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CHILD CARE

Confidence is one of the greatest gifts a parent can give their child. 

Carl Pickhardt, a psychologist and author of 15 parenting books, says a

kid who lacks confidence will be reluctant to try new or challenging
things because they're scared of failing or disappointing others.

This can end up holding them back later in life and prevent them from
having a successful career.

"The enemies of confidence are discouragement and fear," he says. So, as

a parent, it's your job to encourage and support your child as they
attempt to tackle difficult tasks.

Here are 17 more tips for raising a confident child: 

1. Appreciate effort no matter if they win or lose

When you're growing up, the journey is more important than the
destination. 

So whether your child makes the winning goal for his team or
accidentally kicks it out of bounds, applaud their effort, Pickhardt says.
They should never feel embarrassed for trying.

"Over the long haul, consistently trying hard builds more confidence
than intermittently doing well," he explains. 

2. Encourage practice to build competence

Encourage your child to practice whatever it is they're interested in —
but do so without putting too much pressure on them.

Harmony Shu, a piano prodigy, told Ellen DeGeneres that she started
practicing when she was just 3 years old.

"Practice invests effort in the confident expectation that improvement will

follow," Pickhardt explains. 

3. Let them figure out problems by themselves

If you do the hard work for your child then they'll never develop the
abilities or the confidence to figure out problems on their own.

"Parental help can prevent confidence derived from self-help and figuring
out on the child's own," Pickhardt explains. 
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In other words, better that your child gets a few B's and C's rather than
straight A's, so long as they are actually learning how to solve the
problems and do the work. 

4. Let them act their age

Don't expect your child to act like an adult. "When a child feels that only
performing as well as parents is good enough, that unrealistic standard
may discourage effort," he says. "Striving to meet advanced age
expectations can reduce confidence."

5. Encourage curiosity
Sometimes a child's endless stream of questions can be tiresome, but it
should be encouraged.

Paul Harris of Harvard University told The Guardian that asking

questions is a helpful exercise for a child's development because it means
they realize that "there are things they don't know ... that there are
invisible worlds of knowledge they have never visited."

When children start school, those from households that encouraged

curious questions have an edge over the rest of their classmates because
they've had practice taking in information from their parents, The
Guardian reported, and that translates to taking in information from
their teacher. In other words, they know how to learn better and faster.

Your favourite child stars: where are they now?

6. Give them new challenges
Show your child that they can make and accomplish small goals to reach
a big accomplishment — like riding a bike without training wheels. 

"Parents can nurture confidence by increasing responsibilities that must

be met," Pickhardt explains. 

7. Avoid creating short cuts or making exceptions for your child

Special treatment can communicate a lack of confidence, Pickhardt says.
"Entitlement is no substitute for confidence."

8. Never criticize their performance

Nothing will discourage your child more than criticizing his or her efforts.
Giving useful feedback and making suggestions is fine — but never tell
them they're doing a bad job.
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If your kid is scared to fail because they worry you'll be angry or

disappointed, they'll never try new things.

"More often than not, parental criticism reduces the child's self-valuing
and motivation," says Pickhardt.

9. Treat mistakes as building blocks for learning

"Learning from mistakes builds confidence," he says. But this only
happens when you, as a parent, treat mistakes as an opportunity to
learn and grow. 

Don't be over-protective of your child. Allow them to mess up every now

and then, and help them understand how they can better approach the
task next time. 

Pickhardt says parents should see "uh-oh" moments as an opportunity to

teach their kids not to fear failure.

10. Open the door to new experiences

Pickhardt says you, as a parent, have a responsibility to "increase life
exposures and experiences so the child can develop confidence in coping
with a larger world." 

Exposing children to new things teaches them that no matter how scary
and different something seems, they can conquer it.

11. Teach them what you know how to do

You are your child's hero — at least until they're a teenager. 

Use that power to teach them what you know about how to think, act,
and speak. Set a good example, and be a role model.

Pickhardt says watching you succeed will help your child be more
confident that they can do the same.

12. Don't tell them when you're worried about them

Parental worry can often be interpreted by the child as a vote of no
confidence, he says. "Expressing parental confidence engenders the
child's confidence."

13. Praise them when they deal with adversity

Life is not fair. It's hard, and every child will have to learn that at some
point. 
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When they do encounter hardships, Pickhardt says parents should point

out how enduring these challenges will increase their resilience.

It's important to remind your child that every road to success is filled
with setbacks, he adds.

