Are gifted children "a misunderstood, marginalized resource in a culture obsessed with equity and prone to conformity"?

The "gifted child movement" thinks so. Ann Hulbert, writing in the NYT Magazine, takes them on:

In fact, youthful prodigiousness is the leading edge of a wider cultural preoccupation with early high performance in our meritocratic era. Among the educated elite, the superchild has become the model child, and the model parent is an informed advocate with an eye trained on his or her child's future prospects. The unusual fate of the precocious child - to become adultified early and yet to remain hovered over for longer - is echoed in the situation of the privileged child, ushered along a highly scheduled path of credentialed performance from cradle onward, with college and career ever in mind.

In short, thanks not least to the gifted-child movement itself, the mission of discovering and molding precocious talent has been mainstreamed more successfully than anyone expected. Once in a while, the more mundane variety of Ivy League-aspiring kids and their ambitious parents pause to ask themselves whether the ethos entails too much early pressure to compete. For truly extraordinary kids, a different version of the question arises, but it is considered less often: could it be that in the quest to pinpoint and promote exceptional youthful promise, testers and contests and advocates may have unwittingly introduced early pressure to conform, not to the crowd but to an assiduously monitored, preprofessionalized and future-oriented trajectory?

A good starting point is always: Let kids be kids. Left to their own devices, what will become of the gifted?

Look at eminences in the past, and what stands out in their childhoods is an animus toward school, a tolerance for solitude and families with lots of books. What also stands out is families with "wobble" - which means stress and, often, risk-taking parents with strong opinions - rather than bastions of supportiveness where a child's giftedness is ever in self-conscious focus. Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics and himself a prodigy who went to Tufts at 11 and Harvard at 15, wrote that prodigious children need to develop a "reasonably thick skin" - to feel they aren't demonized and will find a niche, but not to expect the world to supply a spotlight. Simonton speaks of the importance of being able to be "on the failure track for a while, take time off, take a real risk."

I love the notion of "the failure track" and the suspicion that it might do you some good. "Families with 'wobble'" is kind of a cool concept too.

UPDATE: Victor Fleischer favors special programs for gifted kids. I'd like to see all kids perfectly placed with programs fine-tuned to their needs. But in an imperfect world, whose needs will be met first? Whom should we be most concerned with? If gifted kids get extra, which kids will get the magic label that gives them more? The ones with parents who fight for it? I'm just thinking about how the system plays out in real life.