Mom and dad of 9-year-old high school graduate share their No. 1 parenting rule....

quote:

---

Talking to David Balogun is like talking to, well, a 9-year-old.

Despite the occasional tangent about quantum entanglement, David is a kid at his core. He competes in paper airplane races with his sister, presses cupped hands to his eyes to simulate glasses and gets antsy after sitting still for too long.

“This is the normal 9-year-old part,” his mother, Ronya Balogun, tells CNBC Make It as she refocuses him on the conversation.


David is one of the youngest people in the U.S. to earn a high school diploma. He graduated in late January from Reach Cyber Charter School, a tuition-free online school in his home state of Pennsylvania, and is currently enrolled in online classes at Bucks County Community College — where he says he completes a week’s worth of homework in a single day.

“If I don’t learn, then I probably will stay up until 4 (a.m.) and wake up at 5 (a.m.),” David says.

His parents are Ronya and Henry Balogun, who also have a younger daughter, Eliana. They first tested David’s intellect when he was 6 years old, and have since scrapped many of their more conventional parenting techniques for him.

“You’ve got to develop a different mindset as a parent,” Henry says. “It’s not always easy when your son is asking you questions constantly. You have to keep answering the questions, because you don’t want to say, ‘Just leave me alone.’”

The Baloguns insist there’s no magic parenting recipe. When it comes to raising a child like David, “there is no book on it,” Ronya says.

Still, they have a No. 1 rule: When a system isn’t built for your child, don’t try to fix your child. Try to fix the system.


They don’t push conformity

By the time David was in first grade, it was clear he wouldn’t thrive in a regular classroom, Ronya says: In one incident, she learned that David’s classmates listened to him more than their teacher.

“It’s a different adaptation that we don’t have in the United States of America yet. It’s very scary, you can’t find this,” Ronya says, adding: “Sometimes I can’t fix the system, but there are other unconventional choices and solutions to help lead my son through his journey to fulfill his dreams.”

They prioritize happiness over social norms

There’s a social side to this, too: When David told his mother that he didn’t have friends, “it did hurt me and bother me,” Ronya says. Unfortunately, it also made sense.

“I think the biggest social and emotional problem [for gifted children] is that they can’t find other people like themselves,” Dr. Ellen Winner, a psychologist who specializes in gifted children, told ParentEdge magazine in 2012. “The more extreme the gift, the more difficult it is.”

The key, wrote clinical child psychologist Shefali Tsabary in a CNBC Make It essay last month: Understand your kids’ needs and adjust, not the other way around. Rather than pressure David into building a large friend network, Ronya focuses on embracing his introversion, she says.

David says he’s embraced it, diving into research on introverted people. “There was a study that suggested that introverts don’t enjoy spicy food as much as extroverts,” he says.

---