A Mother's Obsession with the super-gifted

Between Societal Bias and Social Roles

These days I play nanny to my cousin’s son. He is a healthy, very active, curious and well-adapted growing boy. Granted, he is no big fan of nap time, obsessed with the witch Bibi Blocksberg and his two identical fox plushies and currently he is a bit peculiar about what he wants to eat, but I guess you’ll have to give a one and a half year old a little bit of leeway. I am more than 20 years his senior and still trying to figure everything out, including myself. So instead of pushing a temporarily overwhelmed toddler into socially acceptable gender specific behaviour, all while expecting him to outshine even the smartest savant, shouldn’t we just let him be?

About five months ago his paediatrician thought this aversion towards sleep and the general fussiness were an indicator for his high intellect. The impressed mother, who had celebrated her achievement even before she walked out the door, dragged him into a testing facility. Yet, when the neutral looking tester asked Filius to draw a line on a paper, he proved his strength of character and stubbornly refused but caused his highly ambitious mom, a kindergartener, maybe not the first grief but definitely the first big disappointment in his yet young life. So like many other moms she will have to deal with the fact that her darlingly little first-born is not the next Einstein. If you google IQ and test in English in 0.36 seconds the search engine will spit out 56,700,000 results and most of it is a useless waste of space because the bottom line of a grand majority of those articles tells you, we cannot really accurately measure intelligence an base our results on empirical facts that can be verified and reproduced. Quite the contrary, IQ tests are standardized and work according to a similar principle as SAT college tests, the more tests you take, the better your results. Yet, most TV-programs and newspaper articles dealing with the subject of highly gifted children advocate the idea of doing so as early as possible to single out the good ones into the pot and the bad ones go into well-normal schools. Since when did it become almost an act of criminal negligence to not test your child’s IQ? It is understandable parents need to be proud of their children; their genetic material produced a valuable member of our society who will change the world for the better. That is a lot of responsibility loaded onto the tiny shoulders of a pre-kindergartener. So form the moment of his birth Filius and Filia are constantly asked to perform. Repeat after me. What is that word for this thing or the other? Tell grandpa and grandma what you’ve learned yesterday? And apart from that we expect them to behave according to the societal norms of gender specific accepted behaviour. A boy doesn’t wear pink or purple; his colour is blue maybe a light green. He doesn’t play with dolls, he doesn’t go screaming for mummy, when he’s hurt or afraid, he’ll bare it like a real man.

In a time were 10-year-olds need diaries to keep track of all their social obligations, are our children really finding their own identity or are they just trying on borrowed clothes that look good? Between the violin lessons, the football training or ballet for girls, because let’s face it even post-feminist parents don’t usually deal to well with their very own Billy Elliots. In fact, my one-year-old charge is already trained to become a manly man with big tools, cars and tractors, everything that is big and makes a lot of noise is acceptable. It’s a miracle really that daddy dearest allows him to listen to the adventures of BibiBlocksberg, decidedly a witch not a wizard. What would happen if on his fifth birthday Filius decided, that’s not it for me, I want to become the next RudolfNureyev. Maybe he will grow up and wear pink shirts because he feels like it. Maybe he will one day find out, that he likes boys better than girls. Could you still be the proud and doting father, even if your son dared to hurt your ego by going against the cultural bias of a patriarchal society, where gender roles may officially be in the flux but underneath all the neo-liberal open-mindedness reside the same structured principles of a man at work and a woman at home? Our thinking is still very much fixed around these stereotypical binary gender perceptions, feminism and its great thinkers like Judith Butler, Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Frieden or Virginia Woolf could do only so much. As adults we all proclaim to be tolerant and respectful towards alternative lifestyles and accept the equality doctrine as a democratic absolute but it’s how we raise our children that reveals our level of open-minded acceptance, who we really are.