I agree with tracey. I came to discover early on that everybody defines things differently and in the end it is apples to oranges. Such as first words. When my daughter started putting sounds together I didn't consider it first words, but discovered that some of my friends did. Their idea of an acceptable word was when a child would produce some sound repeatedly for a specific object. Is that really a word? It's part of the gray area and why making blanket statements should not be considered absolute until we understand the person's definition. As for the learning of the ABCs; I have discovered many claims to be just that: being able to recite the abc song but not really identify the individual letters.
Oh ... and the teaching of the toddlers. We are definitely seeing a pattern in today's society. Someone posted a link to another board on this one recently and I was appalled by what it represented. Clearly a push to teach and in a way that was clearly competitive. I wish I could find that link again because I was trying to show my husband. I was floored. The board represented everything I dislike about curriculum for the toddler.
I agree with this one and I think you mean the link I posted while ago. You can probably find it from my old posts
But I think it is fairly common for a 2 year old know their alphabets as there are so many toys & books with them. I also tend to socialize with parents having similar professional background which forms a bias towards what seems normal or not.
At least for us DD learning to route count, alphabets, numbers, shapes etc so young was the first time we as her parents realized that maybe she might be more advanced than we thought. These kind of things are easily recognized. You need to see and interact with lot of kids to be able to know if your child's humor or play is normal age level or not. Much easier for parents to notice that their 18mo old knows alphabets and counts than that the child has a higher level imaginary play than other 18mo olds. Only thing I still notice from the level of play is that some other 2-3 year olds seem so "babyish" compared to DD. She is turing 3 and we are used to her academic skills so I'm not sure how gifted DD is as it is much harder to make comparisons after you are way past the alphabet stage (and as I read post here I'm thinking that reading is normal for this age group too).
