NURTURE
Power Your Child with
By Neu Weetee
Multiple ntelligences
IQ is not the only indicator
of intelligence! Family
& Life speaks to Julie
Viens, a leading expert
on the theory of Multiple
Intelligences and
discovers that all children
are smart, just not always
in the way you think.
For a parent, understanding how your
child processes information is becoming
more important now, especially since
competition for places in prestigious
schools gets more heated. With this
ever-escalating emphasis on academic
results, focusing on your child’s innate
talents seems to be an option that will
pay off in the long run.
The traditional measurement of
intelligence – psychometrically
(i.e. IQ) – may just fall short on
shedding light on how your child
actually processes information. And
that is where the theory of Multiple
Intelligences comes in.
The theory of Multiple Intelligences,
or MI, was first proposed by Howard
Gardner in his 1983 book, Frames
of Mind: The Theory of Multiple
Intelligences. MI suggests that human
beings possess many cognitive
capacities, in contrast to the common
understanding that we are only
endowed with a single intelligence.
To date, there are eight distinct
intelligences expounded by the theory:
linguistic, logical-mathematical, visualspatial, musical, bodily-kinaesthetic,
interpersonal, and intrapersonal and
the ni