A Relational Safe Harbour

I have mixed emotions about Gattaca-esque embryo selection and editing aimed at maximising the intelligence of offspring. While I generally understand and accept the desire for intelligent children, I believe there is an important caveat - it should remain within one standard deviation - especially if the parents themselves are of average intelligence. A similar principle applies when selecting a long-term counterpart - while it may seem like an ideal package - in practice, it can be cruel and traumatic for the child, because it is driven by a fantasy of perfection, when reality is far more complex.

Heightened intelligence is often accompanied by heightened sensitivity - not just somatic, but also spiritual and perceptual. Mainstream science tends to focus on trends, which means tail-end behaviours are frequently overlooked. For instance, while research suggests that children typically develop recall, or the capacity to form and retain long-term autobiographical memories, around the age of two or three, exceptions to the "childhood amnesia" boundary exist - intellectual outliers with extraordinary autobiographical memory often retain memories from before their first birthday - sometimes even from infancy. An experienced parent, especially one with similar traits, will understand the temporal disorientation these children experience - how past memories can resurface through the lens of present cognitive awareness. Such children may not have had the verbal capacity to articulate their exceptionally early memories at the time, but they comprehended what was communicated - and these memories will revisit them as they progress through life - because memory is also stored somatically, emotionally, and energetically. A parent with this awareness will naturally speak to their child as an equal, guiding them gently on the weight of emotional imprinting - understanding that matters of the heart carry a deeper, often haunting, resonance in due course.

It is precisely because of this memory-related temporal disorientation that these children go on to carry a peculiar form of time-awareness - a sense that time is not linear, but a created construct designed to appease the masses - to them, time is simultaneous. They are more perceptually aware and sensitive to the multiple, humming threads of reality woven through their subconscious - for them, the "now" is never fully, cleanly just now. They may experience intense déjà vu and "precognitive" dreams - yet for them, it is often not technically "the future", but rather a concurrent thread of a potential reality bleeding into what is being lived. Without guidance, this can make reality feel slippery, uncertain, and at times overwhelming - like being dragged into a riptide, then spat out into a river.

While most two or three-year-olds are just learning to string words together and blindly follow commands, these children exhibit early signs of metacognition - recognising that their peers do not comprehend what they do - adjusting their language accordingly. They begin to experiment with moral concepts like truth and deception, often driven by curiosity rather than malice. Yet, actions at this age can plant the seeds of retroactive guilt.

A parent who has walked this path would recognise these early signs and prepare their child for the onslaught of what it feels like to perpetually lack belonging with the vast majority of peers - an existential solitude that often accompanies difference, with loneliness becoming a likely lifelong companion. They would offer not a "home" in the conventional sense, but a relational safe harbour, knowing the child will have to define what "home" means for themselves. They would teach the child to observe others, to identify emotions somatically in order to create a conscious psychosomatic link, and to develop emotional regulation - not as a perfect shield, but as a tempering force.

Such a parent would also notice the child's capacity for rapid synthesis, cunning, and subtle manipulation - how they test boundaries and awareness by the strategic application of reinterpreted "authoritative" concepts to achieve their own aims, carefully laying cognitive traps and trails to map behavioural patterns. Left unchecked, this can lead to a derailment into a cynical or rebellious mindset towards authority - often resulting in a deep sense of mistrust or disdain for authority in general. Yet this trait is nuanced - it is not fundamentally negative, as it propels independent thinking. Rather than enforcing blind compliance, an aware parent would playfully call out these patterns, gently guiding the child towards integrity while refining their cunning - teaching them not to blindly obey authority, but to question it, including the parent's own, and to seek truth for themselves. It is about validating and mirroring the child's experience without pathologising or minimising it. This cultivates trust and preserves the child's quiet sense of sovereignty and dignity. Even more importantly, such a parent would respect the child's perception by admitting and apologising when they are wrong or have unintentionally misled the child - modelling humility.

Our minds are most malleable in early childhood - the foundations laid during these years shape our entire trajectory. For deeply sensitive and highly perceptive children, this period also carries heightened vulnerability to psychological and emotional trauma. Now imagine a highly intelligent child born to parents who are two or more standard deviations below them in intelligence - parents who not only lack the capacity to comprehend their mind, but are also ill-equipped to guide them through the complexities they are incrementally becoming aware of. Such children often find themselves questioning their own sanity, and the realisation that they have surpassed their parents' understanding can be profoundly isolating - an early form of existential orphaning. Emotionally exiled within their own families, they become unseen - haunted by the harrowing sense of having to manage themselves without guidance. In these dynamics, the parents are often unaware of the depth of their child's perception - dismissing their concerns, their reality - as though they don't matter, while mistakenly believing their own simple deflections suffice. Even unconscious, subtle dismissals by well-meaning parents - an eye roll, a minimisation, an over-simplification - can seed profound self-doubt in a sensitive child with heightened awareness. Over time, this often leads to quiet, maladaptive self-regulation patterns - improvised coping mechanisms such as addictions, intellectual overcompensation, or emotional withdrawal - as the individual attempts to find warmth, understanding, and emotional connection in a world that seems unable to mirror them.