How and Why Revealing Your Child’s Multiple Intelligences Can Help Unlock Their Potential
As parents, we want to give our children the opportunity to get inspired and spark passion to learn. We also try to give our kids the chance to discover inner strengths that can turn into careers as adults that they are truly excited about—not just 40 hours a week to pay the bills. As our lifetimes get longer and the global economy gets more competitive, it’s even more critical than ever that our job choices are about more than just money.
At about the time that children enter elementary school, they are eager not only to learn a wide variety of new skills across all eight multiple intelligences, but to begin the long journey to mastery in the subject areas that they find most compelling. However, there are only so many hours in an already long school day to address the individual aptitudes of all students within a public school framework. As a result, it’s our responsibility as parents to key into the multiple intelligence preferences and strengths of our children and give them as many opportunities to nurture those multiple intelligenceinterests as possible.
To quote Gardner, et. Al.’s 2006 revision of Multiple Intelligences, “it is highly desirable for children to observe competent adults or older peers at work or at play in these areas. With such observation, youngsters readily come to appreciate the reasons for the materials as well as the nature of the skills that enable a master to interact with the materials in a meaningful way.”
Click on the links below to find out more about each of the eight multiple intelligences to help key into your child’s innate strengths, and, as a result, help you identify enrichment activities that are likely to delight your child or which kinds of topics you should use as multiple intelligence entry points to help make concepts “click” for kids that are struggling with subject matter.
But don’t solely take your own gut feel for your child’s multiple intelligence strengths (or weaknesses) as the be-all-end-all. Ask your child’s teacher’s perspective on his or her multiple intelligences strengths and interests. Look around the house at your child’s favorite games, books or hobbies for clues to what multiple intelligences your child currently finds inspiring. Be on the lookout for the seeds of potential talent and do your best to cultivate those seeds to those best of your abilities. Or take our award-winning Preference Profile to see through which multiple intelligence lenses your child currently prefer to experience and explore our world, along with his personality type and predominant learning style and how these three learning theories work together to shape the way your child prefers to learn.
Use this knowledge to show your child all of the different ways they are smart and you’ll not only give more breadth to her concept of intelligence, but more depth to her own self-esteem.
By learning more about both learning and play behaviors of your children with regard to their multiple intelligence preferences, you will be better able to teach and parent in a way that celebrates and embraces your child’s personality type, multiple intelligences and learning style, as well as help teachers, tutors and mentors understand how to make your unique child’s seeds of potential blossom. Take our preference profile and unlock the keys to your child’s potential now!
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For a complete listing of the references we use to create Kidzmet’s recommendations, please click here.