Child-raising issue: disparity between academic and social development

Possibly the wrong forum here, but my main goal is to see what other people think is the best option. Mods can move this as they see fit.

First off, I don’t want anyone to think my real purpose here is sneak-bragging, so I’ll start by just openly bragging: My kid is smart. He could do a bit of reading before he turned 4, and now, at 4 years and 2 months, he’s reading quite well. He also does great with numbers- he’s able to add and subtract and has started picking up some very simple multiplication. His day care, where he’s in a junior pre-K class, does some sort of testing (Bracken, if that means anything) that translates his academic abilities into that of a child of 5 years, 10 months, putting him in the 98th percentile. I don’t think any standardized test is the final word on someone’s intelligence or anything, but his reading and math (and some other academic skills) are what they are, and they do seem pretty advanced for his age. Teachers at his previous day care, which doesn’t do testing, also thought he was really smart, dating back to when he was less than two years old.

The current day care people are recommending that he start kindergarten in the fall. He’d be 4 1/2. (February birthday.) (ETA: the other option would be a year of what is basically Pre-K.)

The catch is, he’s always been a little bit shy and sensitive. He’s very sweet-natured and does get along well with other kids- his main teacher tells us that his classmates all like him- but he’s not particularly extroverted. He seems to be a bit… well, intimidated is too strong a word, but I can’t think of a better one, so: he seems to a bit one-notch-down-from-intimidated when other kids act dominant or aggressive. Not in a bullying sort of way, just, like, if one runs up to the ladder for a slide as he’s starting to get on, he’ll step aside and let the other kid go, even if he was there first. It’s not a big problem or anything, but the overall picture just makes it seem like socially, he’s about where we’d want him.

So, that’s our dilemma. Where he should be academically and where he should be socially seem to be different. I expect this is a fairly common dilemma for parents of gifted children. I’m curious what anyone here thinks, or what any other parents in a similar situation have found and done.

Unfortunately, I’ve already taken more time than I can afford from work to write all this, and I’ll likely be very busy this weekend, so it may be a few days before I can get back to this thread. I’ll certainly be interested to see what anyone thinks when I do, though. Thanks, Dopers!

I skipped kindergarten for this reason. Whether or not it was a good idea is… complicated. I was definitely socially behind for years and never popular or socially “adept” in school, although I suppose there’s no way to prove one way or another whether that’s the cause.

On the other hand, all the trouble I got into at school happened when I was bored. I would have been a lot more bored if I hadn’t gone early to first grade.

IMHO, the kid is fine, you have nothing to worry about, and you can’t predict what difference it would make if he starts kindergarten early, or not.

You might start by talking to the kindergarten teacher/principal in the school your child will be attending. If you wait until he is 5 before starting, he will probably be more socially and emotionally ready to be in school and do well - but if you research what programs your school offers for gifted children, then perhaps you will also know that he will be challenged at his level when he gets there. You can offer him extra training at home until he gets there if you feel the need.

IMO, I think kids who are with their age group do best, feel more comfortable. I have a very shy child and she is one of the older kids in her class - I think it has helped her do better. We have a decent school that offers accelerated reading/math programs for kids who are ready for it.

I guess I feel that learning is not a timed event - he will do fine if he starts when he’s five - just make sure he’s not bored no matter where he is - whether it’s at day care, home or school.

I skipped kindergarten for the same reason (I could already read, etc.). I admit it was hard to be the youngest and smallest in the class. It was extremely hard when puberty kicked in for the rest of the girls and not me. I was able to keep up academically but I think I would have benefited socially by staying with my age group.

As I got older, the age difference didn’t matter so much emotionally, but I was still the last one to get my driver’s license, the only one who couldn’t get into a bar (the drinking age was 18 at the time, everyone else was of age and I was still 17) and I started college very young, at 17.

Looking back, I think my parents would have done me better to allow me to go to kindergarten, but I survived. You have to judge your own child’s readiness and hope for the best either way.

I’ve got a kindergartner finishing up in a month or so who’s no genius but performs comfortably in the upper 50% of the class. While his acedemic performance is important I’m much more focused on his social well being. I figure if he’s happy socially I can more easily control his academic performance myself.
Whereas if his academic performance was excellent but he was socially unhappy and inept it would be a harder situation to remedy and not fun for him.
A miserable childhood can become baggage that you carry with you for a long time and is not easily fixed. Academics are more flexible and their pace easily adjusted around a happy child.

