So, it might seem wonderful to a parent to tell the world how bright her child is, but the child might see things very differently. Kids don't typically need someone advertising the fact that they're really incredibly different from almost everyone around them.
I agree. I don't think some parents think about how their "bragging" can hurt their kids. The parent mentioned earlier in this thread saying everything their kid "touched turns to gold"?? Yuck!! How will the kid handle it when something he touches merely turns to silver?
On the other hand, I don't think my parents handled it the best way either. They told me that all the kids in my school got 99th percentile on all their standardized tests and that an IQ of 152 was very "typical". I think it made it more confusing and frustrating for me when it was quite evident that I was actually different than most of my peers. I remember when I was 6 or 7 I was thinking either (a) all tests are extremely flawed and meaningless and/or (b) my parents clearly didn't understand percentiles, normal curves, standard deviations, or even the most basic principles of statistics. (I was sort of obsessed with math.) LOL!
So I think my (well meaning) parents went too far the other way - they pretended I wasn't gifted (although they enrolled in gifted programming and a special University enrichment - etc).
I'm sure there is a good middle ground - and most of us are striving to find it.
