Shooting Stars

As parents, we are prone to tell our children at every critical juncture in their lives that, no matter what, "We just want you to be happy." It should come as no surprise that kids are not always persuaded by this sentiment. Consider children who show a remarkable affinity for music, chess, or athletics. What if they insist that practicing for 10 hours a day is what makes them happy, despite their parents' belief that they should go out and play? And what if, years later, they wake up and decide that from here on out, they'd be happier leaving those talents aside to go out and play after all?

Ann Hulbert's Off the Charts: The Hidden Lives and Lessons of American Child Prodigies takes an unusual path to the roots of parental influence and its core conflicts. It's an intriguing choice for a sequel to her 2003 work, Raising America. That book explored a century of shifts in popular cultural advice about parenting, and many of the trends it unearthed reappear here as gospel for the mothers and fathers of prodigiously gifted youngsters. No matter the child-rearing philosophy, however, some truths remain eternal: Parental influence will wane, and, she writes, children will "flout our best and worst intentions."

Her tour begins with Norbert Wiener and William Sidis, who converged at Harvard in 1909 and sparked a mini-trend of precocious preadolescents matriculating at colleges. (Wiener was already a graduate student in zoology at the time, after completing his studies at Tufts in three years.) The boys' "overweening" fathers were both academics and immigrants from Russia, and each taught his son at home from birth. They basked in the national attention they received as models of a new approach to advanced learning, even as their children struggled socially.

Much of the book is structured around contemporaneous prodigy dyads, and like several of the pairs, Sidis's and Wiener's lives went in starkly different directions: Wiener became a mathematician and a founder of the transdisciplinary field of cybernetics, gaining enough perspective on his abnormal youth to write a memoir entitled Ex-Prodigy. Sidis, on the other hand, abandoned academia and the limelight, leaving others to search for clues in the interviews he sat for while at Harvard, when he said, among other things, that his life goals did not necessarily lie in research but in seeking "happiness in my own way."

Some of the stories in Off the Charts are well known, although Hulbert aims to present them in a fresh context: Shirley Temple, for example, was managed by her mother, Gertrude, a devotee of the no-nonsense parenting style then in vogue. "I was determined that she should excel at something," Gertrude later said, and admitted she had pledged not "to let my affection make me too lenient." The approach worked: While not a classic prodigy—she was neither preternaturally intelligent nor musical—Temple nevertheless became "a child whose fame no grown-up could match," with only one antecedent, Hulbert asserts: Jesus.

And yet, at age 12—admittedly with Shirley's box-office numbers in decline—Gertrude pulled her daughter out of full-time studio work and enrolled her in a private school, so that she would "not develop an isolated viewpoint, which often brings on an unhappy outlook on life." Unsurprisingly, Shirley, long her family breadwinner, chafed at following this new script. Married by 17 and a mother by 20, she also divorced young but remarried a year later to the perfect partner—a man who'd never seen one of her films. He also supported her decision to keep quiet when the couple discovered that her parents had secretly squandered her great fortune.

While some parents push, others are pulled. Orna Weinroth, the mother of composing prodigy Jay Greenberg, said of her son, "This child told me, he said, 'I'm gonna be dead if I am not composing. I have to compose. This is all I want to do.' ... And when a child that young tells you where their vision is, or where they're going, you don't have a choice."

Bobby Fischer's single mother, Regina, could relate. Fischer was an example of youthful "rage to master" decades before psychologist Ellen Winner coined the term to describe the intense drive that separates prodigies from run-of-the-mill high achievers. Regina tried to discourage her preadolescent's single-mindedness as he eschewed schoolwork and other children to focus on his chess. It only cemented his persistence. Her son was "an unprecedented handful," Hulbert decides, long before he abandoned his family, country, and religion in a flight of paranoia. But Regina never gave up on him. "Remember," she wrote Fischer in a letter as he spiraled away from her, "whatever you do or whatever happens I am still your mother, and there is nothing I would refuse you if you wanted or needed it."

Growing up in the 1920s, Barbara Follett's prized possession was her family's typewriter. Locking herself in her room to write, she would post signs on the door that echoed those of adolescents everywhere, but with a more precocious spin: "Nobody may come into this room if the door is shut tight....Reason: If the door is shut tight and a person is in the room the shut door means that the person in the room wishes to be left alone."

Follett's mother, Helen, and father, Wilson, rejected a discipline-focused home life and indulged a "romantic idyll" of parenthood, encouraging open discussion and whimsy. Follett became a literary sensation at age 12, with the publication of her first fantasy novel, The House Without Windows, in 1927. With her success, Wilson, a book editor, gained notoriety himself and urged other families tired of the pressures of standardized academics to embrace "Schooling Without the School" and do as he and Helen had—"pour yourself into your child." (A similar spirit can be heard today in the hugely successful TED talk of education adviser Ken Robinson, in which he urges families to prioritize children's curiosity, not a traditional curriculum.)

For her part, Helen exulted that she'd fulfilled her dream of raising "a friend and intellectual companion," albeit still a preteen. And then Wilson strayed, the Folletts divorced, and Barbara and her mother left her younger sister behind to travel the world for two years, typewriter (and the advance for her next book) in hand. On their return, Helen enrolled Barbara in junior college in California, but her daughter bolted, making headlines. On her own, though, she was less productive. Like many creative prodigies, she chafed at critics, as her slightly more mature work did not reap the significant critical benefit of having been written by an immature hand. Follett took work as a typist, married, and, after turning 25, was never heard from again.

As Hulbert moves closer to the present, we encounter some of the youthful minds that sparked the technological revolution in Silicon Valley, as well as "tiger mothers" like Amy Chua and their complicated relationships with their talented children. There are surprises in almost every one of these case studies, because, as Hulbert writes, predictions about prodigies' future "almost never pan out as expected," and whatever their particular skill or level of obsession, "the inevitable swerve into ex-prodigyhood" is always a struggle. It's a tricky transition: The prodigies are grateful for parents who allowed them to hurl themselves into their chosen pursuits, but may come to regret not being well-rounded and blame their parents for neglecting their holistic growth. Meanwhile, their parents, once eager to share their philosophy with the world, tend to seek a way off the stage when their filial relations turn. In this they are like lottery winners who are happy to offer advice on how to choose winning numbers when what everyone really needs to know is how to avoid blowing their jackpots.

"Adults may revere them, and families revolve around them, but prodigies remain dependents, subject to circumstances they didn't choose and usually have limited power to change," Hulbert writes. "They may get chances to show off but may have to wait until they're grown up, and looking back, to fully and truly tell their elders off."