Long before I had kids, I was friends with a counselor who specialized in gifted kids. She said that it was typical for parents to have a strong emotional reaction to finding out that they have a gifted kid. One of the things I remember her saying was that that "diagnosis" came with a stonger sense of parental responsibility. Many parents worry about whether they are adequate, but she found that a lot more parents of gifted kids struggled with feelings of inadequecy and worried that if their kid did not live up to their potential it was because the parent had failed them.
And having a highly talented kid (whatever the arena of talent) has the potential for causing the family to make a lot of sacrifices and hard decisions. You mention sports talent as something to be celebrated, but I think those parents suffer the same way we do. I have a friend who had a daughter who had the potential to be an Olympic gymnist and she wanted to do it. But it would have meant leaving home to live at the training center at age 13. The parents refused to let her do it because they wanted her to be home. She was mad at first, but is now a world class photographer and is glad to have had the 5 more years at home. But what a heartbreaking decision! We face the same kinds of decisions for our kids. Do they go to college at 13? Do we give up a long-awaited family vacation so our child can go to the chess championship? Can we afford to send them to math camp? Some of the decisions we face sort of make us feel like whatever we do is wrong.
That being said, personally, I don't really have much grief about the gifted thing. Still, it makes sense to me that others would feel grief. We do grieve a bit whenever we don't get what we have held in our imagination. It doesn't mean we don't love and appreciate what we have; it just means we have to let go of the image we had in our head.
