The relations of maternal attitudes, concerns, and support networks to intellectually gifted children's perceived competence, as measured by the Pictorial Scale of Perceived Competence and Social Acceptance for Young Children (Harter & Pike, 1984), were examined in a sample of 28 middle-class, Caucasian mothers and their gifted preschool children. Mothers' attitudes toward independence and strictness, their concerns, and support network variables (i.e., perceived helpfulness of the network, willingness to seek help from the network, and the amount of contact the child had with network members) were found to be significantly related to multiple dimensions of children's perceived competence. Implications for theory, research, and practice address understanding gifted children's perceived competence in relation to parental correlates.
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