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David performs in piano competitions.

Jessica tries to set flying records.

JonBenet enters beauty contests.

David is Jewish piano virtuoso David Helfgott, of Perth, Australia, whose troubled life is the subject of the film "Shine."

Jessica is Jessica Dubroff, the precocious Pescadero 7-year-old who hoped to set a record last April by being the youngest pilot to make a cross-country flight in a single-engine plane.

JonBenet Ramsey is the 6-year-old Colorado girl who collected a string of first prizes in child beauty pageants.

Each of these youngsters had a special talent or attribute. Just as key, each had a parent or parents who nurtured, cultivated or pressured them to follow paths wholly inappropriate for their tender years.

David is the son of a poor, proud and controlling father, a survivor of the Holocaust, who saw in his son the chance to live out a dream thwarted years earlier by his own father and the course of history.

David, his father felt, was destined to become a world-class pianist, but only if he shut everything else out of his life, took first place in piano competitions, and followed slavishly the elder Helfgott's every cruel and mercurial wish.

Jessica's mother believed in exposing her daughter to a variety of life experiences; including giving her flying lessons when other children Jessica's age still had training wheels on their two-wheeler bicycles.

Her father, equally enabling, financed his pint-sized Amelia Earhart's exploits and shared the cockpit with her on their last ill-fated trip.

JonBenet's mother, herself a beauty queen years before, was intent on giving her beautiful daughter a head start along the same path. No matter that it involved coloring and coiffing the child's hair, applying full-court makeup to her delicate features, miniaturizing an adult wardrobe for her and teaching her to assume sexy poses that would have made even Lolita blush. The Ramseys had the money and Patsy Ramsey had the drive to make it all happen.

Where did all this misguided, if well-meaning, parenting lead?

Rejected by his unyielding father whom he chose, once, to disobey, David Helfgott suffered a nervous breakdown as a young man. Following the breakdown, he spent more than a decade in a mental institution and for 20 years never touched the instrument that was to be his (and the senior Helfgott's) passport to fame.

While David, now 49, has recently returned to the piano circuit, he is still a broken and childlike man (reaching back, perhaps, to recapture the childhood he never really had).

More tragically still, for Jessica and JonBenet there are no comeback performances.

Jessica's plane went down in a rainstorm, killing all three aboard, including her father. The day after Christmas, JonBenet was found strangled and sexually assaulted in the basement of her family home. However, this child of privilege was a victim before her gruesome death: a tarted-up mockery of childhood innocence.

When Jessica Dubroff died, I wrote in this column that her life was merely an exaggerated version of a "trend that is all too easy to track on the radar screen of mainstream America. Today more than ever, we are pushing our kids. If not to excel, then to keep up with everyone else's kids who are being pushed to excel."

If you don't believe it, calculate the number of extracurricular activities parents shlep their preschoolers to each week. Check out your neighborhood Little League game this spring. Watch some of the parents arguing with the umpire's call or registering palpable disappointment and anger with a child who misses a ball in the outfield or strikes out at bat.

Go to the local skating rink in the dark hours of a winter morning where children blue with cold are practicing their routines under the watchful eyes of an equally chilled mom or dad. Or simply switch that scene to the tennis court or community theater.

Jewish parents are not the only ones guilty of this rush to enrichment, recognition or excellence. But we seem to do our share and more in that department.

If there is any redemptive value in the life stories of David, Jessica and JonBenet, perhaps it will serve as a signal for "Time Out." Not time out as in the popular practice of briefly isolating a child as a form of punishment or reprimand. Rather, it is allowing time out for kids to just be kids — absent the stressful bells and whistles that go along with seeking the limelight.

The prizes, if there are any, will be there for them to win in due time.