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Child Genius: Britain’s brightest children put under the spotlight
As Child Genius returns, Vicki Power looks at the young brainboxes hoping to come out on top
Last year, documentary series Child Genius trawled the country to find Britain’s cleverest child. Alongside observing 21 gifted young finalists compete in subjects such as maths, logic, spelling and debating, the series invited us to gasp at the lengths to which some Tiger Mothers and Fathers went to ensure their bright sparks fulfilled their potential – or, more to the point, their parents’ lofty expectations of them.
This year’s four-part competition, which hits our screens this week and is again run by British Mensa, has drawn 650 seven-to-11 year old applicants for 20 finalist places. Even more than last year’s series, it showcases the mix of unorthodox educational styles deployed by parents to harness the brain power of their offspring.
Lyn Kendall, British Mensa’s Gifted Child Consultant, admits to “a few sharp intakes of breath” at the hot-housing that went on – one mother, Shoshana Garfield, brought a juicer to the competition in London in order to feed her nine-year-old daughter Aliyah brain food between rounds. “There seemed to be an awful lot of pressure [on Aliyah] all the time,” admits Kendall. “Where’s Aliyah’s chance to just breathe and sit and think?”
Another set of parents, Jo Gower-Crane and Chris Butler, of Weston-super-Mare, are shown to be at the opposite end of the scale – their home-schooled nine-year-old, Jocelyn, has never sat a standardised test, and entering Child Genius was her idea.
Jocelyn fits the mould of highly intelligent children, says Kendall, in that they possess a natural competitive edge. “People often cite pushy parents as the drive behind very bright children, and in actual fact it’s pushy children that won’t stop,” says Kendall.
But some of the parents involved make no apology for their methods. Manju Sharma makes inspirational posters with slogans like “Readers are Leaders” for her brainy daughter Ria, 11, a Child Genius finalist. Sharma expects Ria to study outside of school hours every day.
“Yesterday I gave Ria a booklet on Parliament and said, ‘In a couple of days’ time I’m going to ask you about this,’” explains Sharma, a teaching assistant from Isleworth, Middlesex, whose husband is a customs officer at Heathrow. “I will test her on it. We do a competition in mental maths every day as well. I try to make it fun.”
This year Ria took Level 6 exams instead of the Level 4 expected of her age group and will follow her older brother to one of the selective Tiffin grammar schools in Kingston upon Thames in September. But nothing was left to chance.
Ria’s educational environment could not be more at odds than that of Jocelyn, whose mother, Jo Gower-Crane – who trained as a Montessori teacher in order to educate her daughter – explains that there’s no such thing as a typical lesson.
“One day we were sitting on the edge of the trampoline learning about sharks,” explains Gower-Crane. “Jocelyn would read and then bounce and recite bits and ask questions and bounce some more. This went on for hours.”
Jocelyn, who at the age of five was assessed as having a reading age of 12, went to school for half a day four years ago and decided not to return. Her parents agreed, after their own unhappy educational experiences – Jo felt that she had never been properly challenged at school and Chris’s son from a previous relationship, now 38, who is severely dyslexic, had had a difficult time in the education system.
So although Child Genius does mine the entertainment value of overambitious parents, Lyn Kendall dismisses the notion that our gifted children are enduring unnecessary pressure. “Pushy parents make good television, but lots of the kids you don’t see much of in Child Genius have well-balanced parents who make sure their kids have downtime,” she says.
Above all, she’s hopeful that Child Genius encourages us to focus on our exceptionally intelligent children. “There is an assumption that because these children are bright they are going to live happy and successful lives anyway, and [studies have shown that] that is certainly not the case,” explains Kendall. “On the contrary, there is such a gap between their intellectual development and their social and emotional development that they can end up struggling to fit in.”
It’s a particular problem for gifted children when they meet intellectual equals at university. “If you are used to being the prodigy and not used to failure or having to study, suddenly you may think, ‘I’m not as good as everybody tells me I am.’ They have no resilience.”
Kendall was delighted that the first series of Child Genius resulted in more schools getting in touch with Mensa to ask for advice on dealing with exceptional pupils. “We want to celebrate the intelligence of these gifted children,” says Kendall. “They are our future doctors, inventors and world leaders and we need to make sure they are stable, well-rounded people.”
Child Genius is on Channel 4 on Sunday July 20 at 9.00pm