Child Prodigies and Creativity

Adam Grant writes about How to Raise a Creative Child in his Sat-30-Jan-2016 column in the New York Times.  He sums up his advice in two words in his extended title:  Step One.  Back Off.  Grant asserts that child prodigies rarely grow up into the highly creative people who revolutionize their field.  By way of example, he notes that fewer than one percent of the finalists in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, during the time it was considered, as Grant says, the Super Bowl of science prowess, from 1942 to 1994, became members of the National Academy of Sciences, the nation’s elite honorary body of scientists. And, out of the more than 2000 Westinghouse finalists, only eight have won Nobel prizes.  Although, he says, they often go on to become highly respected practitioners and leaders in their fields, they don’t become “adult geniuses” who change the world.

Grant goes on to dismiss the charge that perhaps these prodigies are social or emotional wrecks who cannot work and play with others.  He refers to evidence, though not cited, that “less than a quarter of gifted children suffer from social and emotional problems.”  This is approximately equal to the often-touted figure of around twenty percent for the population as whole who suffer from serious social or emotional problems. 

The real problem, according to Grant, is that child prodigies do not learn to be original.  They conform to the expectations of their parents, teachers, and coaches, and so are inculcated in the status quo, the current paradigm. “Practice makes perfect, but it doesn’t make new,” as Grant so aptly put it.  When children grow up simply conforming to “how it is done,” they do not question that way.  They become overly committed to existing methods, tools, techniques, and technologies.  He quotes Ellen Winner, a Harvard psychologist specializing in studying giftedness, that gifted children rarely go on to revolutionize their field and those that "those who do must make a painful transition" before they make profoundly original contributions.  Grant goes on to discuss what economist Thorstein Veblen called “trained incapacity.”