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.<p>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.<p>Malcolm Gladwell has a great lecture about how our exaggerated interest in prodigies leads to erroneous assumptions about achievement. Here's a summary:<p><a href="http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/getArticle.cfm?id=2026" rel="nofollow">http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/getArticle.cfm?...</a>
This goes hand in hand with this: <p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=78739" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=78739</a> (Bipolar Lisp Programmers, or "Brilliant Failures")<p>I found this article two weeks ago:<p><a href="http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/" rel="nofollow">http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/</a><p>It references the SciAm article, and was written to be more accessible.<p>Thanks for posting the Scientific American one. I had been keeping my eyes open for that one.
it's pretty easy to tell the difference in a brief conversation too.<p>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'