by Tom Clynes
“Looking back, the way we parented was almost totally influenced by the kind of first child we had,” Tiffany says. “Taylor was born and we took off on a crazy ride. A lot of the time we were just hanging on, winging it, following our instincts.”
Although teachers, mentors, and others may influence how fully a talented child develops his or her potential, parents are usually the prime architects of a child’s environment and are essential to bringing a young person’s talents—whether common or uncommon—to fruition. “For things to go well depends more than anything on the actions of these crucial early catalysts,” says David Henry Feldman, who directs the Developmental Science Group at Tufts University. “And of all the variables a gifted child faces, that’s the hardest one to get right.”
Feldman began studying profoundly gifted children and their cognitive development in the 1970s and spent ten years tracking six extraordinarily gifted children, whose stories he tells in his 1986 book Nature’s Gambit. Though the body of knowledge about prodigiousness is still thin, Feldman’s research convinced him that, in terms of supporting the development of a prodigy’s talents, a parenting strategy like Tiffany and Kenneth’s was ideal. “Taylor’s parents may not have felt they knew what they were doing, but as luck would have it, their intuition was appropriate for the situation, and they had the wherewithal and the motivation. They were willing to take some risks and to spend time and energy enabling their son’s very unusual pursuits.”
But just as Taylor’s talent for science and Joey’s knack for math seemed to spring from nowhere, so did Tiffany’s and Kenneth’s responses. Where did their effective but counterintuitive reactions come from?
“I don’t actually believe in reincarnation,” says Feldman, “but I do believe that just as intellectual capacity is inherited to a certain extent, so too are parenting responses.” Though Feldman stresses that he is speculating—very few prodigies have been intensively studied, and in any case his hunch would be almost impossible to test and prove—he believes that parents unknowingly bring a lot with them from previous generations. “If there was another science prodigy somewhere in the family history—and I’m willing to bet my thirty-year career that there was, in Taylor’s case—then there were parents who reacted to that prodigy,” Feldman says. “Generations later, when children exhibit a certain behavior, it triggers certain reactions in parents that are part of their own DNA.” What happens next to that child depends to a great extent on what those responses are. “Some parents get it right, some just get it wrong. And some respond in ways that may have been appropriate in 1716 in Bologna but not here and now.”
Were Tiffany and Kenneth drawing on some sort of transgenerational experience as they learned how to parent their gifted children? Kenneth believes there might be something to Feldman’s idea. “At least, I can’t think of another way to explain it. Looking back, I can see that our gut reactions to Taylor grew into a more conscious approach. But at first, honestly, we were flying by the seat of our pants a lot of the time.”
What Tiffany and Kenneth did understand, almost from the beginning, was that they had two boys who were, as Tiffany puts it, “not your normal kids in most ways.” It was clear that both Taylor and Joey were very smart, but Taylor asserted his intelligence with an extreme willfulness and obsession that was by turns confusing, entertaining, and exasperating. Kenneth in particular was baffled by his son, who was so profoundly different than him. Kenneth loves to watch and play the all-American games; Taylor has zero interest in team sports. Kenneth enjoys polishing off a plate of barbecued pork; Taylor, when he can be coaxed into eating, picks at vegetables and an occasional bit of organic free-range chicken breast. As Taylor grew older, he was drawn toward center-left politicians like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, while Kenneth tended to be more conservative politically.
“I figured out a long time ago that Taylor wasn’t interested in what I was interested in,” Kenneth says. “We did expose him to everything normal kids do: T-ball, soccer, skis, Scouting, tennis. He’s agile and he would have made a good athlete if he’d applied himself. But it was all too regimented for him. I tried to get him into golf, but he had no time for that either. He was all focus; he knew exactly what he wanted to do. And I just had to accept that and adapt and do things differently.”
