Little Wonders : Brilliant Children Sparkle, Standing Out From the Crowd, But Their Problems Are Special Too

Jennifer Lindsay awoke one morning with a vivid dream still pirouetting through her mind. So she sat down and wrote a poem about it:

The Earth itself is a ballet performer.

Its stage is the solar system.

Its movements are slow but calculated.

In its own microcosm it continues the dance,

twirling and whirling on its axis. . . .

She is only 8 years old.

Her poem, “The Dance of Infinity,” placed first last summer in the Orange County Fair’s literary competition for children. Although a relative newcomer to the universe, Jennifer thinks in terms of eternal space and time.

“My dream started with the earth. Then the picture suddenly got larger and became the solar system, then got larger again and became the galaxy, then got larger again and became the whole universe. I felt like I was there, watching,” she recalled. “I get a lot of ideas from dreams.”

She illustrated her four-part composition with otherworldly portraits: bright blue and red planets circling the sun, the galaxy coated in its milky veil, stars sparkling in an endless sky.

Oh, yeah. The youngster can draw, too.

And beat adults at chess. And play Vivaldi’s Third Movement on the violin while coolly staring you straight in the eye, as if there were no feat easier. And sing “Ava Maria”--in Latin, of course--with a voice so big, so womanly that it’s a bit disconcerting to hear coming from her child-size body.

Trophies and ribbons abound throughout Jennifer’s Fountain Valley home. She has won dozens of awards for swimming, her favorite activity. She has won chess tournaments and art contests.

She dances ballet. She roller skates. She karate chops. She does algebra. She speaks French a little. She reads English a lot. “I’m a readaholic,” Jennifer proclaimed. “I mostly read mysteries--Nancy Drew books.”

Is she bad at anything ?

Jennifer pondered the possibility. “Soccer,” she solemnly answered.

“You’ve never played soccer,” her mother, Gloria Lindsay, pointed out.

“I know. So I’m bad at it,” Jennifer said.

“Prodigy” is not a label to be tossed about casually. “A prodigy is way off the graph--with 180 IQ points, or unusual creative skills that cannot be adequately measured using IQ tests,” explained Justin Call, chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at UC Irvine’s School of Medicine.

Whatever the definition, Jennifer surely approaches qualification.

As does Ruby Cheng. The Santa Ana 11-year-old already has earned a lifetime’s worth of awards for her musical prowess. Ruby placed first in the Cal State Fullerton Piano Competition in 1987 and ‘88, and in the Cypress College Piano Competition in ’87 and ’89.

Her talent is almost as amazing to watch as it is to hear. She seems at one with the keyboard, her hands an appendage of the instrument.

“Look at her fingers,” her mother, June Cheng, suggested. They would be exceptionally long even in adult proportions, but their elegant span is magnified sprouting from Ruby’s small palms.

Ruby began developing her gift at the age of 5. Today she practices the piano three hours every afternoon, reserving enough study time to maintain her straight-A average at Hewes Middle School in Tustin.

“Occasionally I lose myself in the music,” she said. “It’s really nice when that happens. More than nice, it’s beautiful. It’s about the most beautiful thing you could feel--to hear yourself playing a perfect note.”

Michael Toledano doesn’t sing or dance or play the piano. He just talks like a college debate team leader twice his 10 years.

Politics are Michael’s passion. “I’m a heavy Democrat,” the Costa Mesa boy declared. “Since the time I’ve been alive, Republicans have been in the White House. In 1986 (at the sophisticated age of 7) I started seeing the way they handle things, and I don’t like it. They’re taking money that could help the homeless and using it to kill people more efficiently with the Stealth Bomber. I’m worried about the expansion of nuclear weapons that’s been going on since 1945.

“I’m also worried about the San Francisco earthquake, but that’s one thing I can’t blame on the Republicans,” he wryly added.

Michael intends to run for president someday, after first winning the Nobel Prize for finding an AIDS cure. “AIDS interferes with (a victim’s) ability to fight off diseases,” he noted. “It’s like in chess--if the other guy hasn’t lost any pieces and you only have a king, you’ve got no hope of defending yourself against an attack.”

As one might deduce from his analogy, Michael is a chess lover. And, as one might deduce from his conversational skills, Michael is extremely bright.

Brilliant children might shine among the masses, but they have their own set of problems. For one thing, they are bored quickly. Until this year, when he started at Pegasus, a Huntington Beach school for gifted children, Michael attended public school--where he often languished in ennui.

He posed a rhetorical question: “I’m sitting in class and the teachers are talking about something that I learned three years ago and, I mean, am I supposed to enjoy it?”

“The public school system is not equipped to accommodate a child like Michael,” said the youngster’s father, attorney Jim Toledano. “He is as far from the median as a child with an IQ of 40. These (gifted) kids require as much individual attention as handicapped children.”

Psychiatrist Call agreed: “Intellectual precocity should be addressed in the same way that you would address a serious hearing problem. Schools are organized to teach groups of children, not individual children--yet individual help is required in the case of a child with unusual gifts, same as in the case of a handicapped child.”

Private school, however, is not a viable option for all--either financially or logistically. Laguna Beach parents Mr. and Mrs. L., who requested anonymity, keep their son Eric in public school regardless of the shortcomings that they see in it.

“We can’t spend all day driving him back and forth across the county to a private school,” said Mrs. L., a college teacher.

