Why parents should find and develop children's talents early

 Safaricom youth Orchestra students practice virtually. (Courtesy)

Are geniuses born or made? After studying the biographies of 400 people considered to be geniuses in their industries throughout the centuries, educational psychologist, Laszlo Polgar came to the conclusion that they are made. 

“A genius is not born but is educated and trained…. When a child is born healthy, it is a potential genius,” he said in an interview with the Washington Post in 1992.

He then went a step further and set out to prove his theory and answer that age-old question by literally making them from scratch - he would find a woman, they would bear children and he would mould his children into geniuses.

From his study, he had observed that most of the greats became prodigies in their fields by starting early, as children, so that was what he would do.

In what many consider to be one of the most amazing experiments of all time, Polgar sought out someone to marry who would go along with his plan, and found her, a woman named Klara. He had explained his plan to her in letters. 

The premise was, “that any child has the innate capacity to become a genius in any chosen field, as long as they start an education before their third birthday and they begin to specialise at six.”

Finding it intriguing, Klara agreed and they married.

The couple considered various areas in which to intensely train their children and settled on chess, because expertise in it could be easily quantified, with undisputed ranking, unlike other areas in which greatness is sometimes subjective.

“... we chose chess. Chess is very objective and easy to measure,” said Klara. 

Amazing experiment

Polgar began teaching his eldest daughter when she was only four years old. Within months, she was beating adults at the game and beat her own father at it when she was five.  What were the results? All his three daughters became some of the highest-ranked chess players the world has ever seen. The eldest, Judit, had been the world’s highest-ranked female chess player for nearly 20 years in 2008.

Susan was the second best woman chess player in the world. The one who performed least impressively, Sophia, was the sixth best woman player in the world. “My father believes that innate talent is nothing, that success is 99 per cent hard work,” his daughter Susan said in an interview. 

This scenario has played out in several other families as well. Tennis legends, Serena and Venus Williams, were coached intensively in tennis by their father from a tender age, with Venus starting at age four and Serena even younger.

Their lessons would begin at 6am until dusk. Mozart, the legendary composer from the 18th century, was taking piano lessons from his father from age four. Michael Jackson, the king of pop, is famously considered to have not had a childhood because his father would allegedly force him to train from childhood.

Last year, 12-year-old Kenyan artist, Sheila Sheldon won the Global Child Prodigy Award. At 12, she is already a painter, model, poet and designer, and very good at it.

 Raila Odinga hosted Sheila Sheldon, a young artist who presented him with a painting of himself. (Photo/Emmanuel Wanson)

This year, she won the 2021 Nina Simone Artistic Excellence Honoree award for Young, Gifted and Black Entrepreneur. 

Since she is considered a prodigy, does it come from nowhere or does Polgar’s experiment predict success even in her case?

Her mother, Vivian Otieno, told the Sunday Magazine that she had not noticed her daughter’s talent until she was five and her teacher at the school she was in then, Light Academy in Mombasa, pointed it out.

Sheila herself believes she might have done things a little bit differently from the start. “I used to practice a lot. At age five, children are usually just playing around. But I was really focused. I really loved art. I still do. I would spend most of my time drawing, rather than playing with other children, so I think that was what really made me different. Art is my playground,” she said. 

In addition, however, once her mother realised that her daughter might be onto something, she did everything she could to nurture the talent, heeding what the teacher at Sheila’s former school had said. 

“She told me, ‘when she leaves this school, do not let this talent die.’ I would take Sheila to artists drawing along Beach Road, so she could draw with them. But some people said that the wazungu would buy her work instead of theirs, so I took a loan, bought materials and set Sheila up in the house,” she said.

From these instances, it seems training from an early age can be a game-changer, which Dr Charity Waithima, Clinical Psychologist and Assistant Professor of Psychology at USIU Africa confirmed. 

“Nurture helps the way the brain is going to be wired,” she said. “As you nurture talent, you are helping the brain to wire towards performing and perfecting that talent,” she said.

Several people in Kenya have taken note of training children early and have launched programmes to get children interested in various areas while young.

For instance, Susan Murabana, a Kenyan astronomer, said in a previous interview that she loved science as a child, but as an adult, she has realised there are areas she could pursue had she been exposed to them at an earlier age.

During her undergraduate studies, she joined a group of students teaching science across Africa and marveled at how easily they could explain it. “They were using basic materials like an orange to demonstrate the size of the sun compared to the earth, and trying to give children a sense of scale. I was fascinated by it because the children really understood it and I was reminded of my school science years; I wished I had had something like that,” she said.

Longing to give children the opportunity she lacked, she founded the Travelling Telescope together with her husband and set out to travel to schools with it, exposing children to Astronomy.

“The idea is to travel around with our materials, which is a telescope, a mobile planetarium and other interesting science kits. I travel around schools and teach them science, then leave hoping that we have left an impact, that the children will look at science in a different way,” she said.  

Early exposure

Just exposing the young ones to an area of science they may never have considered might make all the difference. “In a school we went to, one of the children wanted to be an engineer. When he saw a video of the International Space Station, he decided he will be a space engineer,” said Murabana. 

It is not just in the choice of career that early exposure makes a difference, it is also in everyday living.

Money is central to survival, yet financial literacy is only taught to a few adults, and very rarely children, something Kavata Kiaro seeks to change. She is founder of Owthen, a financial literacy programme for children and teenagers. “Children have the capacity to grasp concepts more than we give them credit for. They are like sponges, curious and eager to learn. Secondly, children eventually grow up to be adults and interacting with money is inevitable,” said Kiaro.

“Starting them young allows them a safe opportunity to cultivate healthy money habits, and even make mistakes within a controlled environment and carry these lessons for a lifetime.”

While it is ideal to start while young, Waithima however said it does not mean that all is lost if that does not happen, thanks to brain plasticity or neuroplasticity.

Britannica defines it as capacity of neurons and neural networks in the brain to change their connections and behaviour in response to new information, sensory stimulation, development, damage or dysfunction.

It is at its peak in childhood, but does not stop throughout one’s lifetime.

“That is why we talk about neuroplasticity. There are people who catch up with things even later in life,” said Waithima.