Not long after I became staff at The TAG Project, they launched a new email list that had been in the works for a while called TAGPDQ. The last three letters -- PDQ -- stood for "pretty darn quick" and it was aimed at parents of very, extremely gifted children like maybe 160 IQ and above.
In order to protect the privacy of members, the list had no archive at all. People with very high IQs somewhat often end up in the news, sometimes at very young ages, if only for academic achievements in K-12.
One member once noted on list that they were related to someone very, very famous, so famous that trying to give any meaningful detail of their career could potentially ID them.
Talking about kids like mine online is very hard. All social things are inherently hard to talk about for a long list of reasons and one of those is that it helps to have specific examples to cite and those need to be credible examples that your audience will believe.
If you have very smart kids and they aren't famous, people tend to think you are telling tall tales and that didn't really happen. So I am going to try something different today and talk about a famous person who found fame at an early age instead of talking about MY kids whom you don't know from Adam.
I haven't really closely followed the story behind the headlines for Britney Spears but Wikipedia indicates she began taking dance lessons at age three and was in The Mickey Mouse Club at age ten. If I can still do math, her first big song hit -- ...Baby One More Time -- came out when she was just seventeen.
So she was not a legal adult when she found big fame in the entertainment industry. And apparently when she was just 26, she was put under a legal conservatorship due to supposed mental health issues. It was supposed to last only days but was extended and ended up being in place for well over a decade before she successfully fought it and got it ended.
I'm not going to try to cite a lot of sources here, but I can recall seeing articles about things like her car ran out of gas and she just got out and walked away and also she shaved her head bald at some point. And I always thought it was ridiculous that details like that were used to suggest she was mentally ill and incapable of managing her life.
A lot of people shave their heads, sometimes even women. I did it four times for health reasons and I'm a woman.
But I was homeless at the time, not mega famous, so no one wrote up articles about my lack of hair being evidence I'm supposedly "crazy."
I can remember Oprah saying something like because she did a daily talk show, there was no winning. If she wore the same outfit twice in two months, people talked. If she wore a different outfit everyday, she was an overindulgent rich bitch who spent too much on clothes.
So when you have that much attention on you, very ordinary incidents can get very blown out of proportion. And most people aren't both mega wealthy and also very young, so the vast majority of people jump to conclusions that may have no relationship to the reasons someone like Britney Spears did the things she did.
She was so wealthy, the cost of the car she walked away from was not a big deal to her, especially given that YOUNG people are often cavalier about money and haven't yet morphed into experienced fiscal conservatives. And she was young, beautiful and very famous. She probably figured the cost of the car was not worth risking her safety over.
The other thing that gets overlooked is that a three year old can certainly express interest in taking dance classes but is in no way qualified to make career decisions. When very young children get to be big names at anything, some adult was making decisions "for them" to some degree.
And those decisions may not have been in the best interest of the child and may not have been handled in a way that preserved the child's maneuvering room. Once you get both rich and famous at a thing, it gets hard to walk away and start over.
In some essay, Paul Graham talks about if you become a very successful business founder at a young age, there are things you give up. I remember him saying something like "Mark Zuckerberg will never get to backpack across Europe."
Maybe Mark Zuckerberg doesn't care about backpacking across Europe, but if he decided he was fed up with being the CEO of Facebook and wanted to trade THIS life for another, it's challenging to start over when you have that much fame and money at such a young age. Those details become barriers to saying "Eh, tried it. Not really FOR ME. I think I shall go try SOMETHING ELSE."
It's so challenging, a lot of people don't bother. They just keep doing what pays the bills, even if they have come to HATE it.
If you are young and a big fat nobody and you get a job at a grocery store and decide "I don't like this. I want to do something else." and then get a job driving trucks, most people are NOT going to go "You can't drive trucks! You're a GROCERY CLERK. You can't change your mind now."
But once you are famous like Mark Zuckerberg or Britney Spears, well, people will not be kind and patient with you starting over and not knowing what you are doing.
If Mark Zuckerberg decided to become an actor, he wouldn't get to be a big fat no name actor making mistakes with no eyes on him and learning from them while crickets chirped and hardly anyone watched the play or film. He would probably get humiliated and dragged globally and told to go back to his real job while everyone watched and took glee in his failure because, wow, can people be assholes.
It always bothers me when someone who got big at a very young age is in the news and people talk a lot of smack about their career and their personal lives as if they can be judged like a "normal" person. They aren't normal people with normal lives and they can do very ordinary things and have it get blown out of proportion simply because there are so many eyes on them.
