By DEBORAH ORR
The human spectacle of watching the sisters Venus and Serena Williams slugging it out at Wimbledon has captured imaginations.
A rather more upsetting story of the disappearance last month of British maths prodigy Sufiah Yusof, who was found safe and well but determinedly unwilling to speak to her parents, has triggered confusion and barely concealed distaste.
Both sets of siblings in the two remarkable families that have found themselves under the spotlight owe their extraordinary development to their father.
In the case of Richard Williams, the family mythology is staggering. The story goes that he was watching women's tennis on television in the 1970s and was struck by the vast prizemoney on offer.
If only he could make a champ ... The only problem was that his three daughters were already too old for him to shape into tennis stars. His wife did not want any more children, so he hid her contraceptive pills and wined and dined her.
Venus arrived in 1980, and Serena in 1982. From the start, Williams consulted psychologists about how to create a tennis star and coaching videos about how to train one.
However much truth there is in all that, one thing is clear. The man wanted to make his daughters into tennis champions, even before they had been conceived, and that is exactly what he did.
In the case of Farooq Yusof, the mythology is no less powerful. Farooq Yusof has five children, all of whom he has taught himself, and all of whom have become mathematics prodigies.
His youngest daughter, Zuleika, is preparing, at 6, to sit her maths O-level. Sufiah, aged 15, began studying for her masters degree at Oxford two years ago. Her brother Iskander passed his A-level maths at grade A aged 13; her sister Aisha, who is studying at Warwick, did the same at 14.
The elder brother, Isaac, 19, interestingly enough, is at present deciding between becoming a professional tennis player and taking up a place at Warwick.
All this, says Yusof, has been done with the intention of proving that the learning process in children can be nurtured and accelerated. Again, we must consider that goal to have been achieved. But in the case of Sufiah, things have gone wrong. Missing from home for a few weeks, she has now contacted her parents by e-mail. They, in turn, have released the e-mail to the press.
"I see you've taken the liberty of running to the national newspapers with the story of how your 'naive and innocent daughter' has run off from a 'happy home' with some nasty socialists and boyfriends," Sufiah writes.
"Has it ever crossed your mind that the reason I left home was because I've finally had enough of 15 years of physical and emotional abuse?
"I've finally had enough of suffering because of your stupid whims about tennis, computing, investment banking etc. You ruined my brother's life because you wanted him to make lots of money for you winning tennis tournaments. I was lucky. Oxford has been marginally better because I'm away from you most of the time."
Her poor parents insist that those cannot be the words of their daughter. Yusof insists that she must be in the hands of some mysterious third party.
However, her e-mail, far from being the work of a brainwashed young woman, reads exactly like the thoughts of a resentful teenager.
Her disappearance has sparked calls for further research into the sort of damage accelerated learning can do.
Inevitably, comparisons have been made with Ruth Lawrence, also a maths prodigy, who became the youngest person to graduate from Oxford when she gained a first-class degree at 14. Again, she had been educated by her father, from whom she was inseparable.
As an adult, she lives in Israel, has no contact with her father at all and wants her son to have a "normal" upbringing and to "develop in a natural way."
Among the tales of young prodigies, the same themes keep arising. First, it appears most often to be the father who wants to push his children so hard in a particular direction.
Second, tennis, maths and chess - at which Yusof was a champion player as a child - are the subjects to plump for if you want to hothouse your children.
Third, there appears to be no room for the rest of the world in the lives of the children involved.
Ken Bore, of the National Association for Gifted Children, says he would not normally recommend early entry to university "because the young person's personal maturity is often not developed sufficiently to be able to function effectively with much older people."
In Sufiah's case, her father seems unable to see how much of the responsibility lies with him.
- INDEPENDENT
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