Child Genius (C4)

[TheFirstOfHerName]

Anyone planning to watch this?

I was a little like these children; joined Mensa as a child, but used my ability to coast through school/university rather than to achieve anything noteworthy.

DS2 is also of this ilk. We are not doing any of the things these parents are doing, although when opportunities arise through school then obviously we let him participate.

Any ideas where I could watch this outside the UK? Is it on youtube or anything?

Rubaiyat and Sharon are lovely too. If something good comes out of this I hope its that Rubaiyat and Cuneyd remain friends they both got along so well and both had social difficulties and are sweet unselfconscious children.
The lovely little Asian boy I can't remember his name , multitasking while eating, aww!
I'd be a bit concerned about Eleanor but her parents seem sound.

I loved the incredulous faces Sophie pulled on hearing some of those words. What a lovely child.

What the hell is Mensa thinking of endorsing this programme.
They are meant to encourage and support people with a high IQ, not parade these kids like some kind of freaks. I am so fucking disgusted with them over this.

Having a genuinely gifted child like Eleanor is hard hard work and shit programmes like this with some kind of agenda portray parents of gifted kids as loons. We are not, we are exhausted.

Mensa and whatever the fuck the the British gifted children association call themselves now, potential plus, should hang their heads in shame for encouraging this shite. Utter utter shite.

That is all.

I think a) the production company b) Channel 4 and c) the parents will all have had something to do with the filming.

It's clear that some parents have not consented to their children having been interviewed for the programme.

Although the documentary aims at being entertaining I think it does show a few interesting things about the families of able children.

Some parents clearly are pushing their children too hard. Some children clearly have 'old' minds, but ordinary child emotions and are also finding it hard to make friends with their peers.

I would be very interested in the stats of those who entered as well as those who made it through to the final group who took part in the shows.

The families in the final seem to be mainly from non British cultures (although the families themselves I am sure are British) so, is it that other cultures are brighter than those who would be thought to be genetically "British" or is there a cultural thing that the children are brought up with more emphasis put on academic achievement, are the parents more likely to want to participate in the show or is it simply Production bias to ensure a cultural mix for the television shows?

I hope that doesn't come across as racist, as it isn't intended to be, simply an observation and statistical curiosity on my behalf.

fwiw - I think Rubiyat comes across really well and whilst we don't see very much of his mum speaking, his Dad comes across as a lovely man trying to do the best by his gifted son. Not to say some of the other parents and kids don't, I guess I just have a bit of a soft spot for him :)

Tudor is very bright.
He is a few years younger than many of the other contestants. So he has done really well.
I really don't like his parents. It is a pity that they both appear to display great ignorance.
It is obvious that they love their children. However, the children may only feel that their parents love is dependent on how well they do academically.

myotherusernameisbetter - it's a perfectly reasonable question to ask! In my experience, in some South Asian, East Asian and African families, academic achievement is very highly prized and encouraged above all else. There's also an element of natural talent as well of course.

I can't believe Tudor's mum gave the wrong year for that question! At least she seemed genuinely sorry about it, unlike last week when Aliyah's stepdad had spent all that time coming up with the ridiculous nicknames for all the cards in the memory test... Which totally backfired for Aliyah as she lost focus, and then her mum blamed her and said she "f'd up" (yes I'm still bitter on Aliyah's behalf on that one!)

Cuneyd was absolutely amazing. I had tears in my eyes watching his assembly at the end.

Poor Sophie though, such a young age to lose her dad :(

Hey does anyone know why that Mercedez girl doesn't appear even though she appeared in the adverts. Also Tudor's mum is attactive she looks good for her age.

Oh yes I've just watched tge recent episode, poor little girl , I list my father at 11, it is hard. I still think the behaviour of Tudor parents is shameful

Watching the third episode now. Sforzando was a really mean spelling. It's not English!

I didn't understand why there was an Italian word in there either!

The words seemed to vary greatly in terms of difficulty, quite unfair.

I loved Cuneyd's mum turning the whole thing on its head and hoping it would be like a summer camp type thing for her boy where he could make friends. That felt like she was really thinking about him.

Tudor's mum should have been mortified by her error. I knew the answer to that one and I'm utterly crap at history - the one exam I didn't care about failing in 3rd year at high school, because I was jolly well going to drop it, anyhow.

Sforzando is a musical term, so any of the kids who played an instrument well would be likely to know that one.

It looked to me that they got a giant list of words to learn the spellings of?

BUT ouryve - the spelling can't be figured out phonetically by UK speakers so its all memory work. Many other words could be figured out by a good natural linguistic capability/knowledge of phonetics so it seems unfair.

No more unfair than xenophyte or any other scientific word of greek origin, or than beryllium, with that pesky y which has to be learnt. He also pronounced it in an Anglicised manner, so you could hear all the letter as you would see them.

I agree that Tudor is really phenomenal given that he's only 8. But he really isn't mature enough for all this. If his parents really felt they had to enter him for the comp they should have waited at least a couple of years.

Rubaiyat and Cuneyad are absoloutely lovely, and it was so lovely and sweet to see Cuneyad cheering Rubaiyat when he did really well :)

Can someone explain to me why the answer 'evaporation' was the correct answer to the question, "when water falls to the earth's surface in the form of rain, snow or hail, what is this process called?" at about 29:10.

I thought that the answer was 'precipitation' and stated this loudly and confidently at the time .

You are correct, Vivacia. I suspect some clumsy editing.

I don't know who I'm most revolted by. Channel 4 for commissioning such abusive crap, Mensa for going along with it or the children's parents for even thinking for a split second of letting them take part. Channel 4 has a history of car crash telly, Mensa have always thought that the ability to do crosswords and remember lots of stuff is how you measure intelligence. So no surprises with those two. So the real villains are the parents. How dare they!!!!!!!

Mensa members who PAY to be part of an 'intelligence club' very clever...

IQ tests are just as bad, there's a test doing the FB rounds just now with some people I know scoring very highly... the same people who post utter nonsense and share inspirational gibberish

Vivacia, that bit made me cross. It is absolutely precipitation.