Try the following suggestions as you support your gifted child.

1. Stimulate and enrich the child's thinking.

2. Provide a warm, safe, and loving home from which to explore the world.

3. Be tolerant of your child's new and different ideas.

4. Share stimulating cultural, social, and motor experiences that will direct your child's attention to new facts and ideas that challenge "the known."

5. Give your child the gift of time alone to do his own thing.

6. Point out the beauty in the simple and commonplace.

7. Evaluate mass media with your child.  Develop family standards and values and judge media by them.

8. PRAISE your child's behavior.

9. Respect your child's ideas and knowledge.

10. Discuss rules with your child.  Gifted children like to know "why?"

11. Play complex games that may be intended for older children.

12. Provide time free for thinking and daydreaming.

13. Allow your child to be gullible and childlike at times.

14. Help your child classify, analyze, and react to his/her environment.

15. Risk-taking takes courage and needs support.

16. Encourage your child to set goals, celebrating success and analyzing failures.

17. Help your child learn to accept constructive criticism.

18. Encourage polished performance and mastery; help your child to do his/her best,  remembering to measure "best" by child-standards.