He spent a year writing new arrangements for the music. He went to fiddle camp, but instead of playing the usual fiddle tunes, he corralled the other campers into performing Pirates music with him. He did the same thing with the Lord of the Rings trilogy. He listened to the music, he memorized the scores, he wrote new arrangements for it—for hours at a time.
Instead of having to urge him to practice, Eve finally told him to stop; she couldn’t take listening to Pirates music anymore. She urged him to compose his own stuff. Jonathan researched top-of-the-line composition equipment on discussion forums and Web sites and, using the money he earned from his jazz gigs, bought a new computer for composing.
Sometimes he sat at the piano and improvised, but for the most part songs came to him fully formed. During high school, he got up at 5:30 a.m. to compose because it was a time when he felt particularly inspired.
Jonathan set his sights on film scoring. Eve asked around about composition lessons, and a friend put her in touch with an NYU composition professor who took a thirteen-year-old Jonathan on as a student. Jonathan developed a huge knowledge bank of scores and score trivia. During one conversation, he noted that Hans Zimmer wrote parts of the score for the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie but his contribution is uncredited; Peter Jackson knew the composer Howard Shore had found the theme for Rohan in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers when he started humming it in the car; in Batman Begins, Zimmer composed an incomplete theme for an incomplete human being. Jonathan began an annual tradition of creating a medley of the best original score Oscar nominees and posting it online.
The performances continued, often influenced by Jonathan’s fascination with film scores. There were jazz festivals throughout the United States (he “pluckishly improvised—using the Lone Ranger’s theme” at the Sacramento Jazz Jubilee) and a music tour in Hungary (he watched Star Wars in Hungarian). Jonathan put out a few self-produced CDs, all of which included his improvisations. He played with Wynton Marsalis at Rose Hall at Jazz at Lincoln Center as part of the Nursery Song Swing concert series when he was thirteen. At fifteen, he performed the improvised violin segment of One Night with Fanny Brice, an off-Broadway production, three nights a week—“sprightly contributions,” as described by the New York Times. But Jonathan’s heart was in composing movie scores—a path that Eve, herself a classical musician, had never envisioned for him.
“We did have to make him practice; that’s what he hated doing about everything. But the improv came from him. Nobody could have taught this kid to improvise when he was younger, and the composition end, which he owns even more, that was the driving force behind him,” Eve said. “We couldn’t have made him compose, we couldn’t have made him sit for hours like he did, but we made him practice.”
Lauren Voiers grew up in Westlake, a suburb on the west side of Cleveland. She’s five feet eleven inches with long hair—sometimes blond, sometimes brunette—a round face, and caramel-colored eyes. Her father, Doug, is a cosmetic dentist, her mother, Nancy, a nurse turned stay-at-home mom who has now returned to nursing.
From the time Lauren was two or three, she had, as her father put it, “a very, very, very, extremely strong desire” to create. “Sometimes I would come home from work, and my wife would brace me for the carnage that had occurred at the home,” Doug said. “She did destroy good parts of our home over the years.”
At three years old, Lauren got her hands on a permanent marker and drew on all four walls of a bedroom, “broad strokes, as high as she could reach,” Doug recalled; the Voierses had to tear the wallpaper down. She drew on the carpet until it had to be ripped off the floor. She carved designs into the woodwork, once etching into a custom-made window seat in her bedroom.
As she got a bit older—four, five, six—Lauren’s creative urge persisted, but she channeled it onto more traditional surfaces. She drew faces and objects in great detail without looking at any sort of reference material. She painted by number; she painted on backpacks and clothes. She assembled jewelry from kits, made a jewelry box out of clay, and poured colored sand into bottles. She had a knack for making posters that won her a couple of school contests. In middle school, Lauren grew interested in architecture and sketched out designs on graph paper, creating modern, angular homes and geometric spaces.
Nancy and Doug both enjoyed the arts—Nancy played the piano; Doug took a ceramics course in college and dabbled with watercolors—and they bought Lauren markers and crayons and other art supplies on Christmas and her birthday to support her interest. Art, they thought, made for a great hobby.
In seventh grade, Lauren’s eye wandered to her dad’s painting supplies. Inspired by one of her dad’s art books, she borrowed a canvas and some paints and tried to replicate a Thomas Kinkade painting of a river running through a forest. Over the next few months, she produced a few other small landscapes—a couple of houses, another nature scene. She painted a couple of times a week for four or five hours at a time. “Eventually, it got to the point where she was producing things that were fairly amusing,” Doug said. “But of course, we wound up with four kids, so we’re making babies, and my wife’s a critical care nurse, and I’m a cosmetic dentist and building a business, and we’re living our lives, so we’re not paying much attention to the quality of what she’s doing.”
When Lauren was thirteen, she saw Marla Olmstead, a then-four-year-old artist with big eyes and chin-length hair, on The Jane Pauley Show. She was riveted by the girl’s story and even more so by her paintings. “It was filled with a lot of micro-detail and smaller areas,” Lauren said of one of Marla’s works, a large, fiery piece punctuated by dark splotches. “It was kind of 3-D, kind of like creepy in a way.”
