Wish your child was a prodigy? It’s FAR tougher than you think
LORAINNE COOK always knew that her son Daniel was unusual. ‘ He had several five-word sentences before he was a year old,’ she says. ‘And though neither my then husband nor I were remotely musical, as a toddler he really loved to bash away at our second-hand piano. He’d do that for hours.’
Daniel had his first music lesson at the age of four, and by the time he was 11, he was playing violin in the National Children’s Orchestra of Great Britain, on stage at the Royal Festival Hall.
Today, the Cook family schedule revolves around the extraordinary gift for music he shares with his sister Abigail, 13. And as Lorainne, a single mother, has discovered, raising a prodigy — or two — is a fulltime job, requiring the organisational skill of a PA and the stamina of a marathon runner.
On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, she drives from the family home in Neath, South Wales, to a tutor in another town so each of her children can hone their formidable piano skills.
Thursdays evenings and Saturday mornings are taken up with violin lessons, and every evening of the week she is to be found listening and encouraging each child through hours of music practice (in between cooking meals, washing clothes, paying bills and keeping on top of the housework). Needless to say, her social life is almost non-existent.
School holidays are no time to relax. They are spent on the road, driving hundreds of miles to orchestral rehearsals and concerts (both children have fought off stiff competition to become members of various national ensembles, including the Children’s String Sinfonia and the Children’s Chamber Orchestra).
But music isn’t all that the Cook children excel at. Indeed, though they each won music scholarships to a leading private school in Swansea, music became a priority only recently.
Daniel is a former chess star, who captained the Glamorgan county team at the age of ten, represented Wales in the nationals and reached the school-age finals of the National Chess Championships.
As a pre- teen, chess took up two of his evenings a week, including one at league matches.
Abigail has grade five ballet and is working a year ahead of her age at school, having skipped Year Six.
Daniel got an A* GCSE in Latin at the age of 14. The Cook children were accepted into Mensa, the high IQ society, at the age of ten, and both are published authors. Daniel has 18 short stories and poems in anthologies of children’s writing, Abigail has 14.
THERE’S more: speech exams with the London Academy of Music and Drama; prize essays that won tickets to a glittering event at Westminster Abbey with the Queen.
The Cooks’ trophy cabinet heaves with medals and accolades.
‘They don’t need pushing,’ says Lorainne. ‘I don’t have to nag, and anyway that wouldn’t work. They do it because they want to. They enjoy the kudos and the sense of achievement that diligence brings.’
Lorainne, a 51- year- old former history lecturer, devotes her life entirely to the fulfilment of her children’s talents.
‘My focus is to give them every possible opportunity — and that’s what makes me happy,’ she says. ‘I’m constantly in the car and it’s enormously time-consuming, but it would be terrible to look back at their childhood and think they could have done more if I’d just given them the chance.’
For parents of genuinely extraordinary children, there is often no choice but to become their offspring’s fulltime chauffeur, therapist and PR, often at the expense of their own social lives.
Such parents frequently feel obliged to take over as their child’s teacher because the education system simply can’t meet their needs. Last month, the country’s youngest ever university undergraduate, ten- year-old Esther Okade, from Walsall, began a maths degree course — having been homeschooled by her devoted mathematician mother Efe.
Esther’s six-yearold brother Isaiah is working towards his maths A-level, also at home. ‘Having a gifted child is one of the most difficult parenting responsibilities in the world,’ says Denise Yates, chief executive of the charity Potential Plus, which helps parents of high-ability children.
‘Getting the right support is a postcode lottery and often parents have some very difficult choices to make.
‘It might be that their area can’t provide the school environment for a child working at a level way beyond his or her years.
‘So, they have to move house to another area which does or put in place a whole host of lessons and support outside school. Parents feel
very guilty, indeed, when they see talent in their children, but for one reason or another can’t provide the opportunity to fulfil it.’
Extra lessons, private schooling and house moves come at a cost, of course. Some parents make huge sacrifices to pay for it — and when brilliance comes out of the blue, they are not always prepared for the impact on their lives.
It was an infant school teacher who first took aside Joe and Melanie Lee to ask them how they felt about having such an exceptional child as their then sixyear-old son Zac.
‘We knew he was bright and that he seemed to have an amazing memory,’ says 48-year-old Melanie, a hairdresser. ‘But we weren’t sure how bright exactly.’
When Zac’s teachers at primary school in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, kept pointing out his brilliance at maths, his parents decided to enter him for a Mensa test.
They were blown away by a remarkable score that puts Zac in the top 0.1 per cent of the population by intelligence.
