"Of course you can be a talented child or what they call a wonder girl, too," my mother told me when I was nine. "you can be best at anything."

With my first child, who landed comfortably within the official 'talented and gifted' category at school, I was insensitive to how pervasive the talk of giftedness had become.

This extremely bright child has just memorized the words in the stories and is talented at using context clues to figure out the words.