Adults are forever raising the bar on clever children, precisely because they’re able to handle it. The children get overwhelmed by the tasks they are set and gradually lose the sort of openness and sense of accomplishment they naturally have. When they’re treated like that, children start to crawl inside a shell and keep everything inside. It takes a lot of time and effort to get them to open up again. Kids’ hearts are malleable, but once they gel it’s hard to get them back the way they were. Next to impossible, in most cases.
