Reference books for whatever he's interested in. With that age, intellect, and drive, he will eat them up. Also support his interests even if he moves on easily

Reference books for whatever he's interested in. With that age, intellect, and drive, he will eat them up. Also support his interests even if he moves on easily. Unlike others I don't think he will benefit from enrichment programs much. Even in talented-youth programs (e.g. CTY, where I've taught) teachers will find it difficult to challenge him, and it sounds like he is already self-motivated. ---- EDIT now that I have a keyboard, to expound on the teacher thing: I've been on both the giving and receiving sides of talented-youth education. The problem for students with such high IQs is not that teachers don't know things they don't (they certainly do), but that teachers often have no experience with correcting the mental models & processes such intelligent children develop. E.g. when I was young, I developed (incorrect) "folk" theories as to how capacitors worked, or the meaning of dividing one by zero, etc. In both cases I was wrong, and teachers told me I was wrong, but they couldn't explain why I was wrong (and hence correct my underlying misconceptions). It wasn't until college that I would encounter instructors who had such a profound grasp of the subject that they could deconstruct my folk theories. (Not that my theories were deep; just that my misunderstandings were deeply rooted.) On the flip side, during the years I was a teacher/tutor, I met maybe 2-3 students whom I could tell right away I couldn't help. I could have told them things they didn't know, sure, but not anything they couldn't have read from a book. There were no flaws in their reasoning skills that I was capable of understanding, let alone fixing. To be a truly effective teacher for a highly inquisitive mind, you have to be at least as intelligent, and more knowledgable than the student. For someone so smart as your second cousin, it will be a very tough find. ---- EDIT2: Academics aside, here is something cynical. If your family is not upper-class, and you are primarily concerned with the kid's success rather than straight-up smarts, find a friend who is upper-class and have the kid hang out with them. As someone with a middle-class upbringing, as I've entered my 30s I've come to realize how tangible class is in terms of networking and "getting ahead in life" (if that's what you're into). You can switch class with a lot of work by being very good at what you do, but it's a lot easier if you already "fit in" with the upper class because that stuff rubbed off on you when you were young. (Again, I recognize this is somewhat cynical and others probably have very different ideas.)