The recent sailing misadventure of sixteen-year-old Abby Sunderland and the successful climbing of Mount Everest by thirteen-year old Jordan Romero have me thinking about skill and ability as related to age. Whenever a kid accomplishes something major, it hits the media because children aren’t expected to achieve much in our society. But the coverage usually involves adult disapproval more than admiration and encouragement. In Romero’s case, we read cute stories about him calling his mom from the summit, along with some age-related criticism, even after he reached the top. Sunderland and her parents have been the topic of a great deal of media negativity, especially since she had to be rescued.

Although the term hasn’t been used, to my knowledge, in coverage of these two situations, the word “prodigy” comes to mind. The dictionary definition of prodigy is an extraordinary, marvelous, or unusual accomplishment, deed, or event – which, I think, fits both adventures. A child prodigy is defined as someone who, at an early age, masters a skill at an adult level…with the assumption that the achievement is extraordinary, marvelous and unusual. Although both Sunderland and Romero are at the upper end of qualifying as children, they have, by all accounts, mastered skills that most adults have not.

But what exactly is an “adult-level skill”? Who decides? Why do we connect a person’s age with their talent and ability anyway? And why do we have such a problem with kids pursuing – and perhaps achieving – excellence? Our ageist culture is in awe of prodigious talent, but only when it’s seen in adults; in kids, it’s usually either dangerous or weird, and given a label that smacks of condescension. Do a web search for “child prodigy” and you’ll find lots of sites listing such people as some kind of freak of Nature, the gosh wow factor often accompanied by sad tales of lives wrecked by the burden of unusual talent. There’s even one site called oddee.com, which concerns itself with the “odd, bizarre and strange things of our world”…and highlights ten kids who have accomplished things. Of course, it’s not the talent that’s odd, but our reaction to it.

It’s likely that all kids are capable of so much more than we give them credit for. Joyce Reed, in her new book What Really Matters, co-authored with David Albert, points out that anthropologists have found evidence of human communities in which the oldest bone artifacts are of eighteen-year-olds. She writes, “It means that in order for that society to continue and to develop, it had to more than reproduce itself within eighteen years. Children (by our standards) were having children as soon as they were biologically capable (ten to twelve?), but they were then dying before they raised those children past the ages of six or eight. Thus, between ages five and eighteen, these ‘children’ lived in groups, sharing and caring and learning to take care of themselves and each other. Isn’t that an astounding thought? It certainly could mean that humans are programmed to do our best problem-solving in those years – if we are given the freedom to do so…Yes, we are concerned that our twelve- and thirteen-year-olds could be as precocious as Romeo and Juliet, but we rarely realize that they could also develop and demonstrate the leadership and decision-making abilities of Alexander the Great, who was leading a significant portion of his era’s population into a new and different concept of nationhood at age eighteen.”

Instead of allowing children to follow their passions and play meaningful roles in society, most parents cocoon them, even living their lives for them, with the conflicting goals of keeping them safe from the world while helping them compete in it. Schools don’t challenge kids either: Six-year-olds belong in first grade, whether or not they are capable of (and are often already doing) third grade level work. Society stereotypes age groups, generalizing that all adolescents are equally immature, violent, or rebellious. And the few kids who do manage – often with the support of parents who see things differently – to excel at something are labeled as prodigies…odd and unusual, and best pushed back to where they belong lest they get hurt.

Perhaps the recent generations of life learners will break through this ceiling and help normalize the idea that children are capable human beings with the right to develop their abilities and passions as they choose…and with the help of adults, rather than with their criticism and faux protection.