Lauren sought out more images of similar artwork. During breaks at school, she went to the library and studied the abstract paintings on artists’ Web sites. When she got home, she did the same thing, poring over artists’ Web sites and examining art books until she was spending two and a half hours a day inhaling art. “I absolutely became obsessed,” Lauren said.
She abandoned the landscapes she had been painting and tried her hand at abstracts (“using my fingers, using my hands, just kind of experimenting with paint”). She quickly moved toward cubism, depicting objects as composed of—and alongside—an array of geometric shapes or, as Lauren put it, “breaking things down to their simplest form.”
She hustled to the art room during lunch and free periods; she stayed after school to paint. The school art teacher called Doug and Nancy after she saw Lauren’s early abstracts. She thought their daughter had a gift. After that, the Voierses bought Lauren paints and the large canvases she wanted. She completed fifteen, some as large as three by four feet, that year.
Her production accelerated once she started high school. She spent six hours a day painting, then seven, eight, nine hours a day. Her other activities—tennis, basketball, schoolwork—fell by the wayside. She pieced together a couple of hours of painting at school; study hall, lunch, any extra time she had went toward her artwork. But she did the bulk of her painting at night, after everyone had gone to bed. Doug converted their attic space into an art studio for Lauren during her junior year of high school, and Lauren stayed up past 3:00 a.m., past 4:00 a.m., sometimes not sleeping at all before school and then crashing during first and second periods. “I went kind of crazy on it,” Lauren remembered.
Her artwork again spilled over onto the walls, this time the walls of her own room, which she decorated according to a different theme every year—sophisticated jungle, “hippy dippy trippy” murals, metallic green with graffiti.
There were a series of victories. Her painting Sisters, a crimson-and-orange work in which two girls appear to be embracing (“showing the love I have for my sister”), was a regional finalist in the 2006 Ohio Governor’s Youth Art Exhibition. The next year, Transparency, an autumnal-colored piece in which a woman is visible among an array of shapes (“a more stained-glas
s effect . . . with many layers and dimensions”), won Scholastic’s National Gold Key Award. A friend’s mother commissioned her to paint a landscape of their house. A Cleveland art dealer sold a few of her pieces, including The Cellist, a nine-by-four-foot bronze-and-violet cubist piece that spanned three canvases (“one of the best paintings I ever made”). To the Voierses, though, art still felt more like a hobby than a viable career. “Everyone knows artists are starving,” Lauren said. “The odds of becoming an artist that can actually make a living at it is—I don’t know what the odds are, but they’re ridiculous.”
A phone call changed everything. When Lauren was seventeen, a California art agent contacted her parents. He had seen an image of Sisters that Lauren’s mother, Nancy, had posted online. He wanted to take Lauren on as a client. “Our first conversation on the phone, my wife got all excited and I said, ‘Okay, I want to talk to this guy, because he’s full of it,’” Doug said. “I was very, very worried for her going into that world. My wife was excited about it, about the prospect, and I was very dubious and I was skeptical.”
The agent proposed a trial online auction, just to see how things went. He sold around $179,000 worth of Lauren’s art; Lauren’s cut amounted to more than $40,000. Lauren signed a representation agreement with the agency a couple of months later on her eighteenth birthday. Her parents contacted the school to help her set up a reduced schedule for the last semester of her senior year so she could travel to art events.
“Right after that, it was bam, bam, bam, bam, bam,” Lauren said. She zipped off to shows and auctions across the country, making her way to New Jersey and New York, La Jolla and Las Vegas, Virginia and Maryland. “It’s something I had been dreaming about,” Lauren said. “Every time I would be working on my art, I’d have it in the back of my mind, imagining, what if I’m painting this for a show? I always dreamed it would be going somewhere else besides sitting in the attic.” Her price tags shot upward, with her large canvases eventually selling for around $20,000 each.
In the midst of her immersion in the professional art world, Lauren graduated from high school. She rented studio space in Cleveland—a loft downtown with big windows, hardwood floors, and redbrick walls—and then in a church on the east side where she worked in a converted space in the rafters. When she met Joanne in September 2010, she was officially a professional.
“Other people began recognizing her talent far before we did, mainly because they had the context,” Doug recalled. “So here they are comparing what she is doing to all of these other children of the same age-group. We didn’t really have that ability to compare; we just saw what she was doing.”
Jonathan’s and Lauren’s families aren’t polar opposites. Both kids come from financially stable, two-parent homes. Both families provided their kids with the supplies they needed to pursue their interest—a violin for Jonathan; paints and canvases for Lauren.
But their families weren’t exactly following the same playbook, either. Lauren was almost entirely self-taught; Jonathan took violin lessons, piano lessons, and composition courses. Lauren’s family knew little of the art world; as she put it, “The whole art business—that was brand-new to all of us.” Jonathan’s parents knew the ropes. “I’m a musician,” Eve said. “A lot of the parents of prodigies aren’t musicians or aren’t this or aren’t that and are kind of lost, but my thing was, I’m a musician, I know what all the pitfalls are. I was gonna make it much easier for him to succeed than it was for me.”