Most significant, Kenneth and Tiffany adapted by opening up opportunities that were outside the mainstream of what’s available to most kids in southern Arkansas. Plenty of parents support their offspring’s interests by buying things for them or dropping them off at the best schools or art centers that money can buy; far fewer put real time and effort into creating customized, hands-on opportunities that meaningfully expand their children’s—and often their own—range of experiences.
Linda Brody, cofounder of the Diagnostic and Counseling Center at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth, says that “the first trick is to give kids a lot of exposure to things in their younger years and then to notice what they’re picking up on.”
“Taylor and Joey weren’t asking for baseball gloves or electronic gadgets like the other kids,” Tiffany says. “So we introduced them to a lot of things to find out what they were interested in—in Taylor’s case, he let us know in no uncertain terms—then we looked for ways to open doors that brought them in deeper.”
It didn’t hurt that they had a lot of community connections, such as Kenneth’s friend who was willing to bring the crane over for Taylor’s birthday or another family friend who arranged for Taylor to ride along in the helicopter that delivered Santa to a Christmas shopping-center event. When Taylor was researching nuclear reactors, Kenneth called an Arkansas senator who was then pushing for funding to decommission the Southwest Experimental Fast-Oxide Reactor, and the senator arranged for a tour of the shut-down facility, during which officials invited the eleven-year-old to climb inside the nuclear reactor’s core.
Kenneth invited Taylor to a Rotary Club meeting to talk about the experience and about his interests in nuclear power and radioactivity. Kenneth, like teacher Angela Melde, had picked up on the learning-by-talking trait in Taylor, and he wanted to encourage it. As the date for the Rotary presentation approached, though, Kenneth began to get nervous. “I kept asking Taylor if he was going to practice, but he didn’t prepare at all, he winged it. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but he pulled it off; he brought down the house.”
As their sons’ interests expanded, the couple looked beyond Texarkana for ways to open up learning opportunities. When Joey expressed an interest in cooking, Tiffany found a class in southwestern cooking in Santa Fe. While Joey and Tiffany explored the possibilities of poblano peppers and green-chile salsa, Taylor and Kenneth drove to Los Alamos and visited the Bradbury Science Museum. Then the family reconnected to ski and visit the ancient adobes in Taos Pueblo.
“Take your kids places,” say talent-development experts, who can now rely on an extensive and growing body of evidence that suggests that a lasting capacity for creativity is enhanced by early exposure to unusual and diverse situations. Such exposure inspires kids to connect the dots and recognize that “there are a lot of different ways of looking at different things,” says Dean Keith Simonton, a psychologist at the University of California, Davis, who has written widely on genius and creativity. Early novel experiences, new psychological research suggests, play a substantial role in shaping the healthy development of brain systems that are important for effective learning and self-regulation, in childhood and beyond.
“We never had qualms about pulling the boys out of school for family trips that fed their interests,” Kenneth says. “Even if they might go down a few points on a test, they’d learn something they otherwise wouldn’t, something that might inform something else down the road.”
Supporting Taylor’s scientific adventures at home would prove to be a much bigger challenge both practically and emotionally. It’s one thing to feed the talents of a kid who’s into geology or horses. It’s quite a
nother to appropriately support a child who wants to experiment with the kinds of materials that keep the world’s leaders awake at night.
People like Dodds, Boudreaux, and later mentors could double-check on Taylor’s safety protocols and would eventually reach out to their own networks to help Taylor access the material and intellectual support he needed. As Taylor’s nuclear ambitions grew, Tiffany and Kenneth struggled even more to resist their urge to rein in their son. “It wasn’t easy,” Kenneth tells me, “but we realized that some kids come into this world with a special gift, and we couldn’t keep that from him.”
“Sometimes,” Tiffany says, “the hardest part is to not stand in their way.”
It was about to get a whole lot harder.
