Democratic parenting important: For bright sparks and rascals
Zakki P. Hakim and Tb. Arie Rukmantara, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
Annisa Rania Putri, 6, is a special girl and so is Qurota Aini, 8 -- by a fair bit of nature and a little bit more nurture.
These gifted children are given the freedom to become who they want to be by their parents, who say they never push their daughters into anything they don't like.
Annisa's parents say they never tried to make their daughter into a "whizz kid"; but nature did the job for them.
At an early age, Annisa already knows a lot about a lot of things.
She talks philosophy, God and is interested in the latest technology; she prefers cable Internet to dial-up and knows the difference between GSM and CDMA services.
Annisa, who says her abilities make her feel like "a woman trapped inside a child's body", is now trying to convince her mother that she needs a brand new Toshiba notebook complete with the latest specifications.
Annisa has been learning English since the age of two and a half, although people can talk to her in range of languages. She understands Indonesian, a bit of Arabic, Dutch and several other tongues, yet she prefers conversing in English, which she speaks with a slight British accent.
"It is usually children who learn from their parents, but in our case, we were forced to learn English to understand what she says," her mother, Jenny, who is her mid-40s told The Jakarta Post.
Her parents speak Indonesian and told the Post that they had never taught Annisa other languages. According to Annisa's mother, Jenny, when Annisa was two she took a private English lesson for about eight months and a computer lesson for two.
These days, she learns almost everything she knows from the virtual world. She's familiar with Leonardo Da Vinci, Abraham Lincoln and other figures throughout history. But she has a certain special attraction to anything about the solar system and beyond.
When asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, Annisa said she wanted to be someone that had the energy to help other people.
However, her parents have no plan to put her in formal schooling any time soon because Annisa does not want to go. She says school is too expensive and that the money could be used to buy more useful things.
It is not that Annisa comes from a poor family -- they are middle class -- but the parents listen to her and avoid pushing her.
"What do you expect her to learn at school anyway? She can already read, write and do math. She learns very fast by herself at home, through the Internet," Jenny said.
The family is considering sticking with home-schooling instead.
Jenny says she never forces Annisa to do anything against her will and always makes sure she had plenty of time for fun stuff.
The same thing applies to young writer Qurata Aini, 8.
Aini's father, Cahyo Supradjogo, maintains his child is just an ordinary little girl without any "extraordinary" talents. That she had achieved well despite her age, was mostly thanks to the "environment" created by he and his wife, Adiyati Fathu Rosana, he said,
And Aini's smarts have nothing to do with what she eats either. Her diet is little different from most children her age; a favorite dinner being a plate of rice with tempe and some soybean sauce, her parents said.
"I'm one of those parents who doesn't try to keep their children busy with courses. All we did was introduce her to books and develop her reading habits," 35-year-old Cahyo said, adding that he took Aini to book shops more often than he took her to malls.
Adiyati, 34, said that books have been around Aini since she was nine-months old, when her daughter had just learned how to sit.
"Books are everywhere around Aini. We don't separate them from toys. It's an environment we create to teach our daughter that reading can also be fun," she said.
The result: Today, Aini can't stop reading.
"Every day after arriving from school, I always read books. I can spend hours reading them. Sometime I read books for the whole day long," said Aini.
Aini, whose favorite reading is Enid Blyton's The Famous Five series has a library of her own, with a collection of more than 1,000 books.
The environment also sparked her interest in writing stories.
Her first novel, Nasi Untuk Kakek (Rice for Grandpa), which was written when she was six, has sold 3,000 copies and has earned her an award from the Indonesian Publishers Association for Best Writer for Children Books.
The Indonesian Records Museum later honored her as the country's youngest short-story writer for her short-story compilation titled Asyiknya Outbound (The Fun Outbound).
"Now I'm writing my third book, a novel, while at the same time, I'm also writing short stories," she told the Post.
Cahyo and Adiyati said that every child could achieve what Aini did, if only their parents would allow their children to express themselves.
"I don't perceive Aini as a novelist or a short-story writer. All I see is that writing is the way for my child to express her feelings and imagination," Cahyo said.