14. Offer your help and support, but not too much of it
Giving too much assistance too soon can reduce the child's ability for
self-help, says Pickhardt.

"Making parental help contingent on the child's self-help first can build
confidence."

15. Applaud their courage to try something new

Whether it's trying out for the travel basketball team or going on their
first roller coaster, Pickhardt says parents should praise their kids for
trying new things. He suggests saying something as simple as, "You are
brave to try this!"

"Comfort comes from sticking to the familiar; courage is required to dare

the new and different," he says. 

16. Celebrate the excitement of learning

When you're growing up, the journey is more important than the
destination. 

So whether your child makes the winning goal for his team or
accidentally kicks it out of bounds, applaud their effort, Pickhardt says.
They should never feel embarrassed for trying.

"Over the long haul, consistently trying hard builds more confidence
than intermittently doing well," he explains. 

17. Don't allow them to escape reality by spending all their time on
the internet
Don't allow your kid to hide behind a computer screen. Instead,
encourage them to engage with real people in the real world.

"Confidence in the virtual world (although important) is not the same as

real world confidence that offline effectiveness brings," Pickhardt says.

18. Be authoritative, but not too forceful or strict

When parents are too strict or demanding, the child's confidence to self-
direct can be reduced.
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"Dependence on being told can keep the child from acting bold," he says.

Natalie Walters contributed to a previous version of this article. 

Read more:

When Maryam Mirzakhani died at the tragically early age of 40 this

month, the news stories talked of her as a genius. The only woman to
win the Fields Medal – the mathematical equivalent of a Nobel prize –
and a Stanford professor since the age of 31, this Iranian-born
academic had been on a roll since she started winning gold medals at
maths Olympiads in her teens.

How to bring out the genius in your child

 

Read more

It would be easy to assume that someone as special as Mirzakhani

must have been one of those gifted children who excel from babyhood.
The ones reading Harry Potter at five or admitted to Mensa not much
later. The child that takes maths GCSE while still in single figures, or
a rarity such as Ruth Lawrence, who was admitted to Oxford while her
contemporaries were still in primary school.

But look closer and a different story emerges. Mirzakhani was born in
Tehran, one of three siblings in a middle-class family whose father
was an engineer. The only part of her childhood that was out of the
ordinary was the Iran-Iraq war, which made life hard for the family in
her early years. Thankfully it ended around the time she went to
secondary school.

Mirzakhani, did go to a highly selective girls’ school but maths wasn’t

her interest – reading was. She loved novels and would read anything
she could lay her hands on; together with her best friend she would
prowl the book stores on the way home from school for works to buy
and consume.
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Notes & TheoriesScience Weekly Live: What makes a genius?

Recorded live at London's Science Museum, Alok Jha and the panel explore
what it means to be a genius

Listen

As for maths, she did rather poorly at it for the first couple of years in
her middle school, but became interested when her elder brother told
her about what he’d learned. He shared a famous maths problem from
a magazine that fascinated her – and she was hooked. The rest is
mathematical history.

Is her background unusual? Apparently not. Most Nobel laureates

were unexceptional in childhood. Einstein was slow to talk and was
dubbed the dopey one by the family maid. He failed the general part of
the entry test to Zurich Polytechnic – though they let him in because
of high physics and maths scores. He struggled at work initially,
failing to get academic post and being passed over for promotion at the
Swiss Patent Office because he wasn’t good enough at machine
technology. But he kept plugging away and eventually rewrote the
laws of Newtonian mechanics with his theory of relativity.

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Lewis Terman, a pioneering American educational psychologist, set up

a study in 1921 following 1,470 Californians, who excelled in the
newly available IQ tests, throughout their lives. None ended up as the
great thinkers of their age that Terman expected they would. But he
did miss two future Nobel prize winners – Luis Alvarez and William
Shockley, both physicists – whom he dismissed from the study as
their test scores were not high enough.

There is a canon of research on high performance, built over the last

century, that suggests it goes way beyond tested intelligence. On top
of that, research is clear that brains are malleable, new neural
pathways can be forged, and IQ isn’t fixed. Just because you can read
Harry Potter at five doesn’t mean you will still be ahead of your
contemporaries in your teens.
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According to my colleague, Prof Deborah Eyre, with whom I’ve

collaborated on the book Great Minds and How to Grow Them, the
latest neuroscience and psychological research suggests most people,
unless they are cognitively impaired, can reach standards of
performance associated in school with the gifted and talented.
However, they must be taught the right attitudes and approaches to
their learning and develop the attributes of high performers –
curiosity, persistence and hard work, for example – an approach Eyre
calls “high performance learning”. Critically, they need the right
support in developing those approaches at home as well as at school.

