How to Raise a Creative Child – Step One: Back Off (2016)
I may be biased from my own experience, but I remember being incredibly frustrated at a young age from the lack of help understanding things I was &quot;too young&quot; for. My role models and teachers made zero efforts to help me learn analog circuit design and my first programming language, Perl. This made it much harder than it would have been if I was attending actual classes, and probably set back my understanding  many years.<p>I&#x27;m not sure how much of an outlier I am, but our education system is not built for creative types. It&#x27;s too hard to get placed in anything significantly above your grade level, especially if your brilliance is restricted to a single subject. I remember showing an bistable flipflop design to my science teacher in 5th grade and getting a puzzled &quot;that&#x27;s nice Johnny&quot; type look when I wanted help figuring out why my breadboard version wouldn&#x27;t oscillate. A few of my skills were so beyond what anyone expected that they didn&#x27;t know what to do with me, or what they were even looking at, so they did nothing.<p>It took another eleven years before I had contact with any teachers that matched my experience level with programming and circuit design. During that time I advanced my skills slightly, but not having any peers made me an outcast and certainly left me far behind where I could have been.<p>Backing off is a bad idea. You need to take your child&#x27;s curiousity and do everything you can to keep it alive. I&#x27;m sure a lot of kids started out like me but eventually let their dreams die.