I would personally take with a grain of salt the comments on giftedness by people who work with children in an unrelated capacity. Is every bright-eyed child gifted?
I'm guessing that a child could be very alert but not gifted, or at least not ultra-bright. (FWIW I have two children who were both very alert after delivery, one now speech-delayed with giftedness unknown.) We see testing results from people's children here who have fast processing speed and good memory, but lower scores in other areas relative to what I think of as a more typical highly gifted pattern (which often includes low processing speed etc.). Is it a stretch to think that some similar fast-processing kids might be wired quite right in some ways, be extra alert at or before birth, and still not be extraordinary in terms of deep rational thought later on?
I also question the weight that is sometimes given to early physical or other milestones. Very bright children sometimes have slow physical development, and others have apparently slow early verbal development. This leads to the easy conclusion that observations of early alertness or other development are not necessary for a person to be gifted. But are those observations necessarily sufficient, even for a supposed expert, to draw a conclusion of giftedness?
I'm not aware of any rigorous research in this area. Someone who works with children often may seem to have authority in this area, when they have absolutely none. And though I think alertness might be some evidence that a child will possibly turn out to be at least somewhat gifted, a correlation is not proof of anything in a particular case. I don't believe for a moment that random child health care professionals, lactaction consultants, etc. can accurately determine giftedness at such a young age, when even testing at later ages by gifted-specialist psychologists may be prone to error.
However, I do believe in confirmation bias, insufficient sample sizes, etc. I also think that in our current IQ-obsessed culture, a person may make positive, meaningless noises about a child's seeming brightness as a way of complimenting the parents. I give this about as much weight as hearing that a person has a "bouncing baby boy" or similar statements.
(Honestly, I always enjoy learning about each child's unique story, including interesting development information and especially when it involves cute pictures. I've just been ruminating over some of these ideas for a while.)