Young people do foolish things all the time and recover from it and life goes on without them being declared mentally ill and unfit to manage their finances.
My brother blew six weeks worth of relatively good pay for a kid his age when he was something like twenty in ONE WEEKEND after getting fired. Result: He gave up his apartment, moved back to his parent's home and job hunted.
And then once the world has declared you "mentally ill" for basically being rich, famous and YOUNG, good luck walking back that reputation and dealing with your own self image.
Most pro football players in the US are college educated to at least some degree and yet the NFL requires them to take financial education classes because:
Like young singers and actors who make it big, pro football players MAY do some stupid things financially or generally. They may screw up in some fashion.
The NFL doesn't WAIT for them to screw up and then put them in a conservatorship and call them crazy. It tells them up front "You are young and it's a LOT of money for someone so young and that's a RECIPE for drama. We would like to help you try to avoid the worst possible missteps."
So I persist in TRYING to figure out how to blog about kids like mine -- which was the name of my FIRST parenting site -- because I would like to see fewer incidents like the Britney Spears conservatorship case.
And I think that starts with educating PARENTS because by the time someone like Britney Spears is very famous, wealthy and learning that, no, there really IS such a thing as bad publicity, some adult went wrong somewhere in letting them get megafamous and wealthy without preparing them for it or giving them options to SLOW IT DOWN if they wanted to.
And if you don't have other parents who dealt with very talented youth trying to guide you, then your parenting mistakes get writ large and your kid pays the price while the world drags them when the reality is we don't really have a good body of resources for people trying to cope with some extremely gifted or talented young person.
Which means the people advising them are frequently people with a vested financial interest in taking advantage of this kid rather than looking out for "Well, wait a minute. What does that do to the CHILD and their LIFE?"
And after everyone got their cut and the child in question is metaphorically a bloody mess, the world stands around going "Bitch, stop bleeding on people. How rude and ill behaved!"
And I facepalm AGAIN and wish desperately I belonged to a nicer, kinder species than the Earth-bound Human.
In order to protect the privacy of members, the list had no archive at all. People with very high IQs somewhat often end up in the news, sometimes at very young ages, if only for academic achievements in K-12.
One member once noted on list that they were related to someone very, very famous, so famous that trying to give any meaningful detail of their career could potentially ID them.
Talking about kids like mine online is very hard. All social things are inherently hard to talk about for a long list of reasons and one of those is that it helps to have specific examples to cite and those need to be credible examples that your audience will believe.
If you have very smart kids and they aren't famous, people tend to think you are telling tall tales and that didn't really happen. So I am going to try something different today and talk about a famous person who found fame at an early age instead of talking about MY kids whom you don't know from Adam.
I haven't really closely followed the story behind the headlines for Britney Spears but Wikipedia indicates she began taking dance lessons at age three and was in The Mickey Mouse Club at age ten. If I can still do math, her first big song hit -- ...Baby One More Time -- came out when she was just seventeen.
So she was not a legal adult when she found big fame in the entertainment industry. And apparently when she was just 26, she was put under a legal conservatorship due to supposed mental health issues. It was supposed to last only days but was extended and ended up being in place for well over a decade before she successfully fought it and got it ended.
I'm not going to try to cite a lot of sources here, but I can recall seeing articles about things like her car ran out of gas and she just got out and walked away and also she shaved her head bald at some point. And I always thought it was ridiculous that details like that were used to suggest she was mentally ill and incapable of managing her life.
A lot of people shave their heads, sometimes even women. I did it four times for health reasons and I'm a woman.
But I was homeless at the time, not mega famous, so no one wrote up articles about my lack of hair being evidence I'm supposedly "crazy."
I can remember Oprah saying something like because she did a daily talk show, there was no winning. If she wore the same outfit twice in two months, people talked. If she wore a different outfit everyday, she was an overindulgent rich bitch who spent too much on clothes.
So when you have that much attention on you, very ordinary incidents can get very blown out of proportion. And most people aren't both mega wealthy and also very young, so the vast majority of people jump to conclusions that may have no relationship to the reasons someone like Britney Spears did the things she did.
She was so wealthy, the cost of the car she walked away from was not a big deal to her, especially given that YOUNG people are often cavalier about money and haven't yet morphed into experienced fiscal conservatives. And she was young, beautiful and very famous. She probably figured the cost of the car was not worth risking her safety over.
The other thing that gets overlooked is that a three year old can certainly express interest in taking dance classes but is in no way qualified to make career decisions. When very young children get to be big names at anything, some adult was making decisions "for them" to some degree.
