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OURS IS AN ERA, a popular parenting adviser has written, when Lake-Wobegon-style insistence on above-average children is “yesterday’s news,” overtaken by an anxious credo that “given half a chance, all of our children would be extraordinary.” Yet versions of today’s uneasy preoccupation with off-the-charts early achievement actually go back further than we think. Over the past century, the zeitgeist has swept different young marvels to special attention as emblems of social progress or as victims of worrisome pressures—or often both at once. Is this or that early bloomer a weirdo headed for burnout, true to popular lore? Or is the wunderkind bound for creative glory, as modern experts have hoped to prove? And what behind-the-scenes forces other than his or her genius explain precocious mastery? Such loaded questions lurk between the lines for lesser superkids, too. Prodigies exert the fascination they do precisely for that reason: they invite scrutiny as auguries for the rest of us. They are the living, breathing, superbly high-performing evidence of what feats children may be capable of—and of how adult aspirations and efforts may help or hinder youthful soaring. What prodigies themselves make of their speedy progress, and the stresses they face, is a question that has only gradually gotten the airing it deserves.
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