Both my little snows are the among the oldest, if not the oldest, in their classes from the get-go. They were both bright and posessed the skills of a good student, but socially were not as ready when it came time for kindergarten, so they got an extra year of pre-school. That extra year of maturing made a big difference socially, and they were more than ready academically by that point. Today they are both excelling in their respective grades. That is what worked in our situation, but everyone’s game plan is different.

Nephew started kindergarten and ended up getting pulled out two weeks in because he was not able to sit still like the rest of the class. The next year he started again and was fine and is excelling academically in high school now. ISTM the early years are less about academic achievement and more about being able to sit in class with other kids and take direction from another adult. Of course, they should not be bored, either, as that will turn them off to learning. It is tough finding the balance. Good luck!

My school recommended that I skip kindergarten since I was reading fluently, but my parents declined because they didn’t think I was socially ready for first grade. This wound up being the best decision they could have made. I was barely socially ready for first grade when I actually got there; I can’t imagine how I would have been if I had skipped a grade.

I’m sure everything would have evened out eventually, but I’m really glad they kept me in kindergarten. Your son sounds a bit better than I was socially at that age though. I think everything will turn out well no matter what you decide.

I’ll second that. My twins were born in September. We could have pushed and gotten them into kindergarten right before they turned 5, but instead opted to let them ripen for another year. I think the wait was good for them, but as with all kids YMMV.

My kid is one that always benefits from being in a class with older students. She’s also bright, winning last year’s ‘Academic Excellence’ award for the school.

It’s been a stop-start situation because legally she has had to progress with her age group at various points. Even though by a quirk of her birthday she’ll be the youngest every time, we see the drop-off in academic and social performance as the boredom and frustration set in.

She’s just moved up to a different school and happily reconnected with the kids who moved on a year ahead of her - and she’s made a whole bunch of friends throughout the five-year age range of students.

But your kid’s MMV

You’re pretty much getting posts from parents here, I note. Perhaps I can provide a bit of perspective from the other end.

I was one of the weirdly smart kids. My sister and I both made standardized tests go TILT!, particularly when we were young and they all worked on mental age vs chronological age. My parents tell me I read really early and walked rather late – both around the same time. My birthday was near the cutoff point for our district, so they scheduled me for an evaluation before letting me start kindergarten, which ended in a hurry when the lady evaluating me caught me reading her cursive notes upside-down off her notepad.

There are two main social problems that go with being very smart very early. One is that the other kids think you’re a freak and decide they hate you. It doesn’t sound like your child has that problem. His teachers say his classmates like him, and you have seen him interact with his peers, if a little oddly sometimes. The other kids develop their idea of what you’re like very early, especially if the district is such that they’ll stay mostly together from K all the way through 12. If they like him now, they probably won’t randomly decide to loathe him later.

The other problem is that you have nothing to talk about with the other kids your age. Gifted kids pick up a lot of things quickly, and the best way to keep them from getting bored is just give them more interesting things to do. The sheer amount of stuff you know that the rest of your cohort doesn’t means that a lot of the stuff that’s on your mind is completely alien to the people all around you. If your kid is one of those who picks something really sophisticated to focus on, after a while he won’t even be able to have conversations with the adults, if the adults pay any attention to him – I developed an interest in space and complicated physics really early, and I couldn’t talk to anyone about it, because this was pre-internet, and adults spook remarkably easily when a 4th grader has a question about quantum mechanics.

If you try NOT to teach him the weird stuff that he can’t talk about with anyone else, he’ll be bored out of his ever-loving mind. I had a bunch of arrangements that they’d call an IEP today, and even with extra language arts materials and an algebra tutor from the junior high I still spent half the day dreaming away, because I’d run out of things to read. I’m convinced that chronically bored children are the inspiration behind the phrase “idle hands are the devil’s playthings”. Normal kids are creative enough when it comes to figuring out clever ways to do stupid things; smart kids are worse. If nobody gives them interesting things to do, they’ll find interesting things to do. :smack:

The only way to fix both parts of this at once would be to send your child to a school full of nothing but kids on his level intellectually while still at his age chronologically. Unless you live in a big city with magnet schools, this isn’t going to happen. I had issues with the first one – I have a very big mouth and it didn’t take the other kids long to figure out I was weird – and my choice both then and looking back now would have been to find a way to get my schooling via tutors, and gone into dance or sports or some other kind of club for social interaction.

