Child Genius

[Whizzz]

on now.......this merits a MN thread !

I think it is ufair to slag off the children. They are only children after all. They are like they are
a) because of their genes, and
b) the environment they are in.
They cannot help being clever, talking in a posh voice, being preocicious.
I did find it wierd thaty the parents discussed their kids abilities/ falings in front of them. I felt sory for them all. I wanted to grab the whole lots of tehm and drag them to the park or the beach, and let them have a bt of fun!

Completely agree with icod re talking about the children and their abilities in front of them. Mad.

i'm a bit unsure about kids on tv at all. How can they give informed consent? There are so many programmes where you KNOW they're going to get the p* taken out of them, or be marked as 'bad' kids afterwards; I can't see why it's ok for parents and tv companies to take that decision for them.
I know there's a lot of exploitative tv with adults, some of whom are undoubtedly vulnerable, but I IMO kids should be protected from that sort of exposure.

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I think the other perspective missing is that there are bound to be, well maybe not masses, but a good few, other kids out there who are just as bright but whose parents manage to have a balanced sensible unstressy long view about it all (and so of course would not dream of taking part in this kind of project).

I wonder if Prof Freeman might be encouraged to talk about those sort of families? Or perhaps she doesn't see them ... I wonder.

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I met Mrs Grafton-clarke and some of her children a couple of years ago. At that time they were home-educating. The children were undoubtedly very bright, and very focussed: they just got on with things regardless of what was happening around them. They were perfectly nice and did not seem odd at all (except for their clothes). She seemed very strange even then, with the same lipstick. We decided to stay away from her as much as possible. I can't remember whether her husband was there.

Families that volunteer for this sort of programme are either naive (Peter), desperate for help (Dante), or obnoxious (Mrs Grafton-clarke). She didn't want the IQ test in case the children fell below their usual standard due to the presence of the film crew, and therefore might 'fail' in her eyes. They have had IQ tests before, and certainly qualify for this programme.

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Yes I realise it was under diff name as he said he didn't want to be called his name so he could get through life without being known as only that or something like that

Bink, I believe Prof. Freeman did a ground-breaking study looking at just exactly that. As I understand it (only read abstracts, not the full work) she took children who had been identified as gifted by membership of mensa-type setups and compared them with a set of controls who were matched for IQ but hadn't been overtly identified as gifted, even if the parents and school were aware of their ability. As far as I recall, the non-identified ones did much better in terms of life achievement and overall adjustment -- I think the theory was that the whole process of labelling children as gifted and somehow different brought with it a set of baggage that had long-term adverse consequences for the individuals.

I did find it odd in the programme (and prof. Freeman picked up on it once or twice) how the families were encouraging the children to play to their strengths to the exclusion of other activities. Whereas surely the point of being very good at school subjects is that you can get the boring stuff out of the way very quickly, do a bit of extensiony challenge work and still have lots of time left over to join the football club, do karate, design and build your own treehouse, breed guinea-pigs or win the school warhammer competition. Or whatever. There seemed to be very little 'whatever' going on outside these children's main areas of talent.

The little 3 year old boy only had an IQ of 130 (I say "only"!). This makes him bright but not freakishly so. I bet sometimes he wishes they could sing a nursery rhyme or two or play I spy instead of having to answer an endless stream of mental maths problems. I felt sorry for him not being allowed to quietly contemplate his first day at school (and talk about it if he wanted to!). Dante was very naughty and hated having all that power in his house. He was quite likeable underneath though. He is a drug addict in the making, he appears to have opted out of any idea of being part of anything, part of a household, part of his school, part of society. The mother was sort of proud of him taking his father's mobile. The little author chap was horribly annoying and I bet his classmates can't stand him (loved the sister crying into her ultra-rare medieval roasted pigeon!) but there was genuine love and warmth in that house. The freak family from East Anglia, so so so scary. The deaf mute husband (lol at the toupee!) looked like he couldn't wait to get out of the room and go and meet his homosexual rent boy in the bushes on the Fens. The mother was a robot. That house was totally devoid of any love or warmth and the children were too wooden. The youngest was withdrawn and depressed I felt. That family are giving me the creeps this morning.

Frogs how fascinating. So it's almost as if at some level Freeman is colluding in these subjects' chances of future problems ... wonder if she has twinges?

Of course, there'll be cases where it works the other way - Dante's problems will have pre-dated any sort of ability-identification, I should think (again, I can so see why his parents are involved) - he was going to have baggage whatever, poor chap.

I did like Freeman on "children have a language of their own, which changes all the time" (especially the last bit) - needing to be in the swim of that (or at least exposed to it) made lots of sense to me.

I always feel a bit uneasy about the idea that only physical stuff is play and anything to do with books and learning is to be 'got out of the way' and is boring. Personally, I'd much, much rather read a book than run about! But take your point that these parents seemed like total freaks who never ever plead with their kids to watch a video so they can read a magazine or sit about as a family watching rubbish telly. I wish I'd seen this programme but the snow did somethign to the telly and we couldn't get c4 or c5. I missed ten years younger too!

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Bink, hadn't thought of it that way -- but all these kids had been labelled as different by their parents already. The few bits of advice prof. Freeman was dishing out seemed to be the voice of sanity in comparison. Although I was very uncomfortable about the way they discussed the children's IQ scores in front of them.

I went to a grammar school, which supposedly meant you should have an IQ of at least 120. I consider myself to be mediocre in the brains department.

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I thought the Prof's advice definitely came across as 'the voice of reason'!

Thought it was quite telling when Dante's mum bascially said yes, all very well but what do we do with him - they needed some parenting help!

After watching this I am just glad that my kids are not 'gifted' I am quite sure they are bright but would never like them to be labelled or to have to live up to anything. I was a bright (but lazy) child and scored 135 in IQ testing but because of this my mum always expected more from me. I felt under pressure academically and I still struggle to this day with not being good enough. Incidentally, I am not a partucularly high achiever and do not have the same ability I did as a child.

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and agree with cod that the children should not have been there when they were being discussed in such a way.

I didn't understand why Dante's mum made that "Yes, but..." comment because she must have known he was just sitting an IQ test. She came across as if she was expecting an answer to all her problems and was surprised that the women just gave her the score.

I thought that too

in fact, I was starting to think she may be v unhappy (Dante's mum) - I hate to bandy about the word depression because we didn't see enough of her and her family - BUT she never looked happy did she, or took delight in him.

At least all the other families (bar the one with 4 children) actually seemed to enjoy their children iyswim.

The bloke on 10 years younger looked really good at the end, he seemed lovely.

Do we still have a gifted kids section on MN? Wonder if there is a mn Dante in the making?

He must be really wearing though.

Especially if she's at home with him all day. Poor woman.