Parent's Guide
Helping to Support Gifted Children
Parents play an important role in molding the academic motivation of their children. Providing a home environment that supports autonomy, competence, and feelings of acceptance are key in developing and maintaining motivation.
Autonomy
Parents can help their children achieve autonomy by providing them with access to learning opportunities in their areas of interest. Allowing your child to have choices and accepting and encouraging their individual choices fosters a healthy independence and helps in creating harmony between parent and child.
Competence
Parents can reinforce talent development instead of focusing on the "natural gifts" of a child. This strategy can foster a greater feeling of competency. Some children may be naturally good in the area of mathematics, but may have a passion for learning about the constellations.
Supporting Relatedness
Engaging in learning experiences together provide families of gifted children opportunities to create bonds and connections. When parents place a high value on learning, children may experience special feelings of belonging while engaging in learning experiences with one another at home.
It is important to know that environments that do not support feelings of autonomy, competence, and relatedness could impair gifted children’s levels of motivation. Therefore, knowing how to create this type of environment at home can help support your efforts to facilitate academic motivation.