Nurturing giftedness and creativity

One hundred years ago we thought that geniuses like Mozart and Einstein were just that – geniuses. Special people born to be great. But modern thinking on how children learn and develop knows it’s more complicated than that. The influence of parents outside school is of paramount importance in how children develop their talents and gifts – including geniuses.

Mozart and Einstein came from families where their talents at home were developed from an early age because of home influences. Mozart’s father was a musician and, in many ways, exploited his young son’s precocious talent and interest in music mercilessly, beginning touring with him when he was just a child.

Einstein came from a home where his engineer father must have been mathematically strong. His father and uncle set up an electrical engineering business and the growing Einstein would make mechanical models for fun. When Einstein was ten, an impecunious Polish medical student started joining the family for weekly meals and began introducing key texts in science, mathematics and philosophy to the boy– sessions that lasted for six years.

So would Mozart and Einstein, and perhaps all the other geniuses that came before and after them, have become the extraordinary figures they did without the upbringings they had? No-one can really know, but one thing is clear – the influences in their homes appear to have had an enormous effect on what they went on to do in adult life.

At less exalted levels, this effect is going on all of the time. The children of people who are good at sport are often very good at sport ,  teachers produce children who often go on to teach, lawyers produce people who go into the law, doctors produce doctors,  actors produce children who become … actors. The list goes on.

Is this just because children are following in the family footsteps – copying what their parents did because it is familiar  - or is something else going on? Are all those early trips to the golf course, the film sets, and Mummy or Daddy’s place of work predisposing children to develop one set of natural attributes instead of others?

The latest research would seem to suggest – yes they are. Giftedness and creativity can be nurtured in children and the parents and the schools that do it best see their children and students flourish.

Parents matter because of the opportunities they give their children. Parents matter because of what they do to encourage talents and creativity to emerge. Parents matter in the way that they encourage newly budded ability to blossom.

The GEMS policy priority parent engagement strategy acknowledges this and recognises parents as co-educators with our teachers. We want to encourage parents to see how influential they can be on the school performance of their children.

So we were delighted to be able to invite Professor Deborah Eyre, one of the world’s renowned experts on the teaching of gifted and talented children and young people, to Dubai in late May to give professional development sessions on learning for able children in our schools and a GEMS parents’ talk on nurturing giftedness and creativity at home amongst all children.

Deborah is internationally recognised for her work on gifted education and currently works in UK, Middle East, Far East and Africa on education policy and system design for high performance.  She is a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University and also holds academic positions at University of Warwick and Hong Kong Institute of Education.

She told her parent audience that academic opinion on where ability and gifts and talent come from is divided. Some academics claim there is no genetic constraint on anyone reaching high ability – that anyone can be taught to do extremely well.

The majority academic view, however, says genetic inheritance of predispositions and attributes, combined with the way that raw talent is nurtured, is at the heart of all high performance. Opportunities to try new things are essential to develop talents and many more children and people could work at advanced levels, given the opportunities to develop.

Contrary to popular belief, says Professor Eyre,  research proves that gifted adults were seldom child prodigies and some children who might be considered gifted at the age of six will not be ten years later because brighter children have not only caught up but have overtaken them.

Pre-school experiences which are different from the norm, may lead a parent to assume they have a gifted child on their hands, when they may just be the product of an early start in something which is due to opportunity not extraordinary talent.

For example, the child with the great vocabulary, the reading age way ahead of his chronological age and the love of stories is likely to be the child who comes from a home full of conversation which values books and reading. That does not mean the vocabulary and reading ages and love of books of many others won’t catch up or overtake.

Also expert performance is associated with hard work and 10,000 hours of practice is the widely acknowledged input required to be a true expert, says Professor Eyre. Brilliance doesn't just happen; people have to work for it.

So what parents need to do is provide their children with opportunities and support to develop as well as working on their motivation, if they want their children to achieve high performance for and advanced performance for those capable of it.

As parents you should encourage and expect exceptional performance and provide your children with the opportunity to try new things, supporting them while they are learning and helping them develop levels of persistence and resilience to cope with setbacks as they improve.

It makes so much sense. When you have children for the first time and start to watch them grow from babies to toddlers and beyond, it’s astonishing to watch the pace of development – to see how much difficult stuff they learn in such a short time.

Those tiny babies morph into bigger babies who crawl (most of them), then walk, then talk, then learn how to get on with people – all the time using the astonishing array of gifts and talents nature has endowed them with to get there.

Once the basics are covered more natural talents and gifts begin to emerge. Some small children want to sing and dance, some want to lie on the floor and play with cars, some love being read to, others seem to be a natural with a ball.

And then bits of them seem to start to close down. Some of them really don’t seem to like sport, others only want to run around. Some of them love to do sums, others can’t stand them. Some seem to be able to draw pictures really easily, others become embarrassed by their own efforts. And so it goes on.

If we as parents encourage them to keep trying new things and to practise the things that don’t come easily as well as the ones that do, who knows what talents could be uncovered. Who know what talents lie undiscovered in the adults we have become.