At the end of the school summer music concert I said to a parent, "You must be so proud, wasn't your daughter brilliant?" Of course the parent was pleased but was worried that his child might become precocious. Since then I've been thinking about the word.
Precocious sounds like such an insult but all it really means is that someone is doing something a bit early. As I've got older I've become a precocious waker; 3am is a good time for me to wake up. My daughter was a precocious talker; almost from the moment she was born she started and hasn't stopped since. My son was a precocious counter; he counted everything. I expect if we think hard enough we can all say that we appeared to be precocious in something. I use the word 'appeared' because it is only a relative term. You do something earlier than most other people around you and you are precocious but what if everyone around you is a bit slow?
It worries me that we've all become so obsessed with being 'average'. We measure children for everything and strive to make them all the same. We move the goal posts to make the average average for the group of children we are looking at.
I heard Pharell Williams on the radio being interviewed and he was asked, "I understand you were a bit precocious in music, a bit a of child prodigy," He strongly denied it and so the interviewer said, "but you were in a marching band," and he said that everyone was in the marching band, it's just what they did in their school.
Not wanting to upset any of the parents of the children at the summer concert I am going to say that they have nothing to fear. Their children aren't in danger of becoming precocious at music. Instead they are brave and brilliant and hardworking and unique an I love working with brave, brilliant and unique children. Precociousness is for brats.
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