2025 Beckman Institute Mentorship Seminar - Dr. Marty Nemko

Becoming a Protege

The Excellent Mentor

On Mentoring

A Word With Marty: "MENTOR"

The Warehouse Pairer: a short-short story

"Handrails: Sources of support through life's journey.

The Meaning of Life From Right Field

Less Obvious Tips for Mentors and Mentees

8 Ways to Support Under-Served High-Achieving Kids: A particularly potent use of your time

Children of the well-off are likely to get significant support toward achieving their potential. Kids from the multigenerational poor may face challenges that make major improvement difficult. So it may be wise to focus on a middle-ground: high achievers from working-class or blue-collar backgrounds. But how? My Psychology Today article today offers eight ways you might be of value.

Mentoring a Gifted Child

We tend to donate our time and money to “the least among us.”  But if the goal is to make the biggest difference, we might want to focus on people with unusually good potential to profit. My favorite example: Mentor or fund the mentoring of a kid(s) from families with modest income who are high performers. Why can that be so potent?

• Of course, some not-high-performers become late bloomers. But current high-performers are more likely to grow up to cure our diseases, create better products, be wise leaders, etc.
• The rich are more likely to help their high-performing kids to live up to their potential. That’s less likely with kids from lower-income backgrounds.
• One-on-one efforts are likely to yield significant benefit because the engagements are individualized and they bring the emotional connection that can foster motivation.

My PsychologyToday.com article today shows how to recruit and make the most of such a mentoring relationship, for the child and for you.
Of course, in today's era of suspicion especially about sexual predators, you may be limited to being a participant in an existing at-school program, but maybe not. In either case, the following should be helpful.

Peer Mentoring: A potent tool for self-improvement and building friendship

Whether it’s for yourself, your child, or anyone else you care about, peer mentoring is among the more potent (and free) ways to improve a life.

In peer mentoring, two to eight people meet regularly in-person or virtually (phone/teleconference, Skype, Facetime, or Zoom) to listen, ask questions, and offer advice. Usually, the focus is a problem a person is facing but sometimes, especially after a relationship among the members has been developed, it might simply be to report on something good, bad, or just interesting that’s happened or is upcoming.

I have initiated and been a participant in a peer mentoring pair and a group of eight for years. My PsychologyToday.com article today summarizes what I’ve learned.

Mentor a Bright Boy

Among the most beneficial ways to volunteer is to mentor a bright boy.

Endless programs exist to mentor and otherwise help girls and women, far fewer for boys, even though boys' school and life performance, relative to girls, has so declined in recent decades. For example, in 1980, the ratio of college graduates was 50/50. Now it's approaching 40% male, 60% female.

I advocate helping bright boys rather than boys in general because the public schools are now so focused on helping the lowest achievers that bright kids' great potential is so often being wasted. They're forced to sit stultified and if they can't, they're too often put on a Ritalin leash.

How you mentor can vary. For example, you could do a recreational activity together: build a model, play basketball with him, whatever. In the process, bring up topics that might help him identify interests, reveal problems, come up with questions to ask you. You could meet once a week or once a month, or not meet at all--mentorship by phone and email counts.

To find a bright boy who could use a mentor, contact the counselor at a local school, the gifted child coordinator in your school district, the principal of your church or synagogue's Sunday School, or simply ask your friends or PTA members.