“Baby Einsteins”

A review of Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child by Alissa Quart. How to ruin your child by trying too hard to develop his or her talents. As if parenting wasn’t already hard enough. What I don’t say in the review, and what Quart fails to address in her book, is that there are plenty of parents out there who can’t even be bothered to read to their offspring, much less encourage them to be concert pianists or math whizzes. Still, you might want to think twice before you park the tot in front of a so-called developmental video.