I guess I have a different take on this- I think it really depends on your kid and the schooling situation. My DD10 has not had IQ testing, and we never felt the need to do it, as it wouldn't change her current situation. There are no gifted schools here, we don't plan on moving, she was put in the GT program at school based on her teachers' assessments. Luckily, she stands out easily to those at school,(without them even knowing that she read and spelled easily at 2yo) so we don't feel there would be much to be gained by getting test results.
If her IQ came back showing that she's "not gifted" I wouldn't put much stock in the test, and if it showed that she is, again, I wouldn't put much stock in it, because I already have all the evidence I need. Perhaps that sounds smug, but I don't mean it to- I just don't have that much faith in testing and what it can achieve. (Except in situations where things are not clear or obscured by other issues- luckily, we haven't experienced problems like that with DD.)
Okay, I'll have to backpedal a bit. I was in no way implying that those of you here who haven't had your kid's IQs tested are making up the fact that they are gifted. I, too, don't put full stock in IQ being the be-all end-all of accurate info on who a child is. Having one kid whose IQ varies from the upper 1-teens to the upper 1-40s on IQ tests, I have to admit that they can't be totally accurate at times depending on the child.
That said, I can say that I am as certain as I can be that I see a lot of parents who believe their kids to be gifted whose kids probably are not gifted. What I was getting at above, was that these studies that say that parents are good at iding their kids as gifted were done by psychologists who specialize in testing gifted kids. Sure, if you are the Gifted Development Center, probably the majority of people who are willing to bring their kids in and spend $1500+ to have them tested have accurately identified their kids as gifted. They also probably have a good reason for spending all of that $ for testing: their kids are having trouble in school due to being gifted (one of my dds was tested for that reason), their kids are being mislabeled as having other problems, etc.
If we can all agree that gifted is a person who is in the top few percentiles in terms of ability, then the schools that identify 15-25%+ of their kids as gifted (all of my local schools do this) are obviously identifying more kids as gifted than are actually gifted. Having kids who've been in these programs, I can tell you that most or all of the parents whose kids are in these TAG classes believe that their kids are very gifted. Some of the parents whose kids aren't in TAG also believe that their kids are gifted; maybe some of them are since our TAG programs seem to grab the high achievers more than the underachieving gifted kids. If 20%+ of my local parents believe that they have gifted kids, some of them are obviously not good at accurately identifying their kids as gifted, IMHO.
