11 quotes
There appear to be as many learning styles among prodigies as there are prodigies to express them.
How to Raise a Prodigy (2018)
Child rearing is an art, and what makes art art is that it is doing several things at once.
How to Raise a Prodigy (2018)
We disapprove of parental hovering not because it won’t pay off later—it might; it does!—but because it’s obnoxious now.
How to Raise a Prodigy (2018)
We know we’ve come to a crossroads when German childhood is being held up as an idealized model for Americans.
How to Raise a Prodigy (2018)
Teaching kids to become something other than what they were born to be is probably impossible; teaching them to behave in ways that seem unnatural to them at the start is actually not that hard.
How to Raise a Prodigy (2018)
What sustains us in any competition are the moments of interiority when the competition vanishes; what sustains us in any struggle are the moments when we forget the struggle.
How to Raise a Prodigy (2018)
Andre Agassi, in his account of becoming an embittered prodigy, seems never to have liked tennis much, except as a vehicle for achievement. The kids who do like life inside the lines can find the flow within that green-and-white geometry.
How to Raise a Prodigy (2018)
Strenuously competitive parents may indeed produce high-achieving grownups, but it’s in the nature of things that high-achieving adults are likely to become frustrated and embittered old people, once the rug is pulled out from under their occupation.
How to Raise a Prodigy (2018)
Accomplishment, the feeling of absorption in the flow, of mastery for its own sake, of knowing how to do this thing, is what keeps all of us doing what we do, if we like what we do at all.
How to Raise a Prodigy (2018)
We understand instinctively that being a prodigy wasn’t [Wayne Gretzky’s] platform for a lifetime’s achievement; it marked the possibility of a highly specific, highly term-limited kind of performance.
How to Raise a Prodigy (2018)
With all the effort in the world, the results of cramming kids are likely to be more ambiguous than we can predict, not because the child rearing was done wrong but because all such results tend to be ambiguous.
How to Raise a Prodigy (2018)