Guiding our offspring through the minefield that is childhood.
The ‘idiot — genius child’ paradox.
The science behind ‘why smart kids do dumb things’, Hint : It’s totally normal & you’re not a bad parent.
Some of the smartest people I know are, paradoxically the daftest. In their book ‘The Stupidity Paradox: The Power and Pitfalls of Functional Stupidity at Work’ Mats Alvesson and Andre Spicer explain that to some extent this is a social strategy, developed because on some level (conscious or otherwise) extremely intelligent people realize that they are likely to be unpopular because of their gifts. Alvesson & Spicer hypothesize that clever people are therefore selective, reserving their gifted minds for work-focused activity and hiding them away in order to make gains socially, a theory which works on many levels. At an evolutionary level, hiding undesirable or irritating traits increases the chances of initially securing a mate. Socially? Well, let’s be honest shall we, Who really likes a smug know-it-all? But where this phenomenon really ‘comes into its own’ is neuro-developmentally. How many parents of teenagers have hooked into this article because they read the subtitle and found their heads nodding on auto-pilot?
