One thing that's always attracted me to this forum is that the quality of conversation here tends to be pretty high. Different people have different perspectives, and interesting articles or ideas get posted all the time. I really like that.

This forum is pretty much the only online parenting forum I visit. Any others that I've looked at seem to have too many members engaging in one-upmanship and putdowns. IMO, this type of thing is pretty petty and just detracts from the value of a conversation. It reminds me of the garbage I used to put up with in seventh grade. Too many mean girls, too little respect for others.

This thread has shown a lot of disrespect and a lot of nastiness. A couple of members have tried to justify their posts by writing that "I'm just making an observation," but this seems rather disingenuous and an excuse. As others have observed, there's big difference between saying,

My baby was really alert when he was a week old. Did anyone else notice that? and Other kids look like they've been dosed with sedatives compared to mine.

These two sentences could easily be interpreted as meaning:

My baby was really alert when he was a week old. Did anyone else notice that?

and

Other kids are so brain dead compared to my uberchild.

Emm. I kind of got the impression that this was what Iucounu was trying to communicate.

This thread has been disheartening for me not just because people here actually wrote that other children are zombies/dazed/glazed/drugged compared to their little geniuses. Worse is the fact that at least a couple people don't really seem to get (or care) that what they said is crass and belittling. Why would a person feel a need to belittle another? This is not something I get. As I said, people can (disingenuously IMO) claim that they're just being "honest" or engaging in free speech, but I think that other people may see through that. And I'm thinking that this attitude probably comes across in a general way if it's expressed so bluntly here.

So, yeah, a right to free speech includes a right to belittle other people's kids because they aren't as stupefyingly, electron-splittingly jelly-doughnut brilliant as your own little megabrained toddler and his IQ of ten to the power of six. We are all so small in comparison, I just hope my kids don't go blind from the sheer reflected magnificence of it all. We're just trying to muddle through as best we can, you know?

I guess I'm just voting that you want to belittle others, I'd prefer you do it somewhere else. PM each other. Call each other. Talk at the water cooler. Be as vicious as you please in private. Just don't give people like the woman who wrote that sick-of-hearing-about-your-gifted-kid-blog a valid reason to complain about parents of gifted kids. Please?