‘After that I knew we had to find a school that would stretch and push him,’ says Joe, a 49-year-old lorry driver. ‘I didn’t get pushed at school or at home when I was a lad, but I wish I had been.’
ZACwaltzed through the entrance exams for several schools, and now goes to the private Wisbech Grammar School with a scholarship that pays most of his fees, but not all.
‘We still have to find £3,000 a year,’ says Joe. ‘That means I often have to work a 70-hour week. As a family we miss things such as holidays and a new car. But it’s not ta a problem — we put up with it to give Zac this chance.’
Of course, some parents take ake their mission to discover or exploit talent too far. Tales es abound of tiny prodigies crusheded under the weight of parentalal dreams.
When the world-renowned ed pianist Lang Lang was droppeded by a tutor at the age of nine, hisis father told him to commit it suicide and handed him a bottle of pills.
Maths prodigy Ruth Lawrence,e, who went to Oxford aged 11 in n 1983, always accompanied byy her father, says she will not bring up her children in a similar way.
Consequently, some familieses of high achievers find themselves viewed with hostility by other parents. Alison Thompson’s son Cameron rattled through A-level maths ‘in a matter of weeks’ aged 11. He was 15 when he got his maths degree from the Open University.
‘We got slated when Cameron started his degree at 11,’ says 37year-old Alison.
‘People said: “Oh, it’s terrible, the poor child having to do all this extra work when he should be out enjoying himself.”
‘But if you substitute a hobby such as football, no one says the same thing. If a child spends all his time playing sport, it’s normal, but if it’s academic work you’re pushy parents. I sometimes think of his brain as a hamster wheel or a hurricane. He just can’t stop it. If h he h hasn’t’t gott somethingthi t to f focus all that intellectual energy on, he becomes unsettled and anxious.’
Now 17 and doing a Masters degree in maths, Cameron is at his happiest when engaged in the kind of highly specialised study most of us couldn’t begin to understand.
But for Alison and her husband Rod, 40, who runs a karate school in Wrexham, it has been a struggle.
Over the years, Cameron has been moved from state school to state school and there have been endless searches for private maths tutors capable of keeping up with him. In 2008, he was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, which means it is hard for Cameron to maintain friendships.
He survived sixth form college in Wrexham for precisely 42 minutes before walking out. ‘We live in a society where no one wants to say their child is normal and everyone thinks they’re gifted,’ says Rod.
‘But I don’t think you’ll find a parent of a truly gifted child who says it’s anything but a curse.
‘As a younger boy, unless he had his passion — which was studying maths at a high level — Cameron shut off from everything.
‘Now he’s older, I’d love him to come back home drunk. Just once. To do what other teenagers do. But that’s just not him.
‘My child is a genius, but people have told me that he’s essentially unemployable. And it’s true.’
PROFESSORJoan Freeman, a psychologist who’s studied gifted children for 40 years, says the impact on parents is overlooked. ‘Parents try their utmost for these children, but often they have to make big changes to family life to get the best for them.
‘Some parents are astounded by their children. They come to me to ask what on earth they can do with them.’
Professor Greenwood sees ‘ two or three’ children each month who are ‘quite unmeasurable’ using co conventional intelligence tests.
‘I find myself talking to a three or four- year- old almost as though they were my own age. And I suddenly realise, good heavens, I’m discussing politics with this child.’
Sylvia Giles, 49, a former pr property developer, always knew he her son Griffin was clever. When he was a toddler, she would ‘de ‘debrief’ him after playgroup.
‘W ‘We’d sit down together and tal talk about how he’d behaved. It wa was obvious to me that he was ver very bright.
‘I didn’t ever put locks on the kitc kitchen cupboard doors at home: IeI explained the dangers to him and I knew he just got it.’
No Now 15, Griffin attends £14,000a- yeary Kimbolton School in Cam Cambridgeshire, where the family live live. Sylvia has given up work to sup support him and his sister — a deci decision she defends vigorously.
‘W ‘Why should supporting a clever child be stigmatised?’ she says.
‘ ParentsPa who support their chil children with obvious learning difficulties don’t get called pushy, yet there’s just as great a responsibility to develop the talent of a clever child.
‘Somehow it’s more acceptable for a clever child to underachieve.’
Griffin’s father Steven, a management consultant, has bought him a subscription to The Economist and Griffin trades on the stock market using a virtual account that follows real market fluctuations, but doesn’t risk real money. His parents see his future in the City.
Until then, there’s a lot of work to do. ‘ We’re always busy,’ she says. ‘We’re all disciplined when it comes to work, but I want him to be a loving and lovable sort of person, too. You can make sure these children get great grades, but humility is an important virtue.’