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Forty-two years have passed since my parents published their first book about the childhoods of famous people. They were middle-aged parents of three gifted boys and things were not going as smoothly as they had hoped. Their oldest was underachieving in school and having trouble making friends. It was embarrassing to ask for help because Victor had a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and Mildred had been a high school English teacher and the director of a school for emotionally disturbed children. They thought they should have been better prepared.
But psychologists and educators did not know much about gifted children in the 1950s and 1960s. Most assumed that the gifted could take care of themselves. I was the oldest of the three boys, born when my mother was 36 years old. Like most firstborn, I was the focus of much of their attention and worry. So they took me to one of my father's psychologist colleagues. He gave me a Rorschach ink-blot test and discovered, as I remember being told, that I "lived in a world of fantasy but in constant touch with reality." But that could be said about most children, especially if asked to make up stories about what they see in blots of ink.
Mildred wanted to talk to other parents of gifted children, but there were no support groups or Internet chat rooms at that time. There was no National Association for Gifted Children, either, until they helped to organize it. So Mildred found another source of information and inspiration: the local public library. Not the books on psychology or education, but the biographies. Here she could read intimate details of the lives of people whose giftedness had been shown by their accomplishments. The biographies were a rich and fascinating store of information, much more interesting than psychological monographs.
Mildred consumed biography after biography, focusing on the childhoods and skimming over the adult accomplishments. She shared her discoveries with Victor, who was impressed by the rich store of information that had been little used by professional psychologists or educators. So they decided to write a book, aimed not only at psychologists and educators, but also at parents who wanted ideas for raising their own children.
Mildred had chosen books about...