

The Secret to Raising Smart Kids - Jaggu
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-to-raising-smart-kids&print=true

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zach
Another thing to bear in mind, and it's so difficult because of parental
pride, is that precocity is not a virtue. In fact, those who feel like they're
"prodigies" or "gifted" more often fall into the trap described here. I know I
did.

Parents are made to feel like there's a scorecard -- that your child should
walk, talk and read by so many months. That can be useful to identify learning
disabilities, but it otherwise is not helpful. There's no causal influence
between someone being a late talker, early reader or whatever and being better
at anything at age 12 or 16. There is a correlation, as you'd expect, but it's
not like kids are losing something if they're "late" to develop skills.
Growing up is a marathon, not a sprint to an age of three (or five, or nine)
when everything sets like Jell-O.

Malcolm Gladwell has a great lecture about how our exaggerated interest in
prodigies leads to erroneous assumptions about achievement. Here's a summary:

[http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/getArticle.cfm?...](http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/getArticle.cfm?id=2026)

~~~
zach
Bonus Gladwell of relevance, if anyone's interested:

An article about Stanley Kaplan, the original teacher of the "unteachable"
SAT. Thesis: "ability cannot be separated from effort."

 _Examined Life_ :
<http://www.malcolmgladwell.com/2001/2001_12_17_a_kaplan.htm>

And then, on raising kids in general... well, maybe you, the parent, are a lot
less important than you think:

 _Do Parents Matter?_
<http://www.malcolmgladwell.com/1998/1998_08_17_a_harris.htm>

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qaexl
This goes hand in hand with this:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=78739> (Bipolar Lisp Programmers, or
"Brilliant Failures")

I found this article two weeks ago:

<http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/>

It references the SciAm article, and was written to be more accessible.

Thanks for posting the Scientific American one. I had been keeping my eyes
open for that one.

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nevinera
it's pretty easy to tell the difference in a brief conversation too.

look for comments about how smart you are, or how 'i could never do that',
versus comments like 'its so cool that you know all this stuff', or 'im not
very interested in that'

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peregrine
I don't understand what your trying to say here...

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ivankirigin
Secret?

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downer
Either Crick or Watson said, "if you want intelligent children, marry an
intelligent woman."

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falsestprophet
"marry"

how quaint

