Pushy dad who couldn’t wait to grab Child Genius trophy
WATCHING him celebrate exuberantly while holding a trophy aloft, you would be forgiven for thinking Minesh Doshi has won something.
In fact, it is the pushy parent’s son, Rahul, who has been crowned winner of an intelligence contest.
Viewers criticised the 12-year- old’s father for his behaviour during the final of Channel 4 show Child Genius on Saturday night.
The IT manager was labelled ‘disgusting’ for smirking when his son’s nineyear- old competitor, Ronan, got a maths question wrong by one digit.
And Mr Doshi was quick to congratulate himself after Rahul beat Ronan to the Child Genius title, saying: ‘I am actually willing him with the answers, it’s like I’m on his shoulder, telepathically trying to get the words to him.’ Rahul has an IQ of 162 – thought to be higher than Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking.
He won the competition which involved a series of gruelling maths, spelling and general knowledge questions.
He was pitted against nineyear- old Ronan in the final round. Mr Doshi spent a lunch period coaching his son on how to hit the buzzer with speed to help his chances.
And despite being 8-2 up, his ambitious father could still be seen grimacing with his head in his hands as his son incorrectly answered a question. He further angered viewers by appearing to laugh when his son’s rival got the same maths equation wrong by one digit. One person tweeted: ‘Rahul’s dad laughing at the fact Ronan was one off the correct total is awful, the boy is nine, grow up.’ Another added: ‘Why does Rahul’s dad think it’s acceptable to laugh when Ronan has an incorrect answer? That’s a nine-year- old child. Disgusting.’ Someone else complained: ‘Minesh is really stressing me out... he thinks HE’S the contestant! What are those faces he’s pulling?’ Rahul eventually won by ten points to four. Mr Doshi then ran down to his son, took the trophy and lifted it in the air with elation.
He said: ‘He’s got the team behind him helping him every step of the way.’
Mr Doshi added afterwards: ‘We raised this little boy from a baby and he’s doing so many good things and I’m boasting about him but, hey why not. It’s amazing, and to call him my son is just the best feeling.’
The parent also lamented that he did not have the opportunity to enter Child Genius as a young boy, but he may be returning to television soon. He told the Sunday Telegraph: ‘The kids want me to go on The Chase as I know all the answers.’
During the contest, Mr Doshi had told Rahul: ‘There are no prizes for being friendly with your opponents.’ Rahul, who attends Queen Eliza- beth’s School in Barnet, north London, had got the top score in three out of five days before the show’s final.
His feats included memorising a pack of cards and recalling Latin and Greek scientific names for fruit and vegetables.
MINESH and Komal Doshi should brace themselves for a torrent of abuse. In fact, it has already started.
And why are this North London couple being subjected to such bilious criticism? What crime did they commit? Only this: that their 12-year-old son, Rahul, has just won Channel 4’s Child Genius competition, and they have therefore been given the unsought-after unofficial title of Britain’s Pushiest Parents.
Never mind that the phenomenal Rahul wanted to enter and was thrilled to win. It is enough that Minesh and Komal encouraged him to excel in this gruelling competition and did everything they could to help, for them to be criticised as ‘pushy’ and even a bit weird.
Well, perhaps the father — a 45-year-old IT manager — did come across as obsessed with his son’s talents and demonstrating them to the world. But if I had a child with such prodigious abilities to retain and assimilate words and numbers, I think I might get rather excited about it, too.
And in their attitude the Doshis are actually quite characteristic of British families with an Indian background — and also from further East — as I have witnessed in my capacity as President of the English Chess Federation.
Pressure
Two years ago, I presented the prizes in the Under-9 section of the British Chess Championship. As the successful entrants came up, one after another, I could hardly fail to notice that they were almost all children from families of Indian or Chinese origins (the first prize winner that year was X Henry Yu).
Now, this is a tournament which lasts a week. The children need to be accompanied, so typically one or both of the parents need to give up a week of their time to be with them.
And it can be thankless. Because we are concerned that the children might be disturbed or distracted if their parents are standing right over them — and to be frank, because we don’t want to risk accusations of illicit assistance — we don’t allow relatives to be anywhere near their sons or daughters during the many long hours of play.
But this gave me the opportunity to speak to some of these parents. I noticed that typically it was the mothers who would be sitting in an adjoining room patiently while their offspring were beating their brains out over the chessboard: they did not by any means all have jobs, and were dedicated full-time to the care of their children.
