>>52500
>I think many "gifted" kids of our era were just kids who said smart adult stuff that we picked up from hanging around our parents all the time instead of our peers, at least that's how it was for me.
yeah I can definitely see that being an aspect of it but nobody is going to think of you as being gifted or destined for success if you aren't also getting good grades and showing other signs of intelligence beyond being able to understand and repeat "smart adult stuff". I think the cause of the eventual failure to live up to those expectations probably lies elsewhere. there's no reason to think "former gifted children" weren't actually gifted, it's just that you need more traits other than just intelligence (in the sense of IQ/proficiency at learning and abstraction) to get ahead in society, things are much more complicated than that