The question of how significantly parents contribute to their children’s achievements is an old one, and it’s one that prodigy parents often face. While many families seem bewildered by their child’s advanced abilities, there have, historically, been parents eager to take credit for their children’s achievements. In the 1910s, for example, a small group of parents proclaimed that they had turned their children into prodigies. One of these parents, Leo Wiener, a Harvard professor whose children included Norbert Wiener, a famous prodigy and eventual MIT mathematician, claimed that his children were “not precocious,” “not geniuses,” and “not even exceptionally bright.” “I could take almost any child and develop him in the same way,” Wiener said. “It is merely the method of imparting learning.”
In other words, these parents claimed that their prodigies were normal children. They had no inherent advantage in the smarts department. In the parents’ telling, these children excelled because their education began at a young age—perhaps at two or three—well before the age at which formal schooling typically began. Other common threads among the parents included rejecting baby talk; introducing letters, numbers, languages, and other areas of study at a young age; and making learning interesting. According to these parents, their children’s outcomes were the product of their parents’ efforts.
The view that parents could create a prodigy out of almost any child is an extreme nurture take on prodigy, one that bestows on parents great control over their children’s minds and abilities. This nurture-oriented perspective is oddly reminiscent of some of the darkest moments in the history of autism. For decades, scientists and the public debated whether parents might be to blame for their children’s autism.
The groundwork for this debate was laid early. In his earliest writings on autism in the 1940s and 1950s, Leo Kanner entertained the idea that parents might have played some role in their children’s condition. In particular, he questioned the impact of two practices he believed were common among the parents of the autists he saw: “stuffing” the children with “verses, zoologic and botanic names, titles and composers of victrola record pieces, and the like” and subjecting them to “emotional refrigeration.” He eventually concluded, though, based on the fact that his patients exhibited autism symptoms almost from birth, that autistic tendencies must be innate: the environmental influence, he wrote, was “not sufficient in itself” to cause autism.
Others disagreed. Bruno Bettelheim, the vocal, long-term director of a children’s residential treatment center at the University of Chicago, was convinced that autism was a product of nurture. He believed that autistic children internalized the perceived negative emotions of their closest caregivers—most often, their mothers. Drawing on the tale of Hansel and Gretel, Bettelheim claimed in his 1967 book, The Empty Fortress, that an autistic child would see his or her mother as the “devouring witch” of the fairy tale and that his or her withdrawal was a defense mechanism against the mother’s perceived “destructive intents.”
Eventually, scientific research, particularly twin studies, swept the nurture conception of autism aside. In the first of these, a 1977 study, the psychiatrists Susan Folstein and Michael Rutter found that among sets of twins in which at least one of each pair was autistic, the second twin was far more likely to have autism if the twins were identical than if they were fraternal. Their finding suggested a strong genetic component to autism because the identical twins had more DNA in common with each other than the fraternal twins (nature), but all the twins shared a prenatal environment and a home environment (nurture). These findings were buttressed by other twin studies and by studies that identified a higher prevalence of autism-related traits in autists’ family members—a finding that suggested a genetic basis for such traits. It has since become conventional wisdom that autism has a large genetic component. In most parts of the world, the idea that parents are to blame for their children’s autism has been tarnished and cast aside.
But what about child prodigies? Are their behaviors, too, largely the product of genetics? After spending more than a decade investigating prodigies, David Feldman thought there was an innate core to prodigious skill. He and Lynn Goldsmith concluded in Nature’s Gambit that all six of their subjects had “striking and extreme” talents—abilities with which they were born. “If these children themselves were not truly gifted,” they wrote, “they would not emerge as prodigies.”
There are occasionally cases in which a child’s story can ser
ve as an almost undeniable example of such extreme innate talent. Kelvin Doe, for example, grew up in Freetown, Sierra Leone, with few resources; he’s the youngest of five children and was raised by a single mother in a community that had electricity only once a week. At eleven, he began rooting through trash heaps for scrap electronic parts. He used what he found to create a battery to power the lights in his house. The self-taught inventor later assembled a generator and an FM radio transmitter. He’s since been invited to visit MIT, given a TEDxTeen talk, and signed a $100,000 contract to develop solar panel technology in Sierra Leone.
It’s easy to imagine, though, that other prodigious children never fully develop their talents. According to Feldman and Goldsmith, while innate talent was the engine for the achievements of the children they studied, most prodigies could never reach their potential without catching a few breaks. They explained that even children endowed with magnificent abilities benefit from significant familial support and superb teachers and from choosing a field both valued by society and conducive to the rapid development of expert ability. Only when all of these factors work in unison, in “a beautifully choreographed co-incidence of forces,” can a child’s full potential be revealed.
It’s an insightful conclusion; it illuminates the circumstances under which the abilities of a prodigiously talented child might fully develop. It suggests that even if prodigies have a baseline innate capability that can’t be taught, most still need a certain environment to maximize their talent. But providing that environment, figuring out how to raise children who, as one reporter put it, “stand out like Gulliver among the Lilliputians,” is a challenging parental task.
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