It is socially acceptable to brag about your child's athletic accomplishments, but not their intellectual ones. That's the society we live in. Anti-intellectualism has been a growing movement since the 80s. Sport good. Smart bad.
With that said, some people are going to interpret bragging where it never belonged. I gave an example in another thread where a mom overheard my wife and I having a conversation about DD's writing project, and the mom asked us about the project. I told that mom that my DD is gifted, not to brag about it, but because I didn't want her using that project as a measuring stick and wondering why her own DD's work was so far below that level.
However, just because I didn't say it to brag doesn't mean it won't be interpreted that way. For someone who uses their child as a source of personal validation and emotional support, any positive statement about your child will diminish themselves in their own eyes. As I've said elsewhere, that's not your problem, that's theirs.
Obviously there are plenty of parents of gifted children who use their children in the same way, and they give the rest of us a bad name. I've seen both sides of it, too... a gifted parent who is constantly bragging about her children, and then this same gifted parent publicly shaming her children when they grew up to be underachievers.
Anyway, this is why I have so little respect for the author of that blog post. She comes right out and admits that she had children in large part to make her feel good about herself. And since she can't get the validation she was seeking for raising a gifted child, she's trying to get it by acquiring acclaim for raising a polite one. It's got nothing to do with her child, it's all about her. Bleh.