I can’t tell you what to do, since I don’t know you or your kid or your school. Just try not to compensate for one of the potential problems by exacerbating the other. I changed schools in junior high – to get away from local bullies, actually – and also lost most of my IEP. It was hell. I didn’t get less strange, it didn’t make anyone like me, and I was bored to tears. And listen to what your kid wants, especially as he gets older – nobody asked my opinion on most of this stuff, and it didn’t help.

My son was blessed with a January birthday so I never had to make this decision. I say “blessed” because I would have started him in kindergarten early because he was very smart, big for his age and quite confident. Well, turns out, once he got to school he was mostly interested in recess. He gets good grades and has no problem learning, but it’s not the main thing for him and that’s fine with us. His excellent social skills will probably get him just as far as his academics if not further.

Just my experience, but food for thought.

I was in the same boat as your son, and my mom refused accelerated advancement for me every year. Thank god. It was bad enough that I was already the youngest with “regular” placement, due to where my birthday fell. I felt like, and was treated like, a performing midget until my growth spurt hit in 5th grade. By 6th grade, I had the biggest boobs in the class, and got the sort of attention an immature babied 11 year old shouldn’t have to deal with. It wasn’t until high school, mostly due to a new mix of students, that I felt viewed as an equal and was able to make my way socially.

But you should absolutely visit the prospective school and have a chat. IF you keep him in pre-K with his age mates another year, then what resources does the school have to deal with a Kindergartner who can do first and second grade work? What will the Kindergarten teacher do with him while the other kids are learning to read? Will she make him sit still and follow along and discipline him every time he gets twitchy, or will she let him choose a challenging book and write her a two page paper about dinosaurs based on his research? Does she, in fact, have any experience teaching first and second grade skills, or has she done only K in the past?

So much of your decision has to be based on the answers to questions like that and the feeling you get from the next school that it’s almost useless to ask us yet.

Especially for a boy. You’ve spoken about his academic and his social development, but how is his physical development? Like it or not, running, hitting a ball, hanging from monkey bars, being able to shoot a basket…these are the things of which many boys’ social lives are made or broken. Is it a good idea to put a guy who is smaller and weaker only by virtue of his age in with bigger, stronger, more coordinated boys? Again - this may be a big deal in his future school, or they may have no time in the day for recess and gym is twice a week and it won’t have much of an impact at all. No way to know without asking.

In my school district, the answer was to not enroll my kids early, but to provide lots of enrichment at home. In effect, we both homeschool and schoolschool, but the homeschooling is only part time.

As a high school teacher at the other end (juniors/seniors) I will say that while I have seen several sets of parents who regretted starting their kids early, none ever regretting starting them late. Some young-for-their-grade kids do fine, but when it goes bad, it can go really bad. Sometimes what happens is that the very young kid gets adopted by a social group that’s even older–their social awkwardness works better with the older kids because they become a sort of pet, and they are smart enough to fake basic maturity. But older kids don’t take good care of their “pets”–they think it’s funny to take them to parties and get them shitfaced. Then, the older kids graduate and leave their “pets” alone with nothing but a handful of bad habits.

Look at it this way: your kid can use his intelligence to get through the same stuff as everyone else, only faster, or he can use his intelligence to learn more than everyone else through enrichment. The former won’t matter once he is 25: the latter could influence his whole life.

Another one chiming in to say that skipping the kid ahead may not be a great idea. That’s what they did to me, and as a result I was always smaller, weaker, and less developed compared to my classmates in school. This was especially noticeable in gym, but also affected my social development. As a result I ended up with a sense of inferiority that has taken decades to battle.

Oh oh, that was my school. Bloody fascists. My SO, on the other hand, spent every single day picking flowers outside in his final year of secondary school, because he had finished all the work and all the extra programmes the year before. I kid not, he picked flowers every day (well, I hear he was sent outside to pick flowers, I will not vouch for the amount of flowers he actually picked and I do know several things were set on fire).

