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[quote=Anonymous]I’ll be the first to admit it: raising a teenager in Silicon Valley does something strange to your sense of “normal.” When every other kid seems to be launching a startup out of their bedroom or casually chatting about reinforcement learning over lunch, you start to lose perspective. And yet--even with that adjusted baseline --I can say without hesitation that my kid operates on an entirely different plane.

Most parents tell me their high schoolers are “into STEM.” Cute. Meanwhile, my kid is modeling plasma behavior for a fusion-energy project because they were “bored with regular physics.” They come home from school, toss their backpack on the floor, and jump straight into debugging some simulation that, frankly, I can’t even pronounce half the variables in. I once tried to ask what the project was about, and after a fifteen-minute explanation involving nonlinear differential equations, I found myself nodding like one of those dashboard bobbleheads, hoping they wouldn’t quiz me afterward.

The teachers have basically stopped suggesting enrichment. One of them actually pulled me aside and said, “We don’t really have anything else to give them.” I thought she meant extra worksheets or some honors track I hadn’t heard of. No--she meant the entire school had tapped out. They keep handing my kid datasets and letting them run wild because apparently the analyses they produce are “at the level of a postdoc.” The counselor even joked that they should be teaching a class instead of taking one.

And honestly, it’s not like we pushed them. If anything, we were the ones begging them to slow down. While most teens are wrestling with calculus, my kid decided to spend winter break learning tensor calculus “just to understand general relativity properly.” I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen someone so excited about Riemann curvature tensors. When their friends were playing video games, mine was writing a custom simulation engine because existing ones were “too inefficient.”

College tours were almost comical. At one place--an extremely respectable institution--the student guide proudly announced, “Some of our upper-level undergraduates even get to work with machine learning frameworks!” My kid glanced at me with that look teenagers give their parents when something is painfully below their level of existence. On the drive home, they said, “It’s weird that they made such a big deal about that. I built a custom ML model for that wildfire-prediction app in ninth grade.” Ninth grade! I was still trying to figure out graphing calculators in ninth grade.

I know I sound like that parent. Believe me, I hear myself. But it’s sort of impossible not to brag when you watch your teenager navigate concepts that stump grown adults with doctoral degrees. And the wildest part? They’re still just getting started. Every time I think they’ve hit the ceiling, they casually blow a hole straight through it and start climbing again.

So yes--I’m the parent who shows up to meetings with a grin that probably annoys everyone in the room. But raise a kid like mine, and try not to brag. Truly. It’s harder than it looks.[/quote]

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