My son, the genius? The parental yearning that misses the point

Stories about brilliant and successful people often begin with the childhood moment when their prodigious talents were first revealed. The entrepreneur who made a killing selling lemonade on the street corner, the artist who finger-painted naive masterpieces on the walls of her nursery, the author who taught herself to read while still in nappies.

I suspect that most parents occasionally indulge in fantasies about their offspring's as yet undiscovered greatness. And behaviour that you might regard as annoyingly precocious in other people's kids can easily be interpreted as a sign of nascent genius in your own.

I've tried to resist the urge to "genius" my children, and they've been very accommodating in this. But still, I do occasionally slip. For example, a few weeks back a friend invited me to Bell Shakespeare's wonderful production of Julius Caesar at the Arts Centre. As I was getting ready to leave, my 11-year-old son suddenly started questioning me about the show, then pleading to be taken along. He'd heard so much about Shakespeare, he explained, he desperately wanted to see some for himself.

Now, my son loves to write stories, and some of them are really very good. So when he suddenly expressed this passionate interest in the Bard, it triggered my genius alert. Could it be a sign of his future calling, of a dramatic sensibility far beyond his years?

For a moment I allowed myself to imagine that after seeing the show he'd put his iPad aside, and instead start voraciously reading the tragedies and reciting the sonnets. I pictured him years later, being interviewed for The New Yorker after his own play had become an international sensation. And when the interviewer asked about what inspired him, he'd reply without hesitation, "It was when my mother took me to see Julius Caesar. It was then I realised my destiny was to be at the vanguard of a profound, but also lucrative, rebirth of theatre."

Yet the next morning, when I told my son that I was going to book tickets for him to see the show, his enthusiasm had evaporated. I reminded him of his previous eagerness, but something important was happening in Fortnite, so his answers remained monosyllabic, and I was forced to face the fact that his short-lived Shakespearian passion had more to do with the possibility of getting a choc-top at intermission, rather than a sincere interest in theatre.

Most of us know that it's wrong to burden our children with expectation, yet it's hard to resist, when broader society is so fixated on a narrow definition of success, understood as high-achieving excellence. Merely being good at something, or enjoying it for its own sake, is worthless. Mediocrity is failure.

Recently, a clip from talk-show host James Corden's Carpool Karaoke segment went viral. It featured Paul McCartney driving Corden around Liverpool while singing songs he'd written, talking about his life and being mobbed by adoring fans. Like so many, I found the clip incredibly moving and affecting, so I showed it to my son. He also loved it, observing how proud McCartney's father must have been at his son's enormous success.

Yet it wasn't the magnitude of McCartney's fame, or the staggering achievement of his songwriting that made the clip powerful. It was the fact that, despite all that success, McCartney seemed like a genuinely pleasant person. A nice guy. A guy any parent really should be proud of.