Hi, I am sorry if this is a little bit off-topic, but I didn’t know where else I could ask. Some recent events made me think about my extended family and my childhood, and I would like to know whether someone else has experienced something similar to what I am about to describe.

So, I come from a huge family on my father’s side. One of my great-grandfathers was a teacher who had a weather station at home, was an amateur photographer, wrote poetry and used to take the school children on field trips to learn about trees, rocks and animals. He had nine children and eight of them went to University, including 4 daughters (this was in the early 20th century, so it was very unusual). One of these children became a Law professor at a very early age, then a diplomat, then a translator, then a writer and historian.

After University, my grandmother married my grandfather, who was a reputed doctor whose real passion was Physics, so he would wake up every morning at 4 a.m. to study Physics before work. They had lots of children, who were all, according to my grandmother, of average intelligence. However, none of them seem average to me. They are all quite quirky, and they all seem to share a pattern of focusing on one theme, learn everything about it, then move on to something else. My father has been an avid reader since he was a child, has been involved in grassroots politics since he was young and is always learning something new, even now that he is retired.

I don’t know a lot about my own childhood. I do know that I was an early talker (I don’t know how early, but apparently one of my uncles, who was doing a PHD in Psychology at the time, was very impressed) and some of the drawings my mother kept show that I was drawing human figures with head, body, hair, arms, legs, hands and feet when I was barely two. School was always too easy, so I used to daydream all the time and still get mostly As and Bs. I was an avid reader too: my parents opened a bookstore account for me in order to nurture my love for books, then closed it because I was spending too much. I was reading adult literature by the time I was 12-13.

Life went on and I had a child. I had the feeling that he was smart, but when I talked to my father about it he never seemed impressed. That is normal, all children do it, they all have very good memories, he would say. Long story short, I ended up having DS tested. Apparently, he has an IQ in the moderately gifted range and a GAI in the DYS range.

So now I wonder: is it possible that they all thought that they were average because they were all the same?

(Please forgive any mistakes, I am not a native English speaker)

Yep.

A tall poppy in a garden of tall poppies...
doesn't seem tall at all.
Might even seem small.

Totally. That is exactly my experience. I didn't really learn what "average" was until I started administering norm-referenced assessments of intelligence. I knew that there were GT members of my family because some were in research studies on the topic, but it didn't become apparent that actually nearly everyone in the extended family was GT until I saw what an IQ of 100 actually looks like.

Could you describe what average looks like? Or is there something out there that describes it?

As you know, of course there is no actual average person. Just a collection of central tendencies. But my experiences interacting with individuals for which I knew their exact formal normative standing for cognitive ability did show me that my preconceived notions of what a neurotypical learner of a certain age range should be able to do with regard to academics, general problem solving, oral language, etc. were not accurate. To my consternation, I realized that many of the people I had previously characterized as being not very bright were really quite typical. Perhaps partly because I didn't progress through the grades in a uniform manner, I hadn't formed a good idea of grade-appropriate skills, nor had I a sense of grades corresponding closely to age.

To your question, perhaps the simplest way of explaining average is to look at our grade expectations (which in North America are very much age-locked), and then consider that the average student puts effort into earning Bs and Cs, and requires explicit instruction and overlearning to become a fluent reader, and calculator of the four basic arithmetic operations, by the end of fourth grade.

There are non-academic qualities too, but they're harder to quantify.

Thank you very much for the replies. Considering this possibility doesn't change the past, but it does give you some perspective.

I remember myself saying:

-Dad, I feel weird and no one likes the things I like.
-Oh, that's normal. I always felt weird too. You may get to know some interesting people at University (I did).

And lately

-Dad, I am worried. DS doesn't seem to be learning much at school.
-Oh, that's normal. You didn't learn much either. Children go to school because they have to, and then they learn at home.

I understand that this approach is probably not ideal, but because I always stress so much, his lack of drama seems quite refreshing.

Yes - 100%

Until we had our DD tested I honestly thought that she was NT. I have posted this before but I was always puzzled by the way that our daughter could do puzzles and assemble toys nominally for child many years older. I assumed that the manufacturers did this to make parents feel that their kids were smart.

I never thought my kids were bright - I just thought some other kids had major learning problems. When my kids were tested I discovered those other kids were average and in at least one case quite bright.

So funny. DD came home in 3rd or 4th grade crying because she thought that the teacher was giving her kindergarten work to punish her. I don't think she believed me when I told her that she actually had grade level homework. DH and I were were clueless about what was going on until we had DD tested in 4th.

My mother was a math major and my grandfather was a head of the department of math in a small town high school in his time. I work in the STEM field and my child was asking me for lessons in polynomials in 3rd grade because he could not understand how to factor them in some problems that he was seeing on some Math Circle website and hence I taught him exponents, functions, polynomials and it seemed the most ordinary thing to do. He asked and I taught it. I never once presumed that this was beyond the capability of a 3rd grader. Years later, in one of the admissions open houses, I am told that the "hardest" chapters in honors 8th-grade math are exponents and polynomials! I believe that if we belong to a family of HG+ individuals, it is easy to assume that we have no special abilities.

I think it is hardest when there is an NT outlier in a family. That happened in family friends. The first 2 kids were PG but the 3rd couldn't even get into a university. Is a truck driver. I think that is a tough situation.

Yes. Although it's also possible that that 3rd kid had undiagnosed LDs of some kind. Perhaps more likely than that there was actually a 50 point spread in IQ just from natural variation.

It is quite common for a gifted kid with dyslexia for example to appear average. In reality they are using their considerable brain power to compensate. If he is a happy truck driver though it is no problem. I once met a poorly educated builder (he trained when you could leave school very young and the academic side was less emphasised) who had a brother who was a high court judge and therefore must have a least had a law degree.