11
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Accelerating Toward Big Science
AFTER BOUDREAUX’S VISIT, Taylor felt he had a green light to get more ambitious with his collecting and his experiments, and his parents began to relax. Taylor stepped up his transmutation experiments, chasing the alchemist’s ambition of transforming elements by irradiating stable isotopes and making them unstable. But none of the naturally radioactive sources in his expanding collection were able to give him the robust reactions he’d hoped for. Taylor was getting frustrated: “I realized that even if I collected lots more naturally radioactive stuff I might still not have sources powerful enough to create the isotopes I was interested in.”
Ernest Rutherford came to the same realization as he used alpha particles from decaying radioactive materials to bombard atoms and investigate the nucleus. It was obvious to Rutherford and other physicists that their transmutation experiments were limited by the natural radioactive sources at their disposal. To move nuclear physics forward, they needed a way to crank up the energy of ion beams and accelerate the particles to higher speeds.
In 1929 Princeton professor Robert Van de Graaff designed a generator that could produce 80,000 volts of static electricity. This was the breakthrough physicists needed to take atomic science to the next level.
Cambridge researchers J. D. Cockcroft and E.T.S. Walton further multiplied the peak output of the first Van de Graaff generator design to power a device that could accelerate subatomic particles to unprecedented speeds and then slam them into target atoms, theorizing that the high-energy collisions in their atom smasher would create other subatomic particles and high-energy radiation such as x-rays.
In 1932, Cockcroft and Walton directed accelerated proton beams at a lithium target. The particles hit the lithium nucleus and transmuted the lithium into unstable beryllium, which then broke down into two helium nuclei, or alpha particles, releasing some seventeen million electron volts of energy. When the researchers detected alpha particles, they realized they had induced the first artificial nuclear reaction.
The result, which Cockcroft and Walton expressed in the equation , garnered the 1951 Nobel Prize in Physics and was the first verification of Einstein’s equation E = mc². It also proved the value of accelerators, which would quickly become as important to the world of nuclear physics as telescopes had been to astronomy. The development of accelerators heralded the arrival of the era of Big Science, in which progress in high-energy physics and other scientific specialties would become increasingly dependent on large-scale projects using enormous machines in well-funded national laboratories.
Though Taylor wouldn’t have the help of any big labs, he was intent on pushing his transmutation experiments forward. But like Rutherford and Cockcroft and Walton, he needed a radiation source that was more energetic than any of his naturally radioactive materials. “I realized,” he says, “that if I was going to create anything useful, like medical isotopes, I was going to need to make my own radiation.”
Again, Taylor’s course of discovery was following the course of nuclear science itself. Searching for ways to take his research to the next level, he turned to a favorite source, the anthology of Scientific American’s Amateur Scientist columns. Two articles by C. L. Stong caught his eye. The first, a 1959 piece titled “How to Make an Electrostatic Machine to Accelerate Both Electrons and Protons,” provided details of a machine constructed by chemical engineer F. B. Lee. Lee, Stong wrote, “designed an electrostatic accelerator suitable for amateur construction which is similar to the Cockcroft-Walton machine but has more than twice its power.” The particle beam was “capable of cutting the time of chemical reactions, of inducing mutations in living organisms, of altering the physical properties of organic compounds and of producing scores of other interesting effects.”
Each of the Amateur Scientist articles was headed with a graphic outlining the project’s cost to build and levels of difficulty, utility, and danger. Stong assessed the particle accelerator’s danger level at “Danger 3: Serious injury possible.” In 1971, Stong featured another particle accelerator in an article titled “How to Build a Machine to Produce Low-Energy Protons and Deuterons.” Whereas the first accelerator had a diffuse beam designed for the amateur chemist, this one, prototyped by Larry Cress, could meet an amateur physicist’s need for a more sharply focused beam that could bombard targets with protons and liberate gamma rays with energies substantially above 250 kilovolts.
Taylor was fired up; he just had to build his own accelerator. The best approach, he thought, would be to make a hybrid of the two and update it to create a powerful atom smasher. “Then,” says Taylor, “I could produce nuclear reactions in light elements, and produce neutrons too.”