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 Maryam Mirzakhani won the Fields Medal, the mathematical equivalent of the Nobel
prize, but showed little maths ability to begin with. Photograph: Clay Mathematics
Institute

So, is there even such a thing as a gifted child? It is a highly contested

area. Prof Anders Ericsson, an eminent education psychologist at
Florida State University, is the co-author of Peak: Secrets from the
New Science of Expertise. After research going back to 1980 into
diverse achievements, from music to memory to sport, he doesn’t
think unique and innate talents are at the heart of performance.
Deliberate practice, that stretches you every step of the way, and
around 10,000 hours of it, is what produces the expert. It’s not a
magic number – the highest performers move on to doing a whole lot
more, of course, and, like Mirzakhani, often find their own unique
perspective along the way.

Ericsson’s memory research is particularly interesting because

random students, trained in memory techniques for the study, went
on to outperform others thought to have innately superior memories –
those you might call gifted.
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He got into the idea of researching the effects of deliberate practice

because of an incident at school, in which he was beaten at chess by
someone who used to lose to him. His opponent had clearly practised.

But it is perhaps the work of Benjamin Bloom, another distinguished

American educationist working in the 1980s, that gives the most
pause for thought and underscores the idea that family is intrinsically
important to the concept of high performance.

Bloom’s team looked at a group of extraordinarily high achieving

people in disciplines as varied as ballet, swimming, piano, tennis,
maths, sculpture and neurology, and interviewed not only the
individuals but their parents, too.

How to raise a brilliant child without screwing them up

 

Read more

He found a pattern of parents encouraging and supporting their

children, in particular in areas they enjoyed themselves. Bloom’s
outstanding adults had worked very hard and consistently at
something they had become hooked on young, and their parents all
emerged as having strong work ethics themselves.

While the jury is out on giftedness being innate and other factors
potentially making the difference, what is certain is that the
behaviours associated with high levels of performance are replicable
and most can be taught – even traits such as curiosity

 The desire to know more – curiosity – is at the heart of all learning. Photograph: Matt
Cardy/Getty Images

Wendy Berliner
Tue 25 Jul ‘17 09.38 BSTLast modified on Thu 27 Jul ‘17 10.27 BST
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What support do children need from teachers and parents to develop

the cognitive skills, values, attitudes and attributes needed for lifetime
success? Here are some ideas from Great Minds and How to Grow
Them, based on Prof Deborah Eyre’s approach, to help your child
become a high performer.

Why there’s no such thing as a gifted child

 

Read more

Think right
• If children get stuck at something, don’t sort it out. Ask “How could
you do this?” “Have you done anything similar before?” “What did you
do then?” This helps them develop their own learning ideas and makes
them much less likely to say they can’t do things.
• Build big picture thinking. Ask “What would happen if … it never got
dark/the rivers ran dry/ everyone ignored the law?” A key
characteristic of students labelled as gifted is their ability to see how
learning connects to the wider world. 
• Build imagination. Ask “How would you weigh a
giraffe/rhinoceros/bridge/house/star?” Creativity builds learning
capability and is vital for high performance.
• Develop critical or logical thinking. Ask ‘Why do you think … bread
goes mouldy if you don’t freeze it/babies cry/ leaves fall when autumn
comes?” The ability to deduct, hypothesise, reason and seek evidence
is probably the characteristic most associated with academic success.
• Help them monitor their own progress. Ask: “What do you need to be
able to do this? How can you check you’re on track? How can you tell
whether you are doing it right?” This one is the key to maximising
thinking skills.

Behave right 
• Intellectual confidence. This is a “can do” approach to learning, even
when it’s hard. If a child says they are no good at something, say: “I
know you can. I know it’s hard to do now but I know you can learn
how to do this in time if you work at it.”
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• Open mindedness. Being open to new ideas is the hallmark of an

advanced learner. Start with being open minded yourself so you model
what it’s like to be receptive to ideas that differ from your own. 
• Curiosity. Children ask lots of questions if you answer them, though
the number falls dramatically once they get to school and only the
class teacher is there to answer. The desire to know more – curiosity –
is at the heart of all learning. High performance is fuelled by it. The
more curious children are, the more whys and hows they ask, the
better they do at school and in life.
• Practice. It’s the only way to get good at something. Make sure it is
regular, deliberate and planned, working towards achievable
incremental goals, and that you practise what you can’t do well.
• Perseverance. To keep going when it’s tough is the most important
behaviour in high performance. Model it yourself. With younger
children you can talk about what would happen if no one persevered –
the farmer who didn’t bother to harvest his crops, the builder to finish
the house, the surgeon to complete the operation. With older ones,
encourage a sense of pride in what they do so that they are motivated
to persevere

They let us out of the studio to spend a night in the museum...

