Child-raising issue: disparity between academic and social development

In My Humble Opinion
21

It is difficult to say as I do not know your child, but speaking as someone who skipped 1st Grade, and as an Elementary School teacher, I would strongly recommend keeping him with children his own age and making sure he gets challenging class work.

As others have noted, the social side of things can be difficult, especially if he is already shy. As the years go on the gap will really show, especially in middle and high school.

There is also research showing that children who are the youngest in the class have problems. If you like I will try and look it up, I just do not have time right now :slight_smile:

22

There surely are some who are labelled as “gifted” who learn with “more depth and complexity”, and many who are very uneven in what they are very good at and what they may be not only average at but even below average, an unevenness that results in some qualitative differences. But the reality is that “giftedness” as practically described for the educational system, by description likely for the op’s child, and very probably for most of those who are reflected on their own childhoods with that label, are not children of a different breed. They are just those who inhabit the top 3 to 5% of one or more relevant ability. That is all. And that is enough to deal with.

That doesn’t take away from anything else in your comment. To that the response is that, sure, this kid is a quiet somewhat introverted kid who is going to have some challenges dealing with standing out one way or the other. Given that, is the path they should place in front of him to deal with the path of standing out by clearly already knowing the skills the class is being taught, and potentially acting out due to boredom, or the path of standing out by being physically the smallest, most youthful appearing, and socially immature kid in the class? Your experience seems to demonstrate that the former can be addressed successfully with enrichment experiences - perhaps he can tolerate being bored a bit in class time if he is having to spend significant effort outside of school learning another language, working on math subjects that the school curriculum will likely not be addressing too much (oh, workbooks like this one), just reading and discussing more challenging books together outside of school, learning skills in art and music, so on. And of course getting into outside activities with kids of similar interests and abilities.

FWIW the most gifted kids I knew growing up … not the bright “gifted” kids, the sigma outlier ones … did just fine in grade level and socially. They learned other things on their own and knew all the sports trivia and were funny too. The two in particular I am thinking of became an academic economist and a quantum organic chemist later in life respectively, with happy families and well adjusted.

23

I think the people in that range are, indeed, a different breed when it comes to their strong areas. For example, if you have a child that shows exceptional strategy in chess, simply enrolling him in some local adult chess classes and buying him some “advanced” books is not going to be enough to help him reach his full potential. He will need the attention of top-notch instructors and be involved in competition against people like himself. A strong middle-school athlete is not going to get what he needs by joining the local college intermural team. A very bright high schooler is going get bored with local community college classes. They need people who see the world in the way that they do.

24

I skipped first grade, back in the days before taxpayer-funded kindergarten was widespread. I’d been reading since I was four and a half, instantly grasped the idea of multiplication when my father took maybe a couple of minutes to explain what that funny table with the numbers was in the back of the children’s encyclopedia, yada yada yada. I was also already mildly introverted, and the jump into second grade resulted in my not even starting to get the hang of social relations until I went back a grade much later on.

Every situation is different and all that, but I wouldn’t wish what I went through on anybody.

25

Keep him at grade level. I was the youngest in my class and very smart, and when I had my very smart daughter - she is among the oldest in her class (September birthday with September cut off). Even as one of the oldest, she is one of the least socially mature (she’s now in sixth grade) and I can’t imagine what life would be like had I insisted by “reading at four, doing math at three” child would have been had she now been a seventh grader. ( had the pet problem - I was dating a guy in his twenties at sixteen. Nice guy, really, but he had no idea how young I was when we started dating because I should have been eighteen, or close to it).

Also, although she is really bright, she’s had her academic challenges - small muscle control doesn’t come easy for her, so her handwriting is horrible.

Also I know many kids who were bright at four who are merely average or struggling by twelve or thirteen. Their brain just moved fast for a bit, then slowed down. My son was like that - he was very bright as a younger child, then just sort of slowed down.

26

I’ve been a high school debate coach for years now and debate is a program that tends to woo in the “smart kids.” Over the years, I’ve had several kids who were skipped one or more grades and I can tell you that the one unifying factor is that those kids are always kind of weird. Alright, “weird” sounds far more harsh than intended-- for the most part, they were all great kids in their own ways-- but each and every one stood out in some way (whether physical development or otherwise).

