Hothouse Kids: How the Pressure to Succeed Threatens Childhood [Kindle Edition]

Alissa Quart (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 31, 2007

A devastating indictment of the "gifted child" myth

The effort to produce "gifted" children through an exhausting regimen of early (and ever-earlier) training has grown into a troubling national phenomenon. With less free playtime and overwhelming pressure to achieve, the kids are the ones who suffer. Investigative journalist Alissa Quart knows the terrain firsthand, having herself negotiated the gifted- child label. With phenomenal research and sharp insight, she takes a damning look at the industry that profits from marketing educational products to enhance giftedness and questions the correlation between rigorous early enrichment and higher achievement. A thoughtful, sometimes critical look at the excessive ambition foisted upon children, Hothouse Kids is essential reading for parents, teachers, and anyone concerned about education.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Quart's follow-up to Branded shifts her focus from rapacious companies to parents, whose obsession with "creating" or "nurturing" giftedness, she argues, has led to a full-blown transformation of middle-class childhood into aggressive skill-set pageantry. While Quart wonderfully details the daily grinds of genuine prodigies (in everything from violin to preaching to entrepreneurship), the real force of the book is in showing how gifted childhood—relentlessly tested, totally overscheduled and joylessly competitive—is being created by striving parents of all stripes; such "enrichment" not only doesn't necessarily work, it can be harmful. A chapter titled "The Icarus Effect" presents child-prodigies as worn, depressed adults; "Extreme Parenting" and "Child Play or Child Labor?" show the bizarre (and often profit-based) forms prodigy-mongering is taking: "Phoenix has started her own knitwear business," one parent crows, "and though she is only 12, she can do it." Probing interviews (the kids are brilliant, robotic, frenetic, forlorn and every shade in between) are matched with educational and psychological data, with beautiful cultural riffs (particularly linking mathletes and Wall Street) and deep engagement: a former gifted kid herself, Quart interviews, interprets and assesses with a sympathy for her subjects and their caregivers that is emotionally profound. She turns in a remarkably evenhanded analysis and argues for "multiple intelligences" and enrichment for "strong learners" in public schools. Quart's second book is first-class literary journalism. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Parental obsession with identifying and nurturing the slightest giftedness in children has produced a "prodigy industry" that is robbing children of simple childhood experiences, according to Quart, a former child prodigy who traveled the country to research the frenzied trend to identify and market products, services, and activities for gifted children. She examined research and talked to parents, educators, and child psychologists as well as current and former child prodigies for a portrait of what she calls the Icarus Effect. Quart includes her own story, describing herself as insufferable, an early reader who skipped a grade and wrote her first novel at seven. She visits an amazing range of competitions for gifted children, including spelling bees, Scrabble contests, and poetry slams, all part of enormous pressures placed on gifted children that sometimes result in resentment and rebellion as the gifted look back on stunted childhoods, haunted by not living up to their promise, being "a cross between a has-been and a never-was." A fascinating cautionary tale for overzealous parents of gifted children. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• File Size: 291 KB
• Print Length: 272 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (July 31, 2007)
• Sold by: Penguin Publishing
• Language: English
• ASIN: B000U20V98
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #622,615 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

More About the Author

I am the author of "Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child," published by Penguin Press in 2006, and "Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers," published by Basic Books in 2003. I also write opinion pieces and book reviews for The New York Times and I've written for The New York Times Magazine and The Atlantic Monthly. I have a master's degree from the Columbia University School of Journalism and a bachelor's degree from Brown University.