Genius is made, not born. Your child's genes have little to do with how well he or she achieves in school and in life.

This may come as a relief to many parents, who doubt their own raw material. The alternative, however, is far more challenging. For their children to succeed, parents must instill an appetite for hard work, combined with high self-esteem. Professor Michael Howe of the University of Exeter, author of Genius Explained, examined the lives of hundreds of genuises and discovered that it is nurture, not nature, that creates the Albert Einsteins and the Charles Darwins. Such people are "highly socialised", with extremely high levels of determination and stubbornness. To believe that geniuses are born with magical qualities, is to sell them short, he believes.

And, as parents, determination and stubbornness tend to be the qualities that some of us try - intentionally or not - to knock out of our toddlers by setting too many limits on their appetites for exploration. So the next time you see your toddler working extremely hard to understand the principles of gravity, the delights of texture and the properties of viscous liquid by building a castle out of flour and Fairy liquid, give him or her an A for effort before cleaning up the mess and installing locks on the kitchen cupboards.