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OK, time to acknowledge something distressing: it seems I want Larkin to be smarter than other kids. Not just some of them, but all of them.
 
Molly and I went for a parent-teacher conference, our first since Larkin began pre-K-3 last fall. All year her teachers have marveled over her precociousness. "She knows everything!"they say. "And her vocabulary is amazing."

Gratifying, of course. Who doesn't like hearing that his child is amazing? But apparently it wasn't enough for me. At the conference, Larkin's teacher showed us the results of standardized testing the class had done. Bar graphs charted all 18 kids (with letters substituted for names) measured for concept and language acquisition. "Here's Larkin,"she said. "See how high she scores?"
 
But what I was noticing was that on each graph, one other student --  "N" -- was well ahead. One bar skyrocketed literally off the chart. As the teacher talked on, praising Larkin's eager and helpful classroom presence, I nodded; but a distracting thought had been planted. "Did you feel anything when she showed us those bar graphs?"I asked Molly after we left.

"You mean, like, who's smarter than Larkin?" She winced. "I did. It's pretty embarrassing."
Yet there it was. And it didn't subside. I kept wondering, Who was N? Was it the painfully shy girl who stays in her own dream world? The bright-eyed little girl whose crayon drawings were so neatly executed? Could it possibly be one of the boys, that band of laughing marauders? I wanted to know who the competition was.

Why? Why do I need Larkin to be not just a good student, not just a thriving and contributing one, but the best, the smartest? In general I'm no fan of the Darwinian tilt of life in America, our fixation on competition and on getting ahead. Over the past three decades, huge gaps have opened up between the rich, the fairly rich, and everyone else. The enormous pressure on performance has turned success in our education-driven meritocracy into a survival of the smartest. Parents used to have a precocious child skip a grade, but they now routinely hold him back. Give him a little developmental head start, and he'll be that much bigger and more experienced than the others. And smarter.

You don't have to be an expert in Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences to know the limitation of this kind of smarts. In my own life I've learned, painfully at times, that acing your SATs has precious little to do with courage or generosity or creativity or wisdom. Have I forgotten this lesson with Larkin? I've always shuddered at parents who boast about how brilliant Little Genius is. Years ago, as a middle school teacher, I fielded an outraged phone call from a man ranting that the B I'd given his son -- his 7th grade son  --  was damaging his chances for Harvard. I never wanted to be that kind of parent. Yet now here I was, obsessing about Larkin's intellectual standing in her class. I reminded myself: She's three, for God's sake!

Try as I might, though, I couldn't shake my dark curiosity about "N."One day I saw that the teacher had posted the testing charts in the hall outside, among the paintings and cut-out snowmen. I stood before the bar graphs, mentally going down the roster of kids in Larkin's class, trying to guess who N might be.

"Any questions?" The teacher, standing in the doorway behind me.

"I'm just trying to remember which is Larkin,"I lied.

"Well,"she said," you can look on my desk. Each student has a folder, and I've written the letter code after their names."
 
It was tempting. Swoop by, take a peek, find out who N is.  It would take all of five seconds. The teacher herself had just about given me the green light.

But was I the kind of parent willing to commit a small trespass in order to know who dares to be smarter than his child? It wasn't the way I saw myself, the person I wanted to be. Perhaps the best we can do with our faults and temptations is to acknowledge them, understand them and try to hold them in check. I've been reminding myself what my hopes really are for Larkin. So far, she seems to love learning and people with equal avidity (dogs and other animals a bit more, perhaps); that's a balance both Molly and I want to foster in her.
 
As for her precociousness, it's not surprising that she's ahead of her peers in reading and language  --  living in a house crammed full of books, with one parent a writer and the other an English teacher. Her school, furthermore, serves a city whose student population is 95% minority, with a third of its children living below the poverty line. Our school superintendent notes that by age five, kids from middleclass families have a thousand-word vocabulary advantage over kids from impoverished urban families.  Larkin is well on her way to being one of those thousand-word-up kids.  How greedy it is, how wrong, finally, to want her to have still more.