I hate the term gifted, my friend said while my husband played double-digit addition and subtraction games with her kindergartener in the next room.
When pressed for why, she said she simply didn’t believe some kids have more natural talent than others. I gave my husband a look. Her 5 year old was currently doing 2nd grade math … in his head.
As we drove home that night, I was troubled. She wasn’t the first to say this to me. If I say my oldest is gifted with language, the reaction is often the same: giftedness isn’t real. It’s just practice, opportunity, or pushy parents.
We’ve all known people in our lives that seemed to have a “gift.” My friend’s 10th grade son is doing graduate level math. He’s gifted right? And if not him, surely Mozart and Beethoven were?
But it turns out not everyone agrees. Some of the loudest voices against innate talent are K. Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool. In their 2016 book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, they argue that top performers get there through superior training, not special gifts. Mozart, for example, received early, high-quality instruction and was allowed to specialize very young. Does that mean if I let my kid specialize early, they’ll be prodigies like Mozart? I doubt that.
But Peak points to a Japanese study showing that perfect pitch, long considered an innate gift, can be trained in most children if the work starts early enough. Genetics and environment, they claim, mainly influence persistence and motivation, which most can overcome with the right methods.
Still, this didn’t map to my personal experience. I ran a math club over the summer. Some kids just “got it” while other struggled. It wasn’t even age-related. I had a 7 year old that routinely out-performed older kids in mathematical reasoning. His parents send him to extra math tutoring. Is that all that made the difference?
This line of thought bothers me most because I also have a child who struggles with math.
If all children have the same capacity for giftedness, what exactly am I doing wrong?
Never one to let a question fester, I delved into the research.
Is giftedness real, or can it be trained into almost anyone with the right approach? What are the best levers to pull as parents to ensure our children reach their peak? Why do some children accelerate dramatically in one domain while others, despite similar effort, do not?
And what about the kids who struggle, how do we help them?
In the rest of this piece I’ll walk through what the evidence shows — and what it means for how we raise and teach our children.
It Only Matters if It’s Modifiable
When I was a postdoctoral fellow in Chicago, I had a mentor named Dr. Mark Grabiner, and he changed the way I thought about everything. I had just spent the last five years helping people recover arm and hand function following a stroke. Most of my research was spent understanding why they had a hard time moving.
But Dr. Grabiner thought differently. He had been studying falls for over 30 years. He told me when he was a young researcher his first goal was figuring out why people fell. Turns out, that was easy. Trips and slips make up nearly 70% of falls. But Dr. Grabiner points out he couldn’t remove all the icy sidewalks and steps from the world. Knowing why people fell was useless.
So he asked a different question. What can I modify? What can I change?
In the end, Mark figured out he could train people to be better at falling through specialized exercises in the clinic. By focusing on what he could control, he was able reduce falls for all sorts of vulnerable people, and you’ll find his training tools all around the country.
Why did I tell you this story? Because…. the same principle applies with giftedness.
Some of what determines a child’s trajectory is fixed — we can’t change it. A great deal is not though. The research helps us separate the two, so we can stop wasting energy on what we cannot change and double down on what we can. With that in mind, let’s begin.