The people who post here are probably not an average cross-section of the gifted-parent populace, disregarding for a moment the actual levels of giftedness of their children. I believe that they tend to be self-selected to a certain degree based on educational needs, but also in some cases based on an apparent desire to have a gifted child, and as gifted as possible at that. We also have some people post here in attempts to get confirmation that they themselves are different flavors of gifted, with more or less solid foundations for their self-conceptions.
For such people not only do I think that they will tend to see giftedness in every glint from a child's eyeball, but they may have convenient memories in some cases as well regarding their children's development. For IQ-obsessed parents who find little or no objective support over time for their beliefs about their children, many of them must stay away from this place out of fear. That leaves the others, who have some degree of confirmation.
I still remember a post on another message board by a mother whose child was refusing to eat soon after birth, and on that basis was reportedly diagnosed by an attending physician as profoundly gifted. It was difficult to tell whether it was a clever tweak of the other posters' egos, whether the poster was inflating something actually said by a doctor, or whether some doctor really felt he or she had a
sound basis for a diagnosis of profound giftedness in infancy.
Those hopeful mommies and daddies aren't the whole picture, of course. Though the word "always" is awfully strong, I do think that a lot of parents here have a valid notion their children are highly gifted before getting confirmation through testing. Sometimes it's impossible to ignore; there are true positives in with the false ones. And for a parent whose child has extremely early milestones and does turn out to be HG+, it's hard to say that their instincts were false, whether retroactively applied or not.
