'Gifted Child Industry' Preys on Parents' Insecurities

Of all the myriad people I’ve met through my children, there is still one type I’m waiting to encounter: The parent of an average child. Kids are all special these days, it seems, needing enrichment toys as infants, music classes as toddlers and intensive academics when they are in school. How did we get to this pass?

Alissa Quart takes us on a journey to the dark heart of the parenting meritocracy in her new book, "Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child." In her view, an increased emphasis on the early years of childhood by sociologists and educators coalesced with parental fears of failing schools and a faltering economy sometime in the mid- to late 1990s. Stir in some astute marketing by firms such as the Baby Einstein Co. and you have the makings of modern American childhood, a period marked by an increased emphasis on study and structured activity and less on play. Or at least it’s that way for upper-middle-class progeny, the ones with parents who have the extra money to buy their kids extra attention and services.

As the rich are getting richer, their children are gaining the opportunity to get smarter. States are gutting funding for gifted education in the public schools even as well-to-do parents fight for appointments with specialized intelligence evaluators who charge a thousand dollars or more per child. What Quart dubs the "Baby Genius Edutainment Complex” has resulted in a world where extra services for kids are increasingly available only to those who can pay for outside tutoring, extracurricular activities or the high tax rates of elite suburban school districts. Call it the privatization of giftedness, where all too many children are being left behind.

Quart is hardly the first to make these points. Sociologist Annette Lareau’s landmark book Unequal Childhoods pointed to the calendar as the new center of middle class family life, the date book having replaced the dining room table as the center of all household doings. Moreover, within the past year several new books, including "The Kindergarten Wars," by Alan Eisenstock, and "The Overachievers," by Alexandra Robbins, have examined the high-pressure world of upper-income American children. What makes Quart’s book unique is its systemic look at the world of these children and their families, from the Mozart tapes their parents play to them in utero to the conventions held for gifted children and their parents. She spends times with both the true prodigies -- those with unique skills manifested at an early age -- and those with just extra high IQs or other talents that are less than extraordinary but still special.

Of course, child prodigies and their pushy parents have always been with us. The Victorians had the hothouse environments of bourgeoisie homes, where children such as future philosopher John Stuart Mill were tutored as toddlers. More recently, there were the Quiz Kids in the 1940s, those champion knowledge-busters who knew more than the adults asking them questions. What’s new is the mass appeal of the concept, the idea that this is something all parents should aspire to, not just a few particularly achievement-oriented moms and dads.

Yet, are these parents doing their kids any favors? In the end, Quart is unable to decide. A former gifted child herself, she notes that many now-adult prodigies and gifted children grow up with a profound fear of failure, with a sense they will never fulfill they promise of their early childhood talent, despite their more mature accomplishments. However, she also believes she might well have not become a writer without her father’s insistence that she read, write and study when many of her friends were out at play.

I read this book with sadness and a touch of wistfulness. After seven years of parenting, I am all too aware of how little I know about my children’s futures. I am almost in awe of those optimistic souls who believe a bit of enriched formula, mixed with the right infant gym class, followed by the appropriate after-school activities can create a successful, healthy and wealthy adult. As if.