Above all though, those kids are always the most immature. Always. I just assume because their brain hasn’t fused together yet or something ;), but really: there is a noticeable and distinct maturity gap between the skipped ahead kids and the regular kids. Do they all understand the same advanced philosophy concepts? Of course, they’re all brilliant kids. But the immaturity of the skipped ahead kids will inevitably cause social problems with their team members. The acting out is stuff that would be 100% typical, normal, and unnoticeable in a middle school---- but in a high school it sticks out like a sore thumb.

Because I’ve directly seen the social detriment that’s suffered by these kids and I see that they aren’t getting all they can get from their teachers due to their maturity. . . if I had a kid, I wouldn’t skip 'em. Your kid might be brilliant, but there are other ways to stimulate the intellect of your child without potentially harming their socialization. There are lots of smart kid activities—think, in a decade, the little one can join the debate team! :stuck_out_tongue:

27

I know several people who skipped a grade. To a person not one of them finished college within 4 years. Not all of them even finished college at all.

My brother insisted on being allowed to skip a grade, but I’m glad that my parents weren’t interested in pushing me to as well despite my participation in the gifted program suggesting I was capable of it. I have an April birthday so I was already among the youngest kids in class, and on top of that I was very slow to reach puberty - sucked enough being in 9th grade when I finally got my first period, so I can’t imagine what it would have been like as a 10th grader…

28

I still have trouble understanding how a single year changes things so much. I know several kids that were held back a year, and they don’t seem any more mature.

I’m not arguing that the skipped ahead kids are less mature, but i wonder if that’s because they were skipped, or if it’s just because they prioritized book learning over social ability.

29

This country BADLY needs a system of schools for kids that are significantly smarter than their peers. Something like my old school - Saint Petersburg Lyceum 239 - Wikipedia. About 200 of alumni are in Google. About a hundred in Microsoft. Dozens are spread around various other tech companies here in the US. Hundreds are in academics in various universities in the US. And that’s just the ones that emigrated to the United States.

Keeping the kid at a grade level where he is bored out of his mind academically will not do anything good for him. And if he doesn’t dumb himself down consciously, kids will pick up on him being way smarter than they are and resent him, which doesn’t do much good for him socially.

30

A friend of mine skipped several grades, leaving her two years younger then the rest of our class in high school and went on to complete a Rhodes Scholarship.

According to the Principal of my kid’s new school, its policy of partial or total advancement has been the most sucessful model for their students. Not the only model, not guaranteed, but the most likely to produce University graduates and successful careers according to their records. To the point where they have ‘vertical forms’ alongside the regular class forms to allow kids to find their own social level independantly of their academic level. In my kid’s case this means that at 13 she’s regularly having lunch with 17 & 18 year olds, at their invitation.

Also backing even sven’s experience with ‘gifted’ students. For* my* kid, that one day a week in a class dedicated to gifted students was a life saver when all the kids (and a couple of teachers) in her ‘normal’ school were bullying her for being ‘different’. You bet she wasn’t learning the same social skills as everyone else, the ‘social’ skills of her own age group excluded her completely.

31

I think these two excerpts capture the dilemma. Most of the time “gifted” kids are not smoothly and evenly 2 to 3 S.D.s above the mean across the board. Instead their giftedness in one or more cognitive stream seems like it at least partially comes at the cost of having taken over processing power from some other stream, such as social maturity. AND, being different, they are often going to be placed in a difficult social environment one way or the other.

Just as an aside, as a pediatrician I can sometime spot the truly gifted kids pretty early on … advanced across the board, doing puzzles significantly above age level, and most of all, believe it or not, by a significantly advanced sense of humor. (Say, a late 3 early 4 telling jokes that involve word play rather than poopy jokes or jokes that have the structure down but make no sense.) I sometimes point the possibility that this kid may be headed towards needing some extra challenging in school when the time comes out to the parent but usually with the caveats that of course development is not necessarily linear, being significantly advanced now does not necessarily mean that such will be the case in a few years from now, just that it is a possibility to be prepared for, and that most parents think they want a gifted kid, until they actually have to deal the with the issues of having one.

