OK, I could have titled this thread, "Best way to praise your gifted child" but it seems negative headlines get more attention.
I'm still debating with myself on whether to have GS tested. In my search for that answer I found this article,
How not to talk to your kids .
snip:
For the past ten years, psychologist Carol Dweck and her team at Columbia (she�s now at Stanford) studied the effect of praise on students in a dozen New York schools. Her seminal work�a series of experiments on 400 fifth-graders�paints the picture most clearly.
Dweck sent four female research assistants into New York fifth-grade classrooms. The researchers would take a single child out of the classroom for a nonverbal IQ test consisting of a series of puzzles�puzzles easy enough that all the children would do fairly well. Once the child finished the test, the researchers told each student his score, then gave him a single line of praise. Randomly divided into groups, some were praised for their intelligence. They were told, �You must be smart at this.� Other students were praised for their effort: �You must have worked really hard.�
To find the results, follow the link, it is invaluable.
Praising natural ability seems to me to be like praising a kid's eye color. Saying "thank you" for that seems...odd!
