Parenting a gifted child: anxious moments.

Every child has their needs. That is fine and understood. Yet, every child also has their wants - and sometimes those can be difficult to meet.

A few days ago, I was walking with Syahidah, through the central city area of Singapore, at night, surrounded by tall buildings of varying heights. Except for the heat, it could have been any modern city, anywhere - but that humid air bathing one is unmistakable.

Syahidah turned to me and said: "Ainan wants you to buy him a skyscraper...", my heart leapt at the size of the acquisition I was being asked to make: I knew he loved tall buildings, but his very own skyscraper was a little out of my league (perhaps Donald Trump could help out).

Before, however, I had time to feel too sick about the latest aspiration of my gifted kid, she continued her sentence: "book".

At once, I felt better. My parenting anxiety vanished in an instant: a book, a skyscraper book, well, I could manage that. Suddenly, my instant inadequacy at not being a billionaire able to indulge his children's every whim, evaporated: a book purchase, I could handle.

Of course, before the relief, came the laughter - my own, as I understood how disparate were my instant emotional reaction to what I thought was to be an excess of materialism and the actual request, for a simple book.

It made me think, though. As a parent, one is always faced with the requests of one's children for various things. Some of those requests are easily met. Yet others are harder and some are simply impossible. With more children, so the requirements expand - at some point, most parents will encounter this gulf between the ideal of what one's children would like, and the reality of what they can have. That is one of the tensions of parenting: the difference between the children's material and experiential aspirations and their practical reality.

I was rather glad that Ainan didn't really want a skyscraper - or at least wasn't saying that he wanted one. The question is, of course: if I were a billionaire, like Donald Trump, or Bill Gates - would he want one and would he ask for one? Ainan knows I can't just buy a skyscraper - but if he knew that I could, would that be on his shopping list?

I am unlikely to be in the position to test his response to such an abundance of wealth, being presently short of the odd billion or two. However, you never know...

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged seven years and ten months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, four years and three months, and Tiarnan, twenty months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, gifted adults and gifted children in general. Thanks.)

Celebrity look-a-likes: famous faces

It is said that everyone has a double, somewhere, somewhen: but is that true? In my life, I have met several people who look somewhat like me, some male, some female - but who, of all the world's famous people do I look like?

There is a website called www.myheritage.com that purports to match genealogy using face recognition. One side effect of this is that it can match any face to its databases of celebrities. Clearly this database is not complete since there are a number of celebrities that I have been said to remind people of at various stages of my life, that did not come up as results - such as Ewan MacGregor (who I was more than once mistaken for, when I was younger) - and Ricky Martin (except one of us is plumper...wonder who?!!). However, given the limitations of the database I thought it a very fun exercise to see who, in the world, one looks like: according to the impartial judge of a computer program that measures faces.

The results are served up here. Apparently, I am a sixty per cent match for Donald Trump (I could do with 60 per cent of his wealth, then...) and a 73 % match for David Bowie. Interestingly, I also resemble Jacqueline Bisset - a woman - and Coolio - who is of a different race. I find this refreshing. In going beyond our ways of categorizing people by race and gender and looking at the actual proportions of the face, this software should give a truer reflection of who we actually look like. The results can be very revealing.

The results depend very much on which photo you upload: different photos may give slightly different results if you are caught differently - or were a different age at the time, I suppose (or weight, I would guess: though it managed to see through my poundage and match the features of ultra-slim David Bowie - so I think the software is pretty good at overcoming such impediments).

I will see if I can check other photos for my family members and post the results for you.

So, who do you look like?