Step zero: Get to know them. Then decide if you should back off or do any other of a thousand things that might help them.
All kids are different. Child rearing is as far from "one weird trick" territory as you can get.
How to Raise a Creative Child – Step One: Back Off (2016)
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Re: How to Raise a Creative Child – Step One: Back Off (2016)
#72In cultures like Korea, hierarchy and unconditional respect for their elders is so deeply rooted that it is evident in the language itself (When addressing elders or someone more important, you have to speak a specific way). This gives a false sense of righteousness and superiority. In societies like these, could the culture itself be an obstacle to creative growth?
Re: How to Raise a Creative Child – Step One: Back Off (2016)
#73A dull article ridden with blatantly false claims and oversimplification of an otherwise complicated topic. >Gifted children who have a noticeable head start and whose skill development begins remarkably early _do not_ usually end up being game changing professionals in their respective fields. Really now? >Developing a skill set early on leads to competence in what is learned but stumps creativity and chances of inn…
All I see here are your opinions, while the article has numerous citations and data to back up its claims. The reason why the article is interesting is because it goes against the common wisdom "you need to know the rules to break em", and backs its claim up with peer-reviewed science. And while you may find the findings unpalatable, isn't this how progress is made?
The main data the author cites is a 32-year-old pop psychology book where n=120. The rest is expert opinion. He also avoids making a case for why trying raising a child who is merely hyper-competent is less desirable goal than creating one who remakes a field of inquiry. After all, why would you want your child to become a run-of-the-mill Oncologist if they're not also going to win a Nobel Prize.
For all the author's dressing up a horrid argument with strained "statistics," he misses a key fact. True breakthroughs in most fields come around rarely, in time frames usually measured in decades. In the meantime, the market for high-end practitioners is evergreen.
For every Mozart, there are thousands of musicians to play in world-class orchestras. For every Jonas Salk, there are hundreds of thousands of doctors. On a risk-adjusted scale, shooting for competent if slightly less creative seems like a much wiser bet.
Re: How to Raise a Creative Child – Step One: Back Off (2016)
#74> just eight have won Nobel Prizes You pick 2000 teenagers, and 8 go on to win a Nobel Prize, and you're still not satisfied? High expectations much...
That means 1 in 250 go on to win a Nobel Prize. An absurd rate. I'd bet money that the only group to perform better over the same timeframe is the list Nobel Prize winners themselves. Edit: I stand corrected. Solvay Conference had 15/29 one year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solvay_Conference#Fifth_Confer...
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Re: How to Raise a Creative Child – Step One: Back Off (2016)
#75Tiger Woods and Serena and Venus Williams are arguably the most iconic players in their sports in the last two decades and both are famous for overbearing fathers who forced them to practice from the time they could hold clubs and racquets.
They're also famous as athletes and not creatives.
The article's author referenced athletes as well as creatives:
Even the best athletes didn’t start out any better than their peers. When Dr. Bloom’s team interviewed tennis players who were ranked in the top 10 in the world, they were not, to paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld, doing push-ups since they were a fetus. Few of them faced intense pressure to perfect the game as Andre Agassi did. A majority of the tennis stars remembered one thing about their first coaches: They made tennis enjoyable.
Re: How to Raise a Creative Child – Step One: Back Off (2016)
#76Why do you feel entitled to foist your own or other peoples problems onto strangers?
Re: How to Raise a Creative Child – Step One: Back Off (2016)
#77The parents of ordinary children had an average of six rules, like specific schedules for homework and bedtime. Parents of highly creative children had an average of fewer than one rule. I grew up in a household where compliance to parental authority was the prevailing rule. This made me fairly compliant as an adult (which opens you up for exploitation by peers and authority figures), but this wasn't too difficult to…
From one of the comments on the article > Backing off will no more produce a creative genius than pushing your child. Neither strategy makes the slightest difference to what is essentially an autonomous process. Beethoven's father did not back off. And Lars von Trier's parents left him to his own devices. Both are geniuses and both hated their childhood. > My guess is that most parents who follow Adam Grant's spuriou…
> Both are geniuses and both hated their childhood.
I don't know anything about their respective childhoods, and I have greatly enjoyed some of Mr Trier's films, but I fear this is a dangerously egalitarian notion of "genius."