It was our first ever recording in front of a live audience, taking over
part of London's Science Museum to discuss the nature of genius.

Making his first appearance on this podcast was genius

personified Stephen Hawking, who opened a debate on The Genius of
Britain at the museum's IMAX cinema earlier in the evening.

The theoretical physicist features in Channel 4's new TV series Genius

of Britain: Scientists Who Changed the World  which began on 30 May.
You'll be able to catch up with any episodes you miss on 4oD.

We spoke to someone who could be considered a modern day genius, a

man estimated to be worth more than a billion pounds, entrepreneur-
inventor Sir James Dyson.

Our guest for the night, and helping us to nail the nature of genius,
was psychologist Dr Kevin Dutton. Kevin is an expert on social
influence. His new book Flipnosis is out now.
 11

On our panel of Guardian genii were Nell Boase and science

correspondent Ian Sample. Earlier we sent them roaming around the
museum's Lates event: Nell tested her IQ, and Ian watched as the
Babbage difference engine came to life.

We also handed the mic over to our audience to nominate their

favourite genius and ask questions of the panel.

If you came along, thanks so much. We would love to get your

feedback on the night. We hope you enjoyed it. You can add your
comments below or tweet @iansample, @alokjha or @scienceweekly.
Relive the night by keying #swlive.

View our pictures and upload your own to our Flickr photostream.
(You'll need to log in and join our group).

Finally, our thanks to the wonderful staff at London's Science

Museum.

WARNING: contains strong language.

Follow the podcast on our Science Weekly Twitter feed and receive

updates on all breaking science news stories from Guardian Science.

Email scienceweeklypodcast@gmail.com.

Join our Facebook group.

Listen back through our archive.

Subscribe free via iTunes to ensure every episode gets delivered. (Here

is the non-iTunes URL feed).

Where does the drive to succeed come from? And if it results in

exceptional achievement (as defined by external norms such as power,
status and wealth) does that have to go hand in hand with being a
troubled, agonised person?

The latest evidence suggests that genes play little part – see box below
– and that nurture is critical, whether it be carrot or stick. In my case,
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for instance, purely because I was the only boy with three sisters, I
was treated completely differently by my father. Despite my repeated
failure at school, he constantly encouraged me to see myself as clever
and I eventually did OK. He gave no such encouragement to my sisters
in their academic careers (fortunately, my mum did).

I would go so far as to say that, had I been swapped at conception

with one of my sisters, she would be writing these words. Each
person’s unique history, starting before birth, sets them on particular
paths, explaining why siblings differ. Think of yourself as a character
in a movie and ask, what’s my backstory?

At the simplest level, performance is nurtured through teaching – for

good or ill. I can teach my son his times tables but, equally, if I am a
pickpocket by profession, show him how to do that.

Then there is modelling. My driving is shamefully disobedient of traffic

regulations (learned from my father’s example) – perhaps my children
will model that or perhaps they will copy my wife’s conscientiously
lawful approach. That depends on our family dynamics – perhaps my
son will follow me; my daughter her mother.

Which brings us to identification, in which the child makes the

parent’s behaviour or injunctions part of themselves. They do that out
of the mixture of love and maltreatment that all of us experience.

The love bit is obvious enough. My son asked me to explain about

office politics when I was writing a book on it. Because we love each
other, he ran with the ideas, trying out ingratiation on a teacher at
school by complimenting him on his tie, with pleasing results: as
someone he loves, he identified with my interest and put it to his own
use.

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But, while there are exceptions, it’s maltreatment that seems to fuel
exceptional achievement more than anything. It’s not that genetic little
bit more that enables it – it’s trauma and adversity.

For instance, one in three exceptional achievers in all fields that have
been studied lost a parent before the age of 15 (compared with 18%
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before modern medicine). That applies equally to prime ministers,

American presidents, British entrepreneurs and exceptional writers.
These people are driven by the pain of loss and a terrifying loss of
control to wrest their destiny from fate.

