The thing about profoundly gifted kids is that they don’t fit in any better if you hold them back. My kid was sooooo much happier when as a first grader he was finally allowed to do math with the third graders. And the third graders were incredibly sweet to him, both in the classroom and on the playground. There was no one his age who he could talk to about electric circuits or computer programming in elementary school. He did play soccer when he was young and there was a group that played chess. Later he found another superbright kid who played Magic and D and D. In Middle School he met up with a MathCounts group, and in high school there was Science Olympiad and Math Team, but he really only had three friends in high school.
Here is another article about the boy at UVA mentioned in post 43. He has two sisters but neither article mentions how old they are or what their schooling has been like. He is still in Little League so would have access to kids his own age . Also, plays on the Engineering School kickball team and stands with the other first year students at football games. He sounds like an interesting kid. http://uvamagazine.org/articles/ordinary_genius
The consequences of skipping grades that I mentioned earlier – where chronological age is a barrier to doing things your classmates do – mostly are relatively minor, as you say.
There are far more profound consequences when the accelerated child cannot keep up with classmates physically, emotionally, or socially. Here I’m speaking primarily about children who skip only one or two grades and expect to be full, “normal” members of their new classes (something that the 12-year-olds at Cornell and UVa would not expect).
On a message board for gifted children, a kid wrote this:
“If you don’t skip, you’re bored. If you do skip, you’re bored and picked on.”
Being picked on is certainly a risk of grade skipping. Children can be very, very cruel to a child who seems “different.” The teasing can come both from classmates and from age-mates (both groups know that the child is in the “wrong” grade and therefore is abnormal). Something as simple as needing a smaller desk in the classroom (which serves as a constant reminder that the child is a “freak”) can lead to merciless teasing.
The kid on the message board also mentioned still being bored. This is a very important point. Any kid who’s smart enough to skip a grade is smart enough to catch up with the new classmates in a short period of time, and once that happens, the kid is bored again. I skipped third grade, and I caught up in everything except handwriting within a few months, even though I was not given access to the curriculum materials for the grade I had skipped. Today’s kids would find it even easier to catch up because they could find the missed curriculum on the Internet.
Another possible consequence of acceleration is always feeling that your desires are “wrong.” This happened to me throughout the rest of my childhood and adolescence after I skipped a grade. If I suggested an activity to my classmates or brought up a topic of conversation, the usual response was “Ewww, who would be interested in that?” What was happening, although I didn’t realize it at the time, is that I was suggesting things that were age-appropriate for me but not for them, and that’s why my ideas were rejected. What I learned was to keep my mouth shut and go along with other people’s choices, even if I didn’t like them. This became a lifelong habit.
Another possible consequence – one that is very important to some young people – is not being able to play on your school sports teams. Children who are atypically young for their grade may not have the strength, size, or skills to successfully try out for school teams. But if the same children had been kept in the age-appropriate grade, they might have been able to play for their school – something that many, many kids aspire to do.
And finally, as I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, there’s dating and sex. Straight boys who are young for their grade may not be able to find anyone to date because girls usually aren’t attracted to younger boys. Straight girls who are young for their grade may find that the boys they date pressure them into having sex before they feel ready. I’m not sure how it works for gay kids, so I won’t comment on that.
Overall, I see nothing positive about acceleration. Skipping a grade relieves a child’s boredom for only a short period of time but can have negative effects for a much longer time. Repeated skipping may give the child multiple respites from boredom but worsens the problem of the child being out of sync with classmates. There have to be better ways to provide gifted children with both an appropriate education and an appropriate childhood.
I personally do not see this as a grade skip issue. These are most likely kids who are learning calculus when they are 10 or 11 years old. They may have intuited basic algebra in primary grades. They are kids who aren’t accelerated b/c they are being rushed or being pushed. (There is only so much “advancement” that can take place via a tiger mom.) This is their normal level of progression. While other kids are attempting to decode Frog and Toad books, they are reading novels that middle school students normally read.
The idea that somehow they are being deprived of normal 12 yr old relationships really misses the fact that they are not normal 12 yr olds. They aren’t “groomed” into these prodigies. They simply are.
I have seen it with my own kids who are no where near as gifted. I had a child “discover” multiplication playing with Legos while he was in 1st grade. He sees the world in patterns and intuitively understood relationships other people need to be taught. With physics, he understood concepts that he had to explain to me bc even after studying them, I still didn’t understand.
The idea that somehow “distracting them” will keep them on par with peers is denying the fact that they absorb info and ideas and understand things that are not just a year or 2 beyond their birth age, but multiple years beyond or even ideas that some people never master. (My ds surpassed his chemE brother (who had graduated from college) in math when he was a jr in high school. He left me behind in 8th grade, so it certainly wasn’t coming from his home environment. It was under his own steam and his own ability. Take that and ramp it up 100+% and you start to have these 12 yr old geniuses.)
I personally cannot imagine how difficult it is for these kids to form friendships or socialize with age mates. They are functioning on a completely different level. My ds associated with friends via sports or talking about superficial things like movies. He had two close friends who he had deep philosophical conversations with, mostly around theology. But most subjects that really mattered to him, his age peers could not relate to. Again, you’d have to totally ramp it up to get what these kids experience.)
Kudos to parents who struggle to do the best they can to help their kids live as normal of lives as they possibly can. (These parents are not shipping their kids off to college to live on their own. They have researched options and the child will be living at home with mom and dad and going to school.)
I am glad it is not an issue I have ever faced. I cannot fathom sending my young child to college. But, equally, I cannot fathom raising such a child in the first place. I know what it is like to walk in parental shoes that others think they know better than me how to deal with (an unstable, highly emotional autistic son…a different child than the one discussed above). I roll my eyes b/c they don’t have a clue. Sure is easy to know all the answers when you live in another house.
