Georgia Mills, 18.
Cover Story
The price of prodigy
by Matt Nippert
Being labelled a “gifted” child is a mixed blessing and the transition to successful adult can be rocky.
Matthew Aidney and Thomas Venning were once classmates. Both were precocious preschoolers. Both had problems in the classroom, disrupting lessons by constantly calling out. And both were considered gifted.
Seated side by side at the respective ages of nine and 10, they seemed cut from the same cloth.
Jane Aidney remembers her three-year-old son asking the mothers of his friends at kindergarten for their telephone numbers. “Being a cute little boy they told him, and probably didn’t think anything more of it,” she says.
But little Matthew wasn’t just being cute. He memorised the numbers, his mother says, and would ring neighbours, sometimes at five in the morning, asking if he could come and play – “which made me”, adds Jane Aidney, “the most hated mother on the block!”
Thomas Venning also was precocious from the age of 18 months. “I used to crawl under people’s sinks to see where the water goes, and I was telling Dad how to do the house-wiring when I was in primary school.”
So far, so similar. But at age 16, the boys’ paths diverged. Venning began the first year of his engineering degree; Aidney dropped out of school, dabbled in drugs and was kicked out of home.
Marilyn Stafford taught both boys and remembers them well: they came with similar reputations. “Thomas stuck out as perhaps the brightest in that group,” she says, “and the class was bright. But he was perpetually calling out.”
The boy told his teacher why he couldn’t wait his turn: “Because if I don’t call out, I never get asked.”
“He wasn’t getting called in class because he always knew the answers,” says Stafford. His hand was so often raised in class, demanding attention, that she recalls Venning complaining, “My arm aches all the time.”
Aidney and Venning crossed paths in a class that Stafford taught in a former crypt on Auckland’s Dominion Rd in 1996. Stafford was one of those who helped convert the grotty crypt into the George Parkyn Centre for Gifted Children.
Recalling that year, Stafford remembers taking the class through their paces. For one day a week, her students played chess, discussed Pythagoras and solved problems.
The centre’s first intake are now aged between 17 and 21. But although all were labelled “gifted” by psychologists, parents and teachers, their lives since those classes in the crypt have been anything but uniform.
From the initial roll of 40 in 1996, the Listener interviewed 14. Most are now stellar students at university. Three are training to be doctors, including 18-year-old Nicholas Chieng, who this year began his second year of studies in medicine after scoring straight A-pluses in his first.
Another was ranked as one of the top 10 Year 13 students in the country last year. Others are studying design, linguistics, accountancy, music and philosophy.
Despite these accomplishments, the gifted had mixed experiences in an education system that sometimes frustrated their talents.
Aidney, after failing fifth-form NCEA, now mixes breathing gases for offshore oil and gas prospectors in places like Azerbaijan and Indonesia.
Annette Collins, head of the Auckland branch of the Explorers Club, an association for gifted children and their families, says that these diverse experiences are typical. Being gifted is a mixed blessing.
“When the general population think ‘gifted’,” she says, “they think ‘geniuses who are brilliant at whatever they turn their hands to’. But they’re not.”
Her husband Steve Thoms, former president of the NZ Association of Gifted Children, concurs. “It hinders and helps. They’re not all Newtons and Einsteins.”
The transition from gifted child to successful adult can certainly be tricky. A 27-year longitudinal study run by Middlesex University compared the lives of children labelled gifted by their parents with their equally bright peers (as measured by IQ tests), who were not singled out.
Many had regrets at being labelled prodigies. Boys tended more often to choose jobs in science or computing that involved little social contact, while girls were more likely than their equally bright classmates to give up careers and devote themselves to children. Some, now in their thirties, drove buses. One became an obsessive recluse who collected toy cars. Some turned to crime.
What, then, is giftedness? Exploring that concept reveals a nebulous term based on a host of differing tests and measures and the subjective judgment of parents.
Lynn Beresford, a child psychologist who makes referrals to George Parkyn, says that standards differ across the country and around the globe. Mensa, the society for the smart, ranks by IQ and accepts only those scoring above 132 – meaning members are drawn from the top two percent.
Roger Moltzen of Waikato University says that IQ tests fell from favour 20 years ago. “IQ tests tend to reward convergent over divergent thinking, and creative ability will generally not be picked up.”
An associate professor of human development and counselling, Moltzen says, “Today, we generally see giftedness and talent as much broader than simply a high level of cognitive or intellectual functioning.”
Partly as a consequence, the Christ-church branch of the Explorers Club accepts children in the top 10 percent of their age group measured across a range of abilities, while their Auckland counterparts say five percent. By these figures, more than one in six New Zealand children could be considered gifted.
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