The specifics of the childhood adversity often shape which interest is

pursued. In the case of Gina Ford, for example, she slept in her
mother’s bed until the age of 11. That played a big role in her
becoming the author of books that try to persuade mothers to get their
babies sleeping on their own from the start.

Whereas Ford prescribes strict routines, Penelope Leach’s childhood

made her a passionate advocate of demand-led, infant-centred care.
Leach’s father favouritised her older sister and was authoritarian. Her
parents divorced when she was 12 and Leach’s books take her adored
mother’s side, and lots of hugging.

Of course, exceptional success does require exceptionally hard work.

The classic illustration is the fact that all professional orchestral
soloists who have been studied have done at least 10,000 hours of
practice. No orchestral players have done so (they average 8,000
hours).

But why do some put in that extra 2,000 hours, and why do some
become emotionally healthy exceptional achievers? The very different
stories of Tiger Woods and the three Polgár sisters, the grandmaster
chess prodigies, illustrate this well.

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 Tiger Woods, aged 15, with his father Earl celebrate his victory at the 1991 USGA
Junior Amateur Championships in 1991. Photograph: Rick Dole/Getty Images

Woods’ father, Earl, had a thwarted ambition to be a baseball star. A

second marriage to Kultida, a tough and intelligent member of
Thailand’s ruling elite, led to their only son. Earl said that he had a
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sense from the birth onwards that this baby would become “the
greatest man to walk the earth”. That surely said more about him and
his unfulfilled ambitions than it did about the baby.

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From nine months, Tiger was hitting golf balls and his first
appearance on television occurred when he was two and a
half, already exhibiting an astonishing golf swing. His parents were
implacable, ruthless and imaginative hothousers. Along the way, both
boy and man were hijacked as a vehicle for their aspirations.

His compulsive and increasingly risk-taking addiction to casual sex

seems to have been an attempt to reclaim something for himself.
There is a large body of evidence showing that exercising self-control,
doing “good” things (such as practising golf all day from infancy) leads
to “ego-depletion”. That produces a much greater likelihood of doing
“bad” things as compensation. Put crudely, if you do that dreaded
paperwork or housework for an hour, you may feel more like scoffing a
chocolate bar or having a drink afterwards.

Interestingly, the exception to the ego-depletion rule is where the

person is doing the self-controlled act because they feel they have
chosen it – self-determined, rather than feeling it is imposed. Which
brings me to the Polgár sisters.

In the 1960s, László Polgár was a Hungarian educational psychologist

who had written several scientific papers on the effectiveness of
practice in creating excellence. Explaining his passionate convictions
to his future wife, Klara, she fell for him as well as his arguments.
They chose chess for their experiment because it has an objective
metric by which achievement can be measured. Neither were
exceptional chess players.

As luck would have it, Klara gave birth to three daughters. There had
been no female grandmasters and it was widely assumed that women
were genetically incapable of the cognitive skills entailed in exceptional
chess, and were consequently excluded from top tournaments.

Starting with his eldest daughter, Susan, Polgár was careful to treat it
as a playful activity, turning it into a fantasy of dramatic wins and
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losses. Whereas Earl and Kultida Woods had coerced perfection from
Tiger, the Polgárs encouraged enjoyment,

By the time Susan had turned five, she was excited by playing and
spent hundreds of hours practising. She was entered into a local
competition and treated it as fun, winning 10-0, causing a sensation.

Meanwhile, her younger sisters were intrigued and László allowed

them to feel the pieces, seeing them as toys, with no formal tuition
until they were five. Interviewed recently, all three girls described
playing the game as something that they loved doing – it never felt like
a chore. Instead of messing about playing Monopoly, netball or going
to the local swimming pool, chess was just what the Polgár family
enjoyed.

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Sure enough, in 1991 the eldest daughter became the first female
grandmaster. The second daughter had 10 straight wins against male
grandmasters, a performance rated the fifth best in the history of
chess. Her younger sister became a grandmaster at the age of 15, the
youngest ever, of either gender.

Polgár understood that coercion was less valuable than small

children’s need to enjoy fantasy play. Consequently, his daughters all
seem to have grown into satiable, well-balanced people rather than
success addicts.

A strong clue to the dynamics of the Polgár family comes from a

fascinating footnote to the story. When the eldest daughter had been
crowned as the first female grandmaster, a Dutch billionaire offered to
pay for the Polgárs to adopt three boys from a developing nation to
show that the experiment could be replicated. They turned him down,
Klara feeling they had made their point.

