B
EING the parent of a gifted child is often more stressful than it is to be the child. Take the case of Hjalmar Rall, 14, who this year made history by becoming the youngest person ever to enrol at the University of Pretoria.
His parents, Heinrich and Annette, are of course delighted, but it’s been a topsy-turvy experience. They invited me into their home but have subsequently turned down interviews and cancelled TV appearances because of some of the bad press and misrepresentation they’ve experienced, with inferences that they are pushy parents (they’re not) and that admitting their son’s extraordinariness is a form of bragging.
The Ralls moved to Pretoria in January purely for Hjalmar’s sake. He was born in the Western Cape town of Riebeek Kasteel and almost immediately started to show signs of giftedness (at three he was drawing 3D representations of cars).
“I was cautious,” Annette says. “I was thinking it was just me thinking that my child was wonderful, like most parents do. But I had to stop telling other mothers what my child was doing because they either thought I was lying or they didn’t like it.”
When Hjalmar reached Grade 4, he was becoming frustrated at the pace of learning and had to wear earplugs for the noise in the classroom (aural hypersensitivity is common among gifted children) so his parents removed him and began to home school him.
“We hadn’t read up on gifted children,” Heinrich says. “But school was destroying him. We had no choice but to take him out.”
Under the Cambridge system, Hjalmar completed his International General Certificate of Secondary Education exams two years ago, aged 12. (The test is designed for children between 14 and 16.) In November last year, a week before his 14th birthday, he wrote his last A-level exam.
“He had four hours a day of school and then endless time to explore other things,” Heinrich says. “This defies the idea that these kids have pushy parents and don’t have a childhood.” then neurologists. Chequita has trouble sleeping because she can’t shut her mind down and is now on a mood stabiliser to pacify her high levels of empathy (another characteristic of giftedness).
If something upsetting happens to her she sometimes has to miss school to recover. Of course, she catches up instantly and is still an A-plus student. Her incredible art (she’s a fan of manga) brings her a measure of contentment.
When I manage to get Chequita to speak, it’s in response to a question about the difficulty she has making friends.
“Well, mmm, sometimes they won’t really understand me,” she says. “Then I don’t know exactly how to tell them in a way that they will understand so I just leave it, so it’s really difficult to make friends.”
How many friends do you have? “Just two.” And how is being this smart a good thing and a bad thing?
“Ummm.” Long pause. “If we were all like this it would be a dis . . .” A what? “A disaster.”
Being a gifted child is one thing, with its expectations and potential for isolation, but what about being the parent of one? discovers it is laden with anxiety and secrecy