Most children of smart parents will be pretty ordinary

Maybe this is obvious, but I want to spell it out.

I find it so easy to love the idea that my kids will be special and talented. But parenting is a roll of the dice, and you could get all kinds of outcomes.

When my first child was little I was interested in homeschooling, partly because of the idea that I could facilitate her learning more if she was especially bright. I talked to another parent about how I thought my kid might need some kind of gifted education later, and asked what her experience had been. She and her partner seemed very sharp to me, and I figured their kindergartener probably was too.

“So far my kid seems pretty normal,” she said. Oh.

Eight years later, my kids also seem pretty normal. Of course I think they’re special in some ways (what parent doesn’t?). But those are areas like “especially interested in drawing windows” or “especially worried that picking flowers will cause fairy homelessness” rather than academic giftedness.

One of them did recently sign up for chess club at school . . . because you get free Gatorade at chess club. Oh.

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Our expectations are set partly by the selection of which kids and adults we even meet.

A lot of smart adults I know hang out mostly with other smart adults. For most of your life, there have been selection mechanisms at work at your school, your university, your workplace, and your neighborhood. The subway may be the only place you hang out with a fairly random assortment of people.

There’s also selection bias in what you learn about other people’s kids. I post things about my kids that are interesting or funny, but not things I think will embarrass them later. You’re unlikely to hear your friends bragging about their offspring’s poor spelling or inability to tell time.

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The more unusual you are, the less you should expect your children to resemble you.

Parents who deviate from the population in any way — especially tall, especially smart, or whatever — will likely have children who are closer to average. It’s regression toward the mean. Of course, unusual parents will sometimes concentrate unusual genes — Yao Ming (7 ft 6 in) is the child of two basketball players measuring 6 ft 7 in and 6 ft 3 in. But the most common outcome is that two very tall parents will have a child who’s closer to typical height than the parents.

The exception is if the rest of the family is also unusual — if two parents are both from families with lots of tall people, their child will probably be tall too.

Of course genes aren’t the only things that matter. Of the non-genetic influence, there’s debate about how much is in-home environment (parenting, or “shared environment”) vs external environment (“unshared environment.”) Many factors seem to come from outside the family, both physical factors like illness and social factors like friends and school experiences. In whatever way the parents are unusual, these factors will usually move children in some other direction.

And of course the genetic stuff is different in the case of adopted children. There should be even less expectation that children will take after their adoptive parents.

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A group of parents who are unusual in some direction will probably produce some children who are also unusual in that direction. If you and your friends are all musicians, some of the kids in this group will probably be unusually good musicians. But the best child musician you know will probably not be your kid.

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And then some kids will be unusual in a way that makes things harder. Some of us will roll the dice and our children will have intellectual disabilities, learning disabilities, physical disabilities, mental illness, or serious difficulty relating to other people. Or maybe several of those.

Many children will be “twice exceptional” — kids who are gifted and also have a disability.

There will be good things as well as hard ones down these unexpected paths, children and adults who love the sparkiness of their ADHD or the deep dives of their autism.

And however things turn out, we will love our kids and feel that they’re special. Because they’re ours.

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Why am I writing this out?

• I want prospective parents to remember how much uncertainty is inherent in parenting.
• I want those of us parenting non-brilliant children, even if we’re surrounded by exceptionally smart people, to remember that this is normal and to be expected.