ancient Egypt, he compiled a dictionary of hieroglyphics. The impression you get when you first meet Karl is that of a bookish teenager, a middle-aged diplomat, and a talkative grandmother trapped together in the body of a first-grader.
"You don't know what it's like with Karl," his father says, laughing tiredly. Karl Sr. was once an artist, and is now a website designer. He spends at least an hour every afternoon in the family's one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment drafting sketches and submitting them to his son's critiques. "He stands behind me and tells me to draw things over and over to his specifications," Karl says. "If he's not on the Internet, he's here, issuing commands over my shoulder. We just want to encourage his interests and support him any way we can. Nobody in this household is trying to tell him what to do." Which is just as it should be. Experts offer parents of child prodigies this advice about raising their gifted children:
1. Don't overstructure your child's life. Experts advise parents of hyper-intelligent children that, instead of filling their time with planned activities, they should try not to be too controlling. "Profoundly gifted kids are highly curious and likely to pursue all kinds of interests with great passion," says Sandra Berger. a gifted-education specialist for more than 20 years. "It's best to let the child's interests be your guide."
2. Provide as many teaming opportunities as possible. Parents should strive to introduce their children to a wide variety of subjects. They should take them on field trips and museum tours; moreover, the child's normal environment should be treated as an experiential playground. It was reportedly his early walks in the woods with his father that alerted Richard Feynman, the Nobel- prize-winning physicist, to the complexity of life. For Karl, it was drives past the Williamsburg Bridge that piqued his avid interest in construction.
Such interests can prove a distraction. When he was taking his Educational Records Bureau exam in January, Karl spent much of the allotted time lecturing the test-givers on the unusual architecture of the Chrysler Building, which was visible through the classroom window. When the examiners tried to summarize Karl's irregular score, they mentioned his "most noteworthy...fund of knowledge."
Of course, even without a standardized-test score, Karl's parents know he's a genius. On the other ;hfend, they know that they should never, ever use that term.
3. Avoid calling your child a genius. "There are three reasons the label could only be unhelpful," says Dr. Jack Shonkoff, an expert on early childhood development. "One, it puts an enormous burden on the kid that he or she will have trouble living up to. Two, it's a setup for other people— relatives, teachers—to be disappointed in the kid's future performance. And three, it serves to set the child apart from other children." Shonkoff says that extremely talented kids are pigeonholed, or stereotyped, enough already. They don't need a label to isolate them even more.
4. Don't expect your child to be popular. Combating social isolation may be the greatest challenge for those raising exceptionally Intelligent kids Karl has had a typically uphill battle finding a school—let alone a circle of friends—that can contain him. At three years old, he was asked to leave his preschool program at the local Y.M.C.A. His teachers thought that his obvious boredom was a bad influence on the other children. After a search, his parents discovered the East Manhattan School for Bright and Gifted Children, but the independent school soon closed. Karl then transferred to a first-grade class at a public school in Brooklyn. He was immediately promoted to its accelerated program, but his social life lagged far behind.
It's no surprise. Adults tend to make friendships on the basis of shared interests and coincidental punulta Similarly, highly gifted children seek out friends like themselves, rather than falling into groups according to age or grade. "These kids just aren't likely to be part of a huge gang in the lunchroom,'' Berger says.
5. Don't sacrifice educational advancement to give your child a "normal" upbringing. Holding children back from upper-level grades and early college won't help them socially. On the contrary, it will frustrate them—and their teachers. "These kids will exhaust the retourceaofany normal classroom," Berger says. "Six-, seven-, and eight-year-olds who are interested in aerospace technology shouldn't be stuck in homeroom."
Karl's extensive punults could exhaust just about anyone. He's played the piano since he was three. Two years later he requested a violin, and his parents managed to borrow one. In addition, the family's apartment was cluttered with Karl's drawings of the Titanic, which he reimagmed as a medieval gatleon, with his floor sculpture of Moscow's St. Basil's Cathedral reconfigured as an ancient Irish church and with the whirling presence of Kart himself.
Preparing to present his well-illustrated, self-assigned report on the Statue of Liberty, he announced to his family: "The architect was Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi; Auguste—I mean—did you hear that? A-goose. I said goose!" He bursts into giggles, and for the moment, at least, Karl Jr. is completely happy and six years old.
