...not as easy to spot as walking at 6 months or reading before 3.
That, and what lucounu said, are also part of it for me. So many other parents exaggerated what their kids were doing that it made me less aware how atypical my dds were. Some of what I was hearing sounded like bs to me like the parent who told me that her kids were speaking in sentences @ 18 months and whose kids I was around at that age and who were barely saying a few single words, so I doubted that, but other things I had no basis for having information on and I assumed that their kids were actually doing whatever they claimed. Plus, my oldest was late with gross motor skills, so having other babies who were walking at 11 months when mine wasn't walking until 15 months seemed to cancel out her areas where she was ahead of them IMO.
By the time I was realizing that my oldest was gifted, I was getting more and more clued in to the fact that parents who were telling me that their kindergarteners were reading at a 3rd grade level when I had just seen them struggling to sound out the word "dog" and whose parents shared that said 3rd grade level was a DRA level 8, for instance, were really far off in their estimations. However, until I realized the inflation that was going on elsewhere, I figured that they all had their areas where they were ahead or behind -- just like my kiddo.
