Parenting & Family Quote by Itzhak Perlman

Perlman’s warning lands with the quiet authority of someone who has watched talent get misread as self-sufficiency. “Gifted child” is usually a praise word that doubles as a permission slip: adults assume the kid will be fine, will “rise,” will absorb pressure like it’s fuel. Perlman punctures that fantasy. His point isn’t that gifted children are fragile in some sentimental way; it’s that their environment often becomes structurally careless. When adults treat ability as a substitute for care, the child becomes a project instead of a person.

The phrase “the way they are handled” is doing the heavy lifting. It implies management, even control: giftedness as something to be optimized, scheduled, and harvested. In music culture especially, the pipeline is full of well-meaning adults who mistake intensity for devotion and discipline for love. The subtext is that exceptional skill invites exceptional interference: overtraining, public scrutiny, perfectionism, and the subtle message that affection is conditional on output.

Perlman, a towering musician who came up through elite institutions, also speaks from a world where prodigies are celebrated and commodified early. Talent can accelerate a child into adult expectations before they’ve built adult coping tools. “Real trouble” is intentionally blunt; it covers burnout, anxiety, rebellion, physical strain, and the identity crisis that hits when being “gifted” stops working as a complete personality. Perlman’s intent is almost parental: don’t romanticize the miracle. Build a life around it that won’t break the kid who made it possible.