Christopher Bennetts

Posts Tagged ‘effectiveness of hot housing techniques’

I recently wrote about ‘hot housing’ children and my experience with my second child Edward.

When you search Google for ‘hot housing children’ you find a lot of negative reports. Most critics focus on the loss of childhood and point to a number of noted failures such as the story of Sufiah Yusof who entered Oxford at 13 years of age and ten years later worked as a prostitute for a period before becoming a social worker.

In my opinion the problem with hot housing children is not the technique itself but parents who put extreme pressure on their children to achieve academic results without balanced emotional support.  I never did put any pressure on my child and as I said I had dropped the actual techniques by the time he was two adopting only some of the principles.

My son Edward was never recognized as a genius or child prodigy.  I remember one experience in early high school when he submitted some creative writing and the English teacher failed it stating that he could not have written it and it must be plagiarized.  I attended the school and confronted the teacher challenging him to find the “original” work.  He said he would do so but of course unable to find it he never got back to us.

This could have been a devastating experience for a child but the one thing I believe I had instilled in Edwards was a belief in himself, and with the knowledge that those that loved him knew the truth ,I don’t think he was affected much by it.

The school was the Doncaster East Secondary College in Victoria Australia. I remember how proud this school was of its ‘recognized’ gifted students but it failed to recognize anything special about Edward who was recently tested by the Australian Defence Force and scored 159 in the IQ test and is thus, by definition, a genius.

How many children are already being classified in terms of intelligence and ability in the first couple of years of their schooling?

As parents we often do not have control over how other people may project limiting beliefs on our children but we do have the power to create a supportive home environment where we can instill in our children a belief in themselves that will enable them to reject any such limitations others might try to project onto them.

Of course I always believed in Edward’s abilities and when he was 13 he was already assisting me as web Flash programmer and graphic artist.  Here is one of his earliest creations still being used today, it is the Moves Removalists animation.    He was given only a business card with the image of the man with the trolley and created not just the animation, but the entire concept.