Mother Of Child With IQ Of 162 Was Advised To Abort

**Origanalist** · 09-13-2015, 02:45 PM

TV’s child genius never knew the father he takes after

Thomas Frith, the standout finalist in Channel 4’s Child Genius series, never got to know the father from whom he inherited his brains

By Judith Woods8:05PM BST 24 Jul 2015

The floor is strewn with boy detritus: a skateboarding T-shirt, train timetables, back issues of The Beano. Discarded on the table, between The Daily Telegraph’s Diabolical Sodoku and some Terry Pratchett novels, is a well-thumbed copy of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century.

Have you read it, I ask the bedroom’s occupant, dubiously; the only adults I know who have picked it up are still struggling through the weighty tome, which was published last year. “A few times,” nods Thomas Frith, thoughtfully. “It’s impossible to escape inequality whether in a capitalist or a totalitarian system, but I do think that sometimes a benign dictatorship is preferable to a turbulent democracy.”

Thomas is 12 years old. The Beanos are a red herring; they belong to his six-year-old brother, William.

Thomas, the blonde, energetic stand-out star of Channel 4’s Child Genius series, with a mind‑boggling IQ of 162 (Einstein and Stephen Hawking could only manage 160), prefers Simon Singh’s maths and science books to comics. He’s read Ulysses, but that was way back when he was at primary school; having taught himself to read when he was two, he has a lot of time to fill while the rest of the world (almost) catches up.

But now that he can play the piano, cello, trombone and bassoon to grade five level, he doesn’t get so bored. Then, of course, there’s his passion for double chess (where a player engages in two games simultaneously) and football, table tennis and rugby. He cooks, too.

“Thomas lives life at a tremendously fast pace,” says his mother Deborah, 44, a warmly charismatic primary school teacher who seems bemused, amused and quietly protective of her son’s childhood. “When he was two he woke up at some ungodly hour to tell me he’d just counted to 503. I told him to go back to bed and do it in French. Then, when he’d done that, to do it backwards in German.”

Thomas Frith’s mother, Deborah, is amused, bemused and gently protective of her prodigiously bright boy (Picture: Guzelian)
Genius is an over-used epithet these days. Mensa accepts those with an IQ of 130 or above, which represents 2 per cent of the general population. Those with an IQ over 160 comprise just 0.003 per cent.

In Child Genius, where children are pitted against one another in tests from general knowledge to logic and reasoning, Thomas is off the scale; one rival parent is heard to mutter in disbelief that he’s “a machine”.

But then programme is as much about the tiger parents as their clever cubs. It’s hard for those of us with more typical children not to wince at their apparent pushiness as they thrust their youngsters into this hugely competitive forum.

Level-headed Deborah disagrees. “Most of these children are by nature highly competitive, but they seldom have anyone to compete with at their level,” she says, simply. “Thomas’s main motivation in taking part was meeting other kids like him, who ‘got’ him and with whom he could play chess and have fun.”

Certainly on the programme, which has its gripping final on Tuesday, Thomas has proved to be TV gold. In person he is sunny, funny and philosophical. As far from the stereotypical image of a maths geek as it’s possible to be, he has inherited his mother’s social skills and wry humour.
His extraordinary intelligence comes from his physics graduate and computer programmer father, Peter, who died of leukaemia two months before Thomas’s second birthday.

Viewers had no inkling of this poignant backdrop until Deborah let it slip in last week’s episode; she has refused to let early bereavement define Thomas’s life.

“Thomas had a difficult start; at my 20‑week scan we were told he might have Down’s syndrome and that there was fluid on his brain,” recalls Deborah. “We were asked to think about a termination, but there was no way anyone was touching my precious bump.”

continued…http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/t...ld-genius.html