FWIW. Good luck.

32

I don’t know your kid or her situation, but as I mentioned earlier, I find this to be a common pattern with kids who are young for grade level and it often ends poorly. They don’t hang out with the older kids because they are on that same level: they hang out with them because their social awkwardness is accepted and allowances made for it among the much older crowd, where as the grade-level kids have higher expectations and less tolerance for someone who is a little behind. The young kid is flattered and thinks the older kids are their friends, but it really isn’t an equal friendship: it’s much more like being a pet. Because the younger child needs the friendship a lot more than the older kids need the younger child, it’s just inherently unbalanced. They are indulged and liked, but not really seen as a true peer.

I hope none of this is true for your daughter, but I would really watch it carefully. Kids whose social group is significantly older often have a very rough time of it later when their whole group outgrows them (not to mention the bad habits they can pick up).

33

K-12 is the only time when people spend most of their day in a social situation entirely out of their control, with a random assortment of whoever happens to live nearby, of exactly one year in age span, day in and day out for years.

For some people, that’s just never going to be a great situation- not because they are flawed, but because they’ve been forced into a bizarre social world. Could you imagine any adult thriving spending six hours a day with a random assortment of neighbors his age?

Growing up, when I got teased, my family always emphasized that the problem was not me. It was that I was in the wrong place for me. And it’s true. In high school, with a larger campus and mixed grade tracked campus, I found some good friends. In college I was finally around a lot of people who thought like me. And as an adult, I’ve got friends of all ages across wide social groups.

So remember that the social skills for elementary school are just that.

34

Elementary, you mean? Yes, they are. Elemental. Foundational. Not to be skipped over.

Yes, you’re right that most of us have *some *control over who we work with as adults, but it’s only some control. 95% of us (number derived rectally) have to work with other people that someone else has hired. The criteria for hiring isn’t age, but it’s not necessarily personality qualities that we find easy to get along with, either.

Learning to function and thrive when surrounded by assholes is an important life skill. Even if you’re lucky enough to work alone (if that’s your thing) or be the boss who gets to do the hiring, you’ve still got to deal with grocery shopping and the DMV and children screaming in restaurants.

35

Picked simply as representative of others.

I wasn’t skipped ahead because my mother wanted me to “be with her age-peers so she’ll get socialized correctly”, but my parents didn’t allow me to play with my classmates after school; I was the only one who had to run home. My classmate who was one year ahead from kindergarten through 12th grade played with everybody else. Guess which one was the outcast.

36

Skipped two and a half grades (from halfway through 5th into 7th, then next year straight to high school), got a full ride to a good college, did quite well academically (and finished in four years - to counter elfkin’s example), and am currently on track to finish my masters at another decent school.

Academically, no troubles at all. I could most likely have skipped earlier and more, but the resources weren’t available to allow that.

Socially? I have to be totally honest and say that it honestly didn’t make much of a difference in my case.

I was the quiet weird one in K4 through 5th grade, and I was the *equally quiet and weird one *afterwards in that one year of middle school and all the way through high school.

Was I immature in those later years compared to my peers? It’s hard to tell. I was shy, introverted, and not particularly interested in live people.

IMPORTANT - This may be much harder and considerably different for boys than for me as a girl. Girls have a much easier time if their goal is to try to be total wallflowers.

I never got “adopted” by high schoolers, but I never got picked on either - just ignored. I wasn’t ready for relationships, but then no one offered one (nor was I interested in any of them because I thought they were all brainless), so that balanced out. I might not have been emotionally mature, but I also wasn’t heading out for riotous drunken parties like most of my schoolmates regularly did.

And really, that was ok with me. They were all boring, and none of them ever were interested in ANYTHING that I cared about, and from what I could tell, half of them were actually incapable of actually *thinking *about anything in the first place. I was that dork that *wanted *to get tutored by the hard teachers after class, because we could really get into the stuff that they couldn’t cover in class, because no one else was interested in learning it.

It wasn’t until I got to college that I found intellectually-stimulating friends at roughly my own age to become my own social group. It was like suddenly getting a pass into a mental heaven.