And those decisions may not have been in the best interest of the child and may not have been handled in a way that preserved the child's maneuvering room. Once you get both rich and famous at a thing, it gets hard to walk away and start over.
In some essay, Paul Graham talks about if you become a very successful business founder at a young age, there are things you give up. I remember him saying something like "Mark Zuckerberg will never get to backpack across Europe."
Maybe Mark Zuckerberg doesn't care about backpacking across Europe, but if he decided he was fed up with being the CEO of Facebook and wanted to trade THIS life for another, it's challenging to start over when you have that much fame and money at such a young age. Those details become barriers to saying "Eh, tried it. Not really FOR ME. I think I shall go try SOMETHING ELSE."
It's so challenging, a lot of people don't bother. They just keep doing what pays the bills, even if they have come to HATE it.
If you are young and a big fat nobody and you get a job at a grocery store and decide "I don't like this. I want to do something else." and then get a job driving trucks, most people are NOT going to go "You can't drive trucks! You're a GROCERY CLERK. You can't change your mind now."
But once you are famous like Mark Zuckerberg or Britney Spears, well, people will not be kind and patient with you starting over and not knowing what you are doing.
If Mark Zuckerberg decided to become an actor, he wouldn't get to be a big fat no name actor making mistakes with no eyes on him and learning from them while crickets chirped and hardly anyone watched the play or film. He would probably get humiliated and dragged globally and told to go back to his real job while everyone watched and took glee in his failure because, wow, can people be assholes.
It always bothers me when someone who got big at a very young age is in the news and people talk a lot of smack about their career and their personal lives as if they can be judged like a "normal" person. They aren't normal people with normal lives and they can do very ordinary things and have it get blown out of proportion simply because there are so many eyes on them.
...they were ragging on two teenagers who are famous mostly because both their parents are famous and it's possible one reason I jumped into the conversation was because that is something I find inherently offensive.Britney Spears should have never been put under a conservatorship in the first place. If she had been a BROKE twenty-something and not a multimillionaire, no one would have taken her to court and announced that she -- aka her MILLIONS -- needed to be "protected" from her foolishness.
Young people do foolish things all the time and recover from it and life goes on without them being declared mentally ill and unfit to manage their finances.
My brother blew six weeks worth of relatively good pay for a kid his age when he was something like twenty in ONE WEEKEND after getting fired. Result: He gave up his apartment, moved back to his parent's home and job hunted.
And then once the world has declared you "mentally ill" for basically being rich, famous and YOUNG, good luck walking back that reputation and dealing with your own self image.
Most pro football players in the US are college educated to at least some degree and yet the NFL requires them to take financial education classes because:
- The average NFL career is around 3.3 years.
- The average age of an NFL player is 26, so they are usually younger than 26 when they first start playing pro football.
- For many of them, this will be the highest salary they ever make and YET most of them will spend it like it's their "entry level" salary and clearly it goes UP from here instead of investing it like they just won the lottery and don't want to go back to flipping burgers four years from now.
Like young singers and actors who make it big, pro football players MAY do some stupid things financially or generally. They may screw up in some fashion.
The NFL doesn't WAIT for them to screw up and then put them in a conservatorship and call them crazy. It tells them up front "You are young and it's a LOT of money for someone so young and that's a RECIPE for drama. We would like to help you try to avoid the worst possible missteps."
So I persist in TRYING to figure out how to blog about kids like mine -- which was the name of my FIRST parenting site -- because I would like to see fewer incidents like the Britney Spears conservatorship case.
And I think that starts with educating PARENTS because by the time someone like Britney Spears is very famous, wealthy and learning that, no, there really IS such a thing as bad publicity, some adult went wrong somewhere in letting them get megafamous and wealthy without preparing them for it or giving them options to SLOW IT DOWN if they wanted to.
And if you don't have other parents who dealt with very talented youth trying to guide you, then your parenting mistakes get writ large and your kid pays the price while the world drags them when the reality is we don't really have a good body of resources for people trying to cope with some extremely gifted or talented young person.
Which means the people advising them are frequently people with a vested financial interest in taking advantage of this kid rather than looking out for "Well, wait a minute. What does that do to the CHILD and their LIFE?"
And after everyone got their cut and the child in question is metaphorically a bloody mess, the world stands around going "Bitch, stop bleeding on people. How rude and ill behaved!"
And I facepalm AGAIN and wish desperately I belonged to a nicer, kinder species than the Earth-bound Human.