I think one key sentence in Mom2aphysicsgeek’s post is “They are functioning on a completely different level.” This was specifically said of the son of a friend of mine, by a computing teacher who had observed how he thought about problems. The offshoot was that this student was accelerated in math, but finished high school overall at the normal age, and started at the graduate level in math in college.
Another key sentence is “Sure is easy to know all the answers when you live in another house.” Amen to that.
Some highly gifted students have interests that suit their chronological ages, but others don’t. The ones who don’t can learn to “fake it” successfully, if they are kept with their age mates.
But there are often adverse social consequences for a student who is always the best at everything academically, too. Another issue of adjustment is posed when they go off to college, and (most likely) are no longer at the top of all their classes. This is compounded if they just “got” everything as they were moving through school at a normal pace, and never had to work to figure something out.
With regard to the problems of grade skipping posed by Marian in #51:
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The first R-rated movie I saw was disappointing. This does not seem like a big deal to me. Also, if the 17-year-old ever looked at the policy at the movie theater, he could have avoided the embarrassment.
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With regard to the 20-year-old college senior who cannot rent a car to get to the interview location: a) taxi? b) Uber? c) Lyft? d) airport shuttle + taxi? etc. . . . When I had a summer job between college and grad school, I was 21, but I couldn’t rent a car anyway, because the rental companies in the area all demanded that you be 25 to rent. I found a friend who was going to the same job location.
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I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was 17. A lot of young people today do not start driving at 16, for a host of reasons. I went to the prom my senior year with a junior who did not have a driver’s license yet. We double-dated with a couple that could drive. When people are actually friends, these issues tend to work out.
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I can’t really speak to the bar mitzvah issue–but people think the person is a “freak” because the timing of the bar mitzvah is out of sync? What’s wrong with them?
The problem is that a profoundly gifted kid is still going to learn the material 10 times faster than a bright college student.
There’s literally no age group where they will “fit in”
It’s not about age.
I was very, very lucky, that my kid who is gifted found a buddy who didn’t think her eternal desire to be building things was weird. It turned out just having one friend who got her was the key to her happiness. Just one.
Breaking down post #51 from my own experience as someone who started undergrad at 17 and observed younger undergrads
Never an issue as someone who started undergrad at 17. If anything, it’s an easy issue as there’s always older HS/college classmates to go with. I’ve also had situations where theaters or even bars would accept college ID and assume one’s 18+. Worked for me with several Boston area clubs/bars while visiting HS classmates during breaks/long weekends.
That’s the closed-minded middle school classmates’ problem. Catering excessively to the rigid conformist expectations was not something I ever desired…especially considering I was of the opinion that doing so meant one was giving away one’s power. A corollary to that was I tend to have a very hard time respecting anyone who catered to others in that manner. March to the beat of your own drum and screw anyone else who has an issue with it…especially the closed-minded marchstep conformists.
Actually, the issue with renting cars isn’t limited to those under 21. IME, if one’s under 25…it’s practically impossible to rent a car unless one’s lucky enough to encounter a car rental place which will make an exception…PROVIDED ONE PUTS UP A DEPOSIT far greater than one expected of 25+ renters.
Ways friends and I dealt with it…figure out transportation alternatives such as public transport, get/buy a used car from, etc.
This is more of a suburban/rural thing as cars weren’t a major part of my HS childhood experience as someone who grew up in an urban area with great public transportation(NYC).
The jobs part sounds very odd to my ears. Especially considering I’ve worked part-time jobs starting in late elementary school.
In fact, I tried out for several jobs* as a 5th grader before landing a steady cashier’s job at a neighborhood stationary store from late elementary school till near the end of freshman year of high school when I had to give it up due to conflicts over academic demands and long commute.
And I wasn’t the exception. The vast majority of my elementary school/middle school classmates in my old NYC neighborhood had one or more part-time jobs. And obviously, they were far younger than 16…or even 12.
- Including a one-day stint as a dishwasher at a local pizzeria which I tried out because several elementary school classmates were working there and it was a way to earn some dough. Alas, turns out I wasn't cut out to be a dishwasher in a busy pizzeria...especially after breaking too many dishes as the very kind owner put it before gently telling me to consider other job opportunities.
In the suburban community where I came from, the main reason why you didn’t get a job until 16 was that you needed a car to get to the job, and you needed the job to pay for the car. There was a sort of symbiotic relationship there. And you couldn’t drive until you were 16.
You may also have needed to be 16 to work in some jobs legally. Some jobs require working papers, don’t they?
I think you’ve made an excellent case for the idea that a child’s mental and social toughness should be considered if the parents and school are thinking about acceleration. Acceleration might be more appropriate for a kid who doesn’t care what others think than for a more thin-skinned kid who cares very much. But there’s a catch: If you accelerate a child at 7, how can you know whether the child will be tough or thin-skinned at 10 or 13 or 17?
In California everyone under 18 has to have a work permit issued by their high school guidance department.
I have no idea how a middle schooler would get one.
In NYC of the '80s and '90s, one officially needed a work permit if one was under 16, it was relatively easy to get one. All one needed was parental permission, an employer who was willing to sign off on forms with the local/state labor department and board of ed, and signing a notice that one cannot work more than a certain number of hours each week/school day.
And in practice, one didn’t necessarily need to go through all that official paperwork. Especially in an area/era when many adults considered it the norm and a good thing that late elementary/middle school kids had some part-time work.
My son got a work permit when he was 7 or 8. He almost got into the modeling/acting business. (Sooo glad he didn’t) I think we just went through the local school district and labor department.