A little over two years ago, I wrote about how “I watched the parenting on ‘Young Sheldon’—and did the exact opposite.”
In that June 2024 piece, I recounted how, no matter how “smart” my middle child was, I pointedly did not mollycoddle him, acquiesce to any outrageous demands, or suggest that his academic and professional achievements were more valuable than those of his older brother and younger sister. You know, the exact opposite of “Young Sheldon’s” Mary Cooper, as played by Zoe Perry.
At our house, we stress that actions matter more than words. (Not that you’re allowed to be rude, but you’re also expected to do things, not just claim you could do them if you wanted to.)
I talked a good game about raising a—no sugar-coating it—oftentimes difficult, frustrating, exasperating child prodigy. (I prefer “prodigy” to “gifted.” The latter is a term that’s been so watered down as to be meaningless. Certainly as to be unquantifiable. “Prodigy” simply means “a child who can perform at the level of a trained adult.” At my son’s computer programming job, which he started when he was 12 years old, they called him “Doogie Howser.” Yes, a disturbing amount of my life references are sitcom-based.)
So how did my actual, actionable, anti–”Young Sheldon” parenting work out in practice? Is my “high potential” (oh, look, another television show reference!) child a “staggering success” of a human being?
I guess that would depend on your definition of “success.” Does it involve earning buckets of money? Prestige? Academic degrees? Outside validation? Awards? Internet fame?
Or might it be something else entirely?
There is a Russian expression: “It’s not evening yet.” Think of it as the Slavic version of “It ain’t over till the fat lady sings.”
We’re not even remotely close to evening—or the fat lady singing—when it comes to a final verdict on my parenting—or my son. That’s a lifelong process. Just because your kid can vote and drink doesn’t mean the parenting part is over. He can—and will—change multiple times, hopefully more for the better and less for the worse, before all is said and done. The only thing I can confidently report on is where we stand now.
My middle child, who finally wore his dad and me down and, after years of begging for it, received our permission to drop out of New York City’s top “gifted” high-school and educate himself, graduated from college this past May.
Did he go to Caltech like young Sheldon? No, he did not. He got into Caltech but chose a different university because he wanted a more well-rounded liberal arts education in addition to a top-notch STEM one. (I didn’t argue, not only because, by this point, I was resolved to let my son make his own decisions, but also because the latter school gave him a fabulous merit scholarship where we ended up paying less than we would have for a state school. No more FAFSA forms to fill out! Whoo! Winning! Who’s gifted at this parenting thing now?)
My son went in as a computer science major but, halfway through, switched to mathematics.
“That’s so great,” friends raved. More than one forwarded me the July article in The Wall Street Journal entitled, “The Million Dollar Talent Wars for 20-Something Math Geniuses.”
My oldest son, an Ivy League grad who wants you to know, “I’m the least impressive member of my family,” works in finance. He enthused, “He has real skills employers actually want!”
That’s all well and good. Except as my younger son made clear upon graduating from the school “ranked number one for early career pay and number four for mid-career pay in PayScale’s 2024 College Salary Report,” he wasn’t interested in helping to “make rich people richer or AI to destroy the planet.”
So what will my anarchistic, autonomous autodidact be doing this fall? (Because he will be getting a job. See “no mollycoddling” above. Our kids are welcome to spend as much time as they like “finding themselves” and/or lamenting their “multiple potentialities.” But they have to figure out how to support themselves while doing so first.)
This fall, my son will be teaching special education middle school math at an underserved school in the Bronx. As an NYC Teaching Fellow, he will simultaneously be studying for his master’s in education, and on his own time, taking graduate-level math courses at a different college. (The last isn’t required. He just really, really loves math.)
I watched the parenting on “Young Sheldon”—and did the exact opposite. So did my “gifted” son turn out as “successful” as the titular older character, played by Jim Parsons on “The Big Bang Theory”?
Well, he’s not making buckets of money, which some would use as the ultimate metric of success. And he hasn’t yet won a Nobel Prize, like Sheldon did in “The Big Bang Theory” finale. (“No Nobel prizes in math,” my son pointed out.)
My son spent part of the summer doing his own independent research. He presented his work, which “formalizes a foundational result about the representation of linear functionals on infinite-dimensional complex vector spaces. Its central objects, C∗-algebras, impose additional structure on the traditional Banach spaces from functional analysis.” (Please don’t ask me what it means or how it’s applied. If interested, you can read the complete description here.) It would appear that “these results play an important role in mathematical physics.” So, hey, maybe he’s still on track for that Sheldon Cooper Nobel Prize in Physics, after all.
But my son spent the majority of his July and August as an assistant teacher in Upper Manhattan, helping students, many of whom are still learning English, prepare for NY’s Algebra 1 Regents exam. He was shocked by how many high schoolers still struggled with fractions. He devoted many evenings to brainstorming techniques he could employ to help catch them up.
Full disclosure: My son has a terrible role model. His dad earned a nuclear engineering degree from MIT (after attending two of NYC’s most well-known “gifted” schools; yes, the one you’re thinking of and the other one). He worked in tech at the turn of this century, when stock options in overvalued internet start-ups were flung about like so much pixie dust. He walked away from all that to teach middle school math and physics.
When our son first announced his intention to also teach, my husband proffered, “Why not get a nice, stable computer programming job instead?”
“That’s so boring,” our son sighed.
He wants to teach because it’s challenging. And because he wants to do good in the world. He wants to help. (Oh, and he also wants to disrupt. As a high school dropout, he is dedicated to the belief that schools must primarily serve the interests of students. Not teachers, not administrators, and not parents. He’s argued that teachers have unions…so students should, too. And he’s outlined how those could work.)
My son is not on track to become tech/finance rich. He has yet to win a Nobel Prize. But, after some very difficult years (for me; as he once explained, “Parenting doesn’t have to be hard. I did everything myself, you just wasted time trying to stop me”), he is a much better, kinder, wiser, and more decent human being than the Sheldon Cooper we watched throughout “The Big Bang Theory’s” 12-season run, or the one we encountered on the final episode of “Young Sheldon,” still unapologetically condescending and arrogant, blithely rude to his wife, dismissive of his children’s interests, and brutally critical of his supposed friends.
I’m pretty sure that’s not the son Mary Cooper wanted. But it’s the son she got—and the bulk of the blame falls on her. (Yes, Sheldon had a father and a grandmother and teachers and mentors, but whenever any of them tried to call him out on his unacceptable behavior, Mary was there to assure him he was wonderful, no need to change a thing, you just be you, Shelley! He never suffered any consequences, so, in his defense, how would he know he was doing anything wrong without it being pointed out and punished? At our house, we like to say, “The smarter they are, the dumber they are.”)
Mary Cooper fell into a fallacy I refused to. She assumed that a child who can perform at the level of a trained adult in a narrow field will somehow be equally competent in others. Mary either genuinely believed that her baby boy was perfect exactly the way God made him, with no need for improvement (guess she missed the Biblical lesson about how “spare the rod and spoil the child” doesn’t apply to beatings, like many have mistakenly attributed, but actually to the shepherd’s rod that guides a sheep wandering off in the wrong direction), or Sheldon’s mother confused academic brilliance with even the most basic competence outside his field of expertise.
Just because a child can do math or read or play an instrument at an advanced level doesn’t make them any less desperate for guidance in manners, limits, obligations, and humility. In fact, one could argue they need those lessons even more than the average youngster because of the way most adults in their lives will be too intimidated by their precocity to treat them like the still-developing human being they unquestionably are.
Based on the above definition of “success” and our respective results, I’ll put my parenting up against Mary Cooper’s any day.
