Parents under/over estimating their child's abilities- I see this often. I have a friend with 2 kids- a girl age 5 and boy age 4. My friend believes her daughter is gifted and her daughter does do well in kindergarten. She is worried that her son might be slow and he loathes preschool. From my perspective, her daughter certainly is bright, but her son is probably smarter. He taught himself to use the computer, can get to websites that he likes, and has mad number skills. Its the boy who chose the animal encyclopedia from my bookcase and spends hours looking at the pictures and asking adults to read to him. I don't know whether either of those children is gifted, but I would be shocked if the girl scored higher than the boy on IQ tests. Their mother would be shocked if it were the other way around!
Interesting! I know a family like this with an oldest movivated, high achieving daughter and 2 younger sons that definitely don't jump through the hoops the oldest would, but are clearly quite sharp and precocious in my eyes. I watch those little boys with great interest. I think it's those covert gifties that sometimes can be the hardest to find a fit for.
Anyway, I actually don't disagree totally with the author of this article. But the article was poorly worded with regards to the gifted community. If you go into the comments section, the author ended up back pedaling a bit on some of his statements. I do agree with you that parents over and under estimate their kids all the time. I'm a solid under-estimator. Which is actually mostly ok since we're homeschooling and I'm not advocating in a regular classroom. I mostly keep them moving forward on basics and let them explore their interests.