“Some of the math books we’re using right now are very low-level,” complained 9-year-old Eric, whose IQ tested at 179. “We’re going over stuff like subtraction and borrowing. That’s old hat, believe me.”

Tax attorney Edward Lindsay and wife June have decided that daughter Jennifer is much in need of a one-on-one education and that they would rather do it themselves. Jennifer attends Courreges Elementary School in Fountain Valley only a few hours a week. The rest of the time, her living room is her classroom and her mother is her instructor. “Jennifer has become my full-time job,” said June Lindsay, formerly a public school teacher.

Currently Jennifer is studying such unelementary subjects as Leonardo da Vinci. “I have a copy of ‘Mona Lisa’ hanging over my bed, but I’d rather have the real thing,” she announced.

So your child isn’t a Wunderkind? You can take solace in the fact that genius has its price. The child who can bring home a boast-worthy report card without cracking a book encounters as many potholes in life’s road as do more “normal” darlings.

Often he doesn’t bring home a boast-worthy report card, for starters.

“A very common problem with these children is that they don’t do their homework, they don’t perform,” Call said. “Things comes so easily to them that they lose interest. They look at the world more abstractly; they get caught up in their own agenda rather than the school curriculum.”

Whiz kids don’t always adapt well to their surroundings. “They are different, and our societal attitude is not accepting of the unconventional,” Call said. “Other children aren’t receptive to a child who is unusual in any way, so he can have a hard time making friends. Sometimes classmates call him derogatory names--nerd, egghead. Many precocious youngsters do not find true friendships until graduate school, where they run into a significant number of others like themselves.”

“Michael came home from his first day of school at Pegasus and said, ‘Finally, I’m not different anymore, Mom--I’m average,’ ” Peggy Toledano remembered. Cute, amiable Michael had felt estranged? “He’s aware when he doesn’t fit in,” she said.

Although witty, gregarious Eric L. has scant trouble garnering pals, he seldom discusses his main interest--astronomy--while romping in the back yard. “He holds himself back from revealing his intelligence when he’s with youngsters his own age. He wants to be socially acceptable. That’s why he wears his hair in that crew cut--it’s in,” laughed his mother.

“I’m sort of the class weirdo,” Eric bluntly confessed with his self-deprecating humor. An adept Jackie Mason impersonator, he’s also the class comedian. “My mother has this weird philosophy that someday girls are going to chase me. Ha,” he skeptically related. Time likely will prove her right.

Ruby Cheng views herself as “an individualist.” “I’m usually at home alone, practicing piano or reading. If I focused a lot of my mind on my friends, I might not play the piano as well,” she speculated.

Stretches of solitude are important for a creative child, reminded Laura Katz Hathaway, founder and director of Pegasus School. “The great artists and scientists of the world were not sitting in a structured classroom when they arrived at their ideas,” she said. “They were walking through the woods or sitting on the front porch. The brain needs a chance to gestate and digest information.

“A lot of our kids are overscheduled. They go home after a full day of school, and then they have piano lessons one day, gymnastics the next, soccer the next. These kids don’t have time to breathe; they don’t have time to just daydream and mess around. When they’re out at recess and there’s nothing programmed, many of them have a hard time figuring out how to entertain themselves.

“But I can understand how parents end up overscheduling their children,” Hathaway conceded. “Gifted children often are very high-energy. They’re always wanting to do something. They can drive you crazy if you don’t keep them busy.”

Violin lessons, voice lessons, chess lessons, ballet lessons--being multitalented can kill your whole day. “I wish I had more time to play,” Jennifer Lindsay groused.

In case you’re still consoling yourself with the drawbacks of superior intelligence, register this: The parents of a brainy child face a tough 18-year-plus responsibility. Among other trying characteristics, little geniuses won’t take no for an answer.

After his mother had ordered him to quit roller skating in the house, Michael dropped to his knees and hobbled; after all, simply removing the forbidden wheels would have presented no challenge whatsoever. “He’ll calculate a way around every rule,” Peggy Toledano sighed, exasperated.

“You have to debate every point with him,” said Eric’s L’s dad, an engineer. “You practically have to act like an attorney to convince him of his boundaries. His response is always, ‘Why not? Why not? Why not?’ ”

Furthermore, little geniuses file information like tape recorders--faulty data included.

“If they learn something that’s incorrect, it’s hard to erase from their memory,” said Glory Ludwick, founder of the Orange-based El Dorado School for gifted children. “They have a tendency to become very rigid in their thinking.”

Take Michael, the hard-core Democrat. “He sees the two parties in black and white,” chuckled Jim Toledano. “He has the mind of an 18-year-old but the maturity of a 10-year-old. We’re hoping that someday he’ll see the shades of gray, as well--that he’ll understand Republicans aren’t evil incarnate.”

Finally, and perhaps most important, the parents of little geniuses must give their children room to be themselves--as must all parents.

“With the best of intentions, parents can use a gifted child to meet expectations they weren’t able to meet in their own lives,” said psychologist James Daehnert, director of the Child Therapy Center of Orange. “The child can develop a false self, where he feels that he must put on a good performance in order to be accepted and loved.”

“Sometimes parents push gifted kids too hard,” Ludwick of El Dorado School observed. “Kids grow up fast enough. We should allow our children to be children. There is plenty of time for adulthood, but you can never go back and relive a year of childhood.”