Pushy parents: the naked truth

Pushy parents: the naked truth
If you decide to hothouse your child, don't be surprised if they turn out to act rather wildly Carol Midgley

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article3731897.ece

A few days ago I stood, notebook poised hopefully, outside the new-build Salford flat where Sufiah Yusof, child maths prodigy-turned-prostitute, now twiddles her nipples for clients at £130 an hour.

Sufiah, who won a place at Oxford at age 13 after being pressured mercilessly by her father, is now 23 and has just been exposed by the News of the World as being a “Genius on the Game”. It is here, on a bed made up in the lounge, that she gets her kit off for punters who book via her online escort agency.

Apart from asking the obvious - whether this new lifestyle direction is purely to punish her parents - I wanted her take on the theory that overbearing parents risk making anarchists or even dropouts of their children. Alas, she had already done an exclusive newspaper deal and duly told her story dressed in a leopardskin bra and brandishing a riding crop - predictable, perhaps, since hookers don't tend to perform for free. “I have studied so intensely for so many years I wanted to have fun,” she said.

Whether pleasuring businessmen en route home to their wives is much fun is debatable. But every pushy parent in the land would be advised to cut out the picture of the beautiful Sufiah gyrating naked (and get this - looking absolutely delighted to be doing so) and consult it each time they are tempted to strong-arm their child into yet another “improving” activity or extra Mandarin lesson. Sufiah was taught by her father under the Accelerated Learning Technique and apparently made to study alone for hours in freezing rooms to keep her brain alert. As a further discipline, he pushed her so hard at tennis that she was seeded No 8 in the country for under-21s.


report this week claimed that grandmothers see their grown-up (middle-class) children as competitive obsessives who approach parenthood in exactly the same way as their careers - with targets, checklists and ruthless ambition. Professor Rachel Thomson, of the Open University and co-director of The Making of Modern Motherhood report, said grandmothers were horrified by the “modern pressure and compulsion on parents to be constantly busy and sociable, taking their child to every class available, being up to date on endless independent research into everything from developmental goals to nutrition”.

Why are so many parents obsessed with their offspring being conspicuous overachievers that they are willing to sacrifice their childhoods for it? Do they now regard the word “average” (regarded as quite good, ie normal, in my day) as now equal to “shameful”? Maybe they truly do believe that the formula of right school/right hobbies/right university automatically equals wonderful, happy life. Ask the parents of child prodigies and many will tell them to be careful what they wish for.

As long ago as 1978 the psychologist Peter Congdon wrote a guide for parents of gifted children in which he said: “Accelerating mental development is sometimes bought at the expense of slowing down the pace of social and emotional growth. The result can be a lopsided and maladjusted individual.”

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I just post the stories, for interest.. for everyone

Lord, what fools these mortals be!
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act III, Scene ii

Voltaire said: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

H.L.Mencken wrote:"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. Albert Einstein

As a general rule, the English-speaking countries do not provide sufficient resources for genuinely gifted and talented youth, especially for those with hyper-high IQs. I know whereof I speak. But a small group of pahrents, as in this example, seem determined to force the issue and go quite too far in the opposite direction.

The dirty little secret is that the parents see pushing these kids to practice and excel for university scholarships, so the family has little or no expense for higher education, which will lead to a future meal ticket in the form of the child's high-paying career whose proceeds Mom and Dad will push the child into "sharing" with them.

The problem is the example set by people such as Tiger Woods. Everyone knows that Tiger's father began pushing him with a vengeance to play golf starting at age 3. They then think that if they push their own kid into a sport at an early age, they will also get a prodigy who can get big benefits later. It doesn't work that way for most children. Often the kid burns out.

Some years ago one of the advice columns—Dear Abby or one similar—had a warning from a mother whose husband pushed their teenage son to play football in high school, even though the boy was no longer interested. She tried to intervene, but Duh had to have things his way. In response to Duh's pushing, the boy deliberately began flunking classes to get kicked off the team, and he succeeded, even though it also damaged his chances of getting into university later. She warned from her sad experience that pushing your kids to do an unneccessary activity they don't like can backfire.

The same is true for academic pursuits. Even the brightest children benefit from down time and an opportunity to learn with challenges, but at their own pace. Attempts to accelerate this pace by overscheduling and forcing results will not work for long. No one can keep up an insane pace without grave consequences, not even children. "Hothouse" children do get "overheated" and burn out. And when a genuine prodigy extinguishes like a shooting star too soon in life, we all pay a price in missed potential.