In an open area near his bedroom, Taylor began tacking up schematic diagrams of the machines that he then supplemented with notes, calculations, and pictures of different components and hardware he could substitute to improve the design.
“Looks dangerous” was Tiffany’s first reaction. Indeed, Stong had printed follow-up cautionary comments to his 1959 article, including one from an engineer who felt that the article hadn’t adequately warned of the “far from negligible” hazards of x-rays. Stong agreed that “the article might well have pointed out . . . that one invites trouble by remaining near particle accelerators when they are in operation.”
In Stong’s 1971 article, he upped his assessment of the risk level to “Danger 4: POSSIBLY LETHAL!!” and included a warning that “the proton beam and the products of the nuclear reactions are hazardous. In addition to emitting gamma rays, the machine can generate x-rays of substantial intensity.”
Taylor told his parents that he was convinced he could build and safely operate a hybrid of the two machines. But both Kenneth and Tiffany had reservations when Taylor pointed out that the Van de Graaff generator would produce between 250,000 and 500,000 volts. Was their eleven-year-old really ready to step into the high-voltage, atom-smashing world of Big Science?
Just after school let out for the summer, Taylor rode into work with Kenneth, something both he and Joey did frequently. Taylor loved visiting the plant, especially now that workers were disassembling the bottling line. The large scrap piles of machinery and electric controllers were full of parts he might be able to use for all sorts of things—including the particle accelerator he’d build if only his parents let him.
In the car, Taylor talked nonstop about the experiments he’d perform, the isotopes he’d create. But Kenneth leveled with Taylor: He and Tiffany wanted to support their son’s scientific progress, but this project concerned them. They were worried about him working with hundreds of thousands of volts, and about the other hazards mentioned in the articles—what were they called?
“X-rays,” Taylor said. “And gamma rays. And neutrons.”
In 1993, psychology professor Barbara Kerr, now at the University of Kansas, began a fifteen-year study on the development of talent and creativity in gifted children. One finding in particular jumped out: “There are critical times when decisions are made that will either take a child down a path toward engagement with his or her intellectual interests, or disengagement,” wrote Kerr, who also edited the 1,112-page Encyclopedia of Giftedness, Creativity, and Talent. T
he study found that these critical times vary by gender, subject interest, and physical, intellectual, and emotional development, and that each crossroads is rife with opportunities and risks. Subsequent research also made clear that the support (or lack of it) that a child receives at these make-or-break moments can have a tremendous effect on future outcomes, creating self-reinforcing and often permanent repercussions.
The first critical points are typically a child’s initial interest in reading and the timing of kindergarten enrollment. In recent years, it has become fashionable to hold back children—boys, in particular—even when they’re already reading and intellectually ready for school.
“It’s well intended, but it does a bright child no favors,” Kerr says. “Maybe they’ll be tougher on the playground or excel in team sports, but intellectually, it holds them back. With reading, gifted kids are often discouraged by teachers who make them wait until the rest of the class catches up.”
Another opportunity arises when a child develops a strong interest in a particular subject. If a parent notices and has the motivation and resources, he or she can provide opportunities to develop that interest and talent. If a parent doesn’t see it, a good teacher might. But with only three states requiring general-education teachers to be trained in identifying and supporting gifted and talented students, the spark of interest often dies. “It’s amazing how often parents and teachers fail to see the signs of prodigiousness, or to take action if they do,” says Kerr.
The cutoff points for noticing and engaging exceptional talent vary widely between disciplines and individuals. Researchers Rena Subotnik and Paula Olszewski-Kubilius found that children who started chess or music at young ages typically achieved higher levels of mastery as adults, regardless of the quantity of cumulative practice. Even within particular fields, there are significant differences between subdisciplines. Wind instrumentalists and singers typically aren’t physically developed enough to excel early, while string instrumentalists often show talent and need to start serious instruction at a young age, says Subotnik, “or it will go away.”