There is no perfect solution for any child who falls outside the norms.

ETA: just realised how non-helpful that was for a contribution…sorry :frowning:

As someone who also was labeled gifted in school and ended up skipping grades because of it, I would not recommend skipping grades due to the risk of causing social problems for the kid.
Being the smartest/most mature kid in the class could possibly turn out to be a good thing if it helps your kid shine, but being the shyest/youngest kid in the class probably won’t help him any.

The age difference is an especially big deal at younger ages, but even in high school it was an issue for me. I have a specific memory of feeling self conscious in high school that I was too young to drive when my classmates were all able to. Some kids did make an effort to be nice to me, but I ran into other kids who resented me for skipping grades. It was only towards the end of high school that I found out that apparently some other kids thought that my shyness meant that I thought I was “too good” to talk to them. :rolleyes:

The ideal probably would be to get him enrolled in a gifted school or gifted classes where he will be around other kids who really are just like him. But if that’s not an option, the next best thing is probably to let him be the smart kid in his age group rather than the young, awkward kid among the oldest kids. Maybe later if HE indicates he’s bored, you can revisit the idea of skipping grades. In the meantime, I’d try getting him started on some kind of enrichment at home to keep his mind engaged.

Joining the chorus and me-tooing lavenderviolet

KG, I think, is the grade most devoted to building social skills, and in which the risk of being bored academically matters the least.

If it turns out that your school system does not have enough differentiated learning opportunities in later grades to keep your little possessed noodle from getting bored within grade level, you can always visit the issue of bumping up then. Leaving your grade cohort by bumping up later would not be very traumatic; dropping down later would be.

Also be cognizant of the fact that current trends have many parents holding kids back if they are even in the younger third age portion of their grade level … whatever the pluses and minuses of that approach it means that a child pushed ahead is likely to be even more dramatically the youngest, smallest, and least socially mature of the class. Yes, sexist as it may be, the impact those size issues have on a kid’s place in the playground social structure is even more significant for boys than girls. (Although the other social issues may play out even more viciously in girls.)

Unless you have overwhelming reasons presented by those in the school he is going to in favor of pushing him up at this point, don’t do it.

Gifted learners are different qualitatively, not quantitatively. They don’t simply process more information faster. They understand the world in a different way, and their learning process has more depth and complexity, not just a wider breadth and faster pace. I don’t think socially it’s going to matter what grade he is in. He’s still going to be different.

I also think personality is an extremely strong force, and I’m pretty sure twin studies back up that personality will come through every time. If he’s an introvert, he’s an introvert, and he’s going to have a different set of tools to work with than an extrovert. Being an introvert doesn’t mean you are doomed to be shy, and introverts have a lot of room to learn how to socialize. But it’s always going to be a different process, and you probably aren’t going to be able to have much of an effect on his fundamental personality.

The absolute ideal situation would be to get him into a community of like-minded kids. I would have never believed it as a kid, but there are schools where the smart kids are the coolest ones. As he gets older, as long as he doesn’t get bogged down in self-loathing he’s going to have more options as his social world gets bigger and he has more choices. A kid who is 1 in 100 probably won’t find many companions in elementary school, but he’ll find some in high school and all he could ever want in college. You might want to look into IB schools- a lot of them are public.

My family didn’t have the resources to get me into a top school, but they made sure I had outlets that put me around smart people- they scrimped and saved so I could go to science camps, gifted and talented summer programs, museum events, etc. These were great outlets where i could be myself.

Anyway, I’d consider not thinking of it as a problem or as him not being where you’d like him to be, but as realizing that he has a different set of tools and strengths, and will have a different social path.

I had an experience similar to Arabella Flynn’s. I don’t think skipping a grade or not would have made any difference to my social experience, because honestly I just didn’t have much in common with the other kids, and this gulf widened as we got older. I didn’t skip kindegarten, but I ended up skipping grade 8 in the end because I simply didn’t have anything to learn in that grade. Looking back, that was probably a better grade to skip than kindergarten (not least because I missed one-third of the awfulness that is middle school), so.

But I’m interested to see how many people are saying it’s not a good thing to skip early grades. Good to know, because the Little One may be in that same situation.