What Parents Can Learn From Steve Jobs and Bill Gates About Raising a Prodigy

Baby boomers and their successors may think they’re the first to be obsessed with precocious achievement, priming their children for the fast track even in utero. They’re not. American fascination with early off-the-charts mastery — its promise and its perils — goes back at least a century. Shirley Temple’s mother saw to it that her fetus had plenty of song-and-dance enrichment, and her wisdom on raising a star proved very popular with parents.