Re: How to Raise a Creative Child – Step One: Back Off (2016)
#78In adulthood, many prodigies become experts in their fields and leaders in their organizations. Yet only a fraction of gifted children eventually become revolutionary adult creators. My daughter is being treated for Leukemia by some amazing doctors at Boston Children's Hospital. To my knowledge, none of the health care professionals at this world-class institution have won Nobel Prizes in medicine. All the same, for…
Maybe I'm biased because I'm a no-name physician at a community hospital, but the "best doctors" in my eyes are the ones with the best outcomes, lowest utilization, highest efficiency and highest patient satisfaction. These measures don't correlate well with the physician's credentials. I learned this in residency, which I did just down the street from a "top" university hospital. We out-performed that place on every level except our doctors went to "lesser" medical schools. They simply spent more money (on wild things like ECMO, which makes everyone feel they're making more of a difference even though the outcomes are the same without it).
Our profession is moving toward identifying these doctors and promoting their behavior to the entire field.
There's a study that showed lower heart attack mortality when all the "top" cardiologists were out of the hospital attending a cardiology meeting. Too many confounders to make any real conclusions from that, but it lines up with my point.
Of course, if your child has a serious life-threatening and/or rare disease, then you want her to be treated at a vanguard institution like the one you took yours to. No dispute from me on that one.
But in the system as a whole, we make the most difference reducing complications of cardiovascular disease, sepsis, pneumonia, COPD, and kidney disease (which are orders of magnitude more common). And we're starting to find out how to identify doctors that do it better, with fewer complications, and with much higher efficiency than others. I think those are the best doctors and it's what I'm striving to be.
Re: How to Raise a Creative Child – Step One: Back Off (2016)
#79The parents of ordinary children had an average of six rules, like specific schedules for homework and bedtime. Parents of highly creative children had an average of fewer than one rule. I grew up in a household where compliance to parental authority was the prevailing rule. This made me fairly compliant as an adult (which opens you up for exploitation by peers and authority figures), but this wasn't too difficult to…
And while our lax rules have certainly inspired creativity and fed into her individuality, it hasn't done a great deal to build work ethic. I'm aware of the stereotype of parents believing their kids are lazy, so I'm open to being wrong here. I think the work ethic thing has less to do with rules, and more to do with how you approach small adversities. For a lot of people, if something is hard it's not worth doing. I…
I read in John Medina's book Brain Rules for Baby that one of the most important things you can teach children is to associate difficulty with progress, to understand that learning how to do something most likely requires failing a bunch of times before you figure it out and that failing is okay, that it doesn't mean you're incapable but rather that you're actually making progress.
My daughter is three years old and for the past year or so, whenever she becomes frustrated that she can't do something—whistle, pronounce a word, build a lego set, draw a letter—I calm her down and remind her that not being able to do it is part of learning how to do it. I often use the example of how she didn't always know how to walk or talk, that she failed lots of times but she tried and tried and tried and eventually she got it, that after falling down so many times now she's running around the room and talking non-stop.
I've been blown away by how that reframing of difficulty has made her seemingly unstoppable. Sure, she still gets frustrated and overwhelmed, but when she starts whistling—full on whistling at three years old—and she tells me, "Daddy! I tried and tried and tried and eventually I got it!", I can't help but think that there's something to this. When she doesn't know I'm watching, I've observed that she seems a lot more determined to do things even when she's repeatedly failing—she doesn't give up as quickly as she did (often quickly followed by a tantrum) before I started explaining to her that learning requires challenge.
Re: How to Raise a Creative Child – Step One: Back Off (2016)
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
From one of the comments on the article > Backing off will no more produce a creative genius than pushing your child. Neither strategy makes the slightest difference to what is essentially an autonomous process. Beethoven's father did not back off. And Lars von Trier's parents left him to his own devices. Both are geniuses and both hated their childhood. > My guess is that most parents who follow Adam Grant's spuriou…
Good point about Feynman. The only thing I've found to work is trying everything until something starts to work. Of course, you start with the books to get ideas for what to try next. Ive got one of those kids that bounces off the walls. The older I get though the less I care. Some kids just can't sit still. Kids are society's problem and when we don't build spaces for them to be kids, its gonna happen.
I prefer to think that kids are society's solution.