Treat child prodigies as normal kids

WEI YONGKANG, a child prodigy who could recognize about 1,000 Chinese characters at the age of 2 and who graduated from Xiangtan University, Central China's Hunan province, at 17, was recently persuaded to withdraw from the Institute of High Energy Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences at the age of 20. On hearing the news, his mother who had accompanied him during his studies, allegedly shouted at him to commit suicide. The Beijing News commented on Monday:

We should interpret the reaction of Wei's mother properly. No mother would like to harm her child. Yet it might be too late as from the very beginning the parents didn't treat their son as a normal child.

Even if a prodigy, a child is first of all a normal person. If we adopt the concept of taking children as ordinary human beings first, no matter how young or old they are, we may hold a realistic attitude toward their potential no matter how talented they seem. We should realize that children have their own perceptions about their lives, which may differ from that of their parents.