For parents, the implications are clear. Most of us say we just want
our offspring to be happy, but most also want them to do well at
school and beyond.

Hothousing is not the way – it creates needy, hungry and lonely

adults. Emotional distress is common in exceptional achievers. British
 16

senior managers are actually more prone to narcissism (me-me-me

grandiosity) than patients in mental hospitals. American ones are four
times more likely to be psychopathic than the general population. It’s
the same in the arts. Top rock stars really are more suicidal than
normal. The more they were maltreated as children, the more likely
they were to die prematurely. Comics and actors suffer more,
with comics especially likely to be depressive.

If you really care a lot about having an exceptional child, just ensure
that your children love you and you them, along with the inevitable
maltreatment that comes with the parenting territory.

By all means have aspirations for them (a child whose parents have
none is emotionally neglected), but if they are going to be an
emotionally healthy exceptional achiever, it must authentically come
from them.

While no exceptional achiever, I do speak whereof I know. My parents

were both psychoanalysts, obsessed with the nature-nurture debate.
There is no gene that has caused me to be writing about this subject.
It came out of the subtle mix of maltreatment and love that led to my
identification with them. If you stop to think about it, it’s probably the
same for you and your ambitions …

• Oliver James is a chartered psychologist and psychotherapist at the

Bowlby Centre. Not In Your Genes by Oliver James is published by
Ebury Press, priced £18.99. To order a copy for £14.99, go
to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.

@oliverj_psych

Your genes don’t dictate your achievement

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It’s the best kept secret of modern science: 16 years of the Human

Genome Project suggest that genes play little or no role in explaining
differences in intelligence. While genes have been found for physical
traits, such as height or eye colour, they are not the reason you are
smarter (or not) than your siblings. Nor are they why you are like your
high-achieving or dullard parents, or their forebears.
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Very likely, you will simply not believe this and are sure from your
own experience that it’s “a bit of both” nature and nurture. But those
genes that have been found only explain 1%-5% of any psychological
traits.

This is not just my opinion, it’s something scientists call “missing

heritability”. Robert Plomin, one of the world’s leading geneticists, told
the Guardian last year: “I have been looking for these genes for 15
years and I don’t have any.”

Having searched under the molecular genetic carpet and behind the
sofa, it’s a well-concealed truth that genes that confer significant
heritabilty are neither there nor likely to be found.

Of course, babies are born different and biological transmission of

traits does occur – it’s just not genetic. For instance, there is
abundant evidence that dyslexia or autism may be due to what
happens during pregnancy, prematurity or difficulties during the birth
itself. About a third of babies are born “difficult” for these reasons, but
it has been proven many times over that the right kind of nurture can
correct it.

That it’s not genes is extremely good news. It means that most babies
have the potential to succeed in conventional terms in exams and
careers. There is no inherent reason why children from low-income
families cannot succeed as much as those from affluent homes.

Studies show that purely through believing that its abilities are not
fixed, a child can increase its performance in key subjects such as
maths. If parents or teachers do not start from the assumption that
abilities are fixed, children perform better. But even more important
than mere beliefs is actual nurture.

Oliver James

Carrot, not the stick: Dos and don’ts

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Do …
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• Encourage your child to enjoy the la-la land of fantasy play as much
as they like, at least until age seven.

• Show unconditional love when they are under five.

• From birth, assume their abilities are limitless.

• Put enjoyment of activities ahead of competitive success.

• Be relaxed about whether they are exceptional, while celebrating it if

it happens.

• They will be exceptional because you have high standards but they
need to identify with those standards by choice.

Don’t …

• Coerce them into activities when small – do the opposite of what is

recommended by hothousing or tiger mothering books.

• Beware of the “little devil” attribution to children as babies and

toddlers – do not assume bad intentions before they are capable of
them.

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 Tiger Woods, aged two, demonstrates his golf swing on US television. Photograph:
CBS via Getty Images

• No strict regimes – punishment and making a child feel like a bad
person crushes the imagination and self-motivation that underly
emotionally healthy achievement.

• No imposition of your own perfectionism. The answer to “I got 98% in

maths” is not “What happened to the other 2%?”
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• No colonisation of your child with your own unfulfilled aspirations:

let them choose the field in which they excel (if you have a good
relationship with them, it will almost certainly be one that arises out
of your own interests)