So, yes, skipping can cause problems with fitting in. If a kid is sufficiently mentally different, there are going to be problems fitting in ANYWAY, and perhaps fast-tracking that whole school experience will just make it pass quicker so they can start finding their own way as adults, which in my experience has been phenomenally more simple than it was while I was in grade school.

I would however say that it seems from friends and my own experience, that if you DO decide to skip, there are better places to do that than in kindergarten.

As always Y(or Your Kid’s) MMV.

37

Cripes Manda Jo -where the hell did I say that she only has friends five years older than she is? Or* only* relates to older people? She has always had friends her own age and other ages too. When her class mates at one school rejected her, she had age-peer friends through gifted classes. The next school and her current school have better policies in place both for general socialisation of all their pupils and extension for gifted students so she hasn’t needed any outside classes.

The OP will need to find what type of schooling and what combination of ‘extras’ (if any) is going to work best for their kid. Saying that having older friends or advancing classes is universally ‘bad’, is just as demonstrably false and potentially damaging as saying they are universally ‘good’.

Gifted kids aren’t victims, they’re kids. They will all have their own responses to any given situation.

38

Think of it in percentages.

When you’re 4, a single year is 25% of your life (and the first 25% of your life was spent laying in a bouncy chair staring at the world). The 5 year olds have had 25% more social experiences. 25-50% more opportunities to climb steps. 25-50% more slides down the slide. 25-50% more times to practice sitting still when asked.

The older you get, the less it matters, I think, especially when you have some understanding and hopefully some input into the decision making process. But a year at kindergarten age is a whole lot of life experience.

Consider the clueless new guy at your office. Say you’ve been in your field for 15 years by age 40. Would you expect a 25 year old kid with no experience in your field to be as good at your job as you? Of course not. That’s the kind of disparity we’re talking about, only with very fundamental skills.

39

You might consider a Montessori school, where there’s less correlation between age and grade level.

I believe this was the Straight Dope’s original motto.

40

OP here. Big thanks to all who took the time to respond. A lot of good food for thought. Needless to say, I’ll continue to read this thread with interest for anyone who wants to offer more insights or share more experiences.

Since our conference with my son’s day care on Friday morning, my wife and I haven’t had a chance to sit down and talk about what we should do, but I have some expectation that we’ll differ based on our own experiences. I was always a good student, but I was physically very small for my age. (It looks like this may be the case for our son, too.) Socially, I was a late bloomer- in elementary school I was fine, but I was pretty awkward for most of middle school and early high school. I think it would have been a lot harder for me if I’d also been the youngest in my class (August birthday). On the flipside, schoolwork was easy for me, but I never got really bored or frustrated. My wife, on the other hand, was also a good student but was apparently bored and frustrated literally to tears.

My feeling is that we should keep him on the same age-based track and work with his teachers and at home to challenge him academically. As some noted, we’ll always have the option to skip a grade if boredom in the classroom becomes an issue. The day care naturally recommended their own private kindergarten for next year (the highest “grade” level they offer), but a teacher friend tells me that even if a child goes to private kindergarten, the local public school district will require the child to start first grade the next year. So, it feels like advancing him is pretty much an irrevocable decision once made. I’m not worried about next year- he’ll be fine whether he’s in pre-K or private or public kindergarten. It’s more 7, 8, 10 years down the road that concerns me.

It was noted that there is a dire need for schools set up for children of the type we’re talking about. There is actually at least one in our city, and my wife and I have attended an information session about it. From an academic standpoint, it looks great, but there are some big downsides: what’s called “Physical Education” there is laughable, it’s too small to support any non-academic extracurricular activities (band, theater, sports), and, of course, the cost is not exactly trivial. The cost concerns loom larger, too, because we have a second child, currently 2-1/2, who’s also showing some signs of high intelligence, and it would be hard to send only one bright child to the special school if we felt it was coming at the expense of the other.

I realize all of this falls under the heading of First-World Problems, so I don’t want to sound too ungrateful. I know we’re blessed to have two bright kids and to have enough money that we can even think about private-school options. But, it is a decision we nevertheless have to make, with potentially far-reaching consequences, so I sure do appreciate the input from this community of smart people.