Thanks for the response suevv. I believe you're the second poster to bring up imposter syndrome in this thread. I had never heard of it before.
I do not consider myself gifted and I believe my spouse would think the same of herself. I took an IQ test in my early 20's that put me into the low 130's (WISC-IV). This was to help out a friend who was on her way to getting a doctorates in clinical psychology. Apparently she needed to run full length IQ tests on a number of people as part of her program. The score puts me around the 98 percentile which is about where I would have placed myself- not a level I would consider "gifted".
When I compare my DS's ability to soak in information to my own ability as a child, I have zero question that his brain is working at a level I will never be capable of. I used to share with my friends just how fast he learns new information (i.e. having him demonstrate the times' table as a 4 year old). But with his attainment of new knowledge and abilities seeming to never slow, I have all but stopped sharing with others his incredible-to-me feats. I'm not sure exactly why that is, possibly not wanting to seem like a show off. I only glanced over briefly the wikipedia page for imposter syndrome, but perhaps this has something to do with that.
First - I think there is a nuance to "when parents suspect giftedness, they're usually right." When you are talking about gifted parents, it seems that if the (gifted) parents have any suspicion the child is gifted AT ALL, there is probably actually a very high level of giftedness. Search on "impostor syndrome" and you'll see why this is true and see how many of us struggle with this as to ourselves and as to our children.
