Sowell, Child Psychologist

The only outliers in this culture without a platform are the homeless.


                             Sowell, Child Psychologist

From the City Journal on the remarkable Thomas Sowell

Sowell’s work at times does reflect episodes from his life—often painful ones. The most striking example concerns his son, John Sowell. John was born healthy and seemingly normal, but as time passed, it became clear that something was wrong. Well past the age when most kids begin speaking in full sentences, John would scarcely utter a word. To outsiders, and even to Sowell’s then-wife, it seemed a clear case of mental disability. Yet Sowell wasn’t convinced. Speech problems aside, John was unusually bright: he could pick child locks before he could walk, for instance. And he had a prodigious memory: he once knocked over a chessboard mid-game and put all the pieces back in their former places. Given these underlying signs of intelligence, his failure to grasp even the simplest words was all the more mystifying. Yet hope came when, around age four, John slowly started to speak, and final vindication came when he grew up to become a well-adjusted young man.

Decades later, after his son had graduated from Stanford, Sowell set out to explain the puzzle. The result: the first academic study ever to explore the phenomenon of late-talking children who are unusually bright but not autistic. Drawing on this original research, as well as anecdotes, data, and history, Sowell wrote two books: Late-Talking Children, in 1997; and The Einstein Syndrome, in 2001. The second—named after history’s most famous late talker—won praise from Steven Pinker as “an invaluable contribution to human knowledge.” But apart from child-psychology specialists like Pinker, and parents of late talkers, these books received little public notice. Yet they represent a remarkable achievement: in an era of high academic specialization, it’s vanishingly rare for a scholar to break new ground in a field in which he has no formal training.