Nor were they obsessed with chess themselves: more often than not, they had no idea whatsoever about the game and found it entirely baffling.
What they did know was that their child had an aptitude and enthusiasm for this intellectually most demanding pursuit — and they would do whatever they could to help them make the most of that.
I would not call those mothers pushy. I would call them wonderful. Another phrase that has been coined to describe such parents is ‘Tiger Mothers’.
A few years ago a Chinese-American professor at Yale University, Amy Chua, published a controversial book entitled Battle Hymn Of The Tiger Mother. In it, Chua criticised Western parents for what she saw as their unwillingness to get behind their children and push, based on a fear that to do so would be too harsh and prescriptive.
But as she wrote: ‘ Western parents worry a lot about their children’s selfesteem. But as a parent, one of the worst things you can do for your child’s selfesteem is to let them give up.
‘For their part, many Chinese secretly believe that they care more about their children and are willing to sacrifice much more for them than Westerners, who seem perfectly content to let their children turn out badly.’
This, as you can imagine, did not go down well in the U.S. (and it was deliberately provocative): Chua received not just abuse, but death threats.
She was indeed pushing her finger into a very sensitive spot: could it be that much of the laissez-faire parenting of the modern West uses the idea of ‘enlightened liberalness’ to justify what is actually a form of parental laziness, or even selfishness? After all, it takes no effort for parents not to make their children practise the violin (Chua would spend many hours with her daughters in this way, rather than indulge in her own pursuits).
Stigmatised
The point is that aspiration without hard work is just empty talk. As one sports coach wrote: ‘It is so easy to dream and aspire for goals: we can all do that. It is so easy to encourage and tell people how great they will be one day: we can all do that. What is not easy? To drive people on when they want to give up. To point out the truth when the truth is painful to reveal. So please don’t get hung up about the phrase “pushy parent”.’
Judy Murray, the tennis coach who helped both her sons to become champions in the sport, is the best-known British mother to have endured abuse for doing her utmost for her children. This summer she told an interviewer how she felt she was being stigmatised as ‘a nightmare mother’ and had become deeply upset about this characterisation.
It is certainly true that children’s lives can be damaged by parents who force them into pursuits for which they have no aptitude. And most of all when a parent who has not had the success he or she wanted, uses a child purely as means to experience such a triumph vicariously.
But as the clinical psychologist Linda Blair wrote about last year’s Child Genius winner Rhea — yes, another Brit of Indian origins whose mother, Sonal, was denounced for being ‘pushy’ — ‘You won’t find many children who want to work that hard. Our culture is about instant gratification, so it’s hard for parents not to feel pushy if they ask a child to stick with something.
‘You may have to be unpopular, both with your kids and other parents, if you detect a talent and a passion.’
This national aversion to so- called ‘pushy parents’ has been manifested over decades in our education system. The so- called ‘ pushy’ ones are generally unpopular, even though the effect of their complaints about inadequate standards is to raise the quality of the education provided for all children at any given school, not just their own.
Moaning
In that respect, I’d even argue that Michael Gove, as Education Secretary, acted as the unpopular ‘pushy parent’ on behalf of the nation’s children. It had become all too convenient that public exams became ever-easier in which to get top marks. I remember being appalled when a Cambridge professor told me that the Maths O-level in his day (and mine) was actually more demanding than the Maths A-level of today.
The result of this was that British educational standards, measured internationally, began to lag further and further behind our rivals — notably China. There was no end of moaning when Gove demanded a return to greater rigour, which meant getting rid of easy-to-manipulate course work and basing results on genuine tests of remembered and applied knowledge.
Yet Gove understood what that sports coach said: that it is necessary to reveal the truth about children’s abilities, even when it is painful.
For far too long, our educational establishment actively discouraged competitiveness — the co-called ‘All Must Have Prizes’ philosophy. I imagine teachers of that persuasion will have hated Child Genius, in which there is just one winner and none of the less successful competitors gets a bauble to put on their mantelpiece.
And yet that is completely to miss the point of such a fierce winner-takes-all competition. Those who came off second best will doubtless have been upset. I see this with talented young chess-players, who often burst into tears when they lose.
But if they hadn’t taken part, they would never have known what they might have achieved. And by matching themselves against the best, they are given the opportunity to bring the best out of themselves.
Isn’t that what all parents should want for their children?