Honestly-- I'm going to offer a bit of an addendum. A few people who know me better more privately know the back story on this little addendum and can vouch for just how hard-won this knowledge actually is.
My DD, now nearly 17, has had a much harder time coping with being so different
this year than last.
Bad things can happen to anyone-- her age didn't MAKE it happen, and it definitely didn't really impact how well she's been able to cope, let's just say that I
know that statement is true by virtue of having been a college professor and having seen it unfold before.
But what I
would say is that children are NOT their test results. Children are, first and foremost, individual to the core. Those idiosyncracies play together to produce absolute singularity when considering things like radical acceleration.
Now for the part that is pretty strongly opinionated.
MOST children, even PG ones, probably have no business as "regular" college students at anything under 17-18yo. Maturity is far, far more than the ability to learn quickly and solve complex problems in vector calculus.
Our daughter was well-suited to college-- I would make the same choice about acceleration again. (I'd do some other things far, far differently, but that's another story and not for this venue).
Understand that I would NOT place a child with most 2e issues, any mental health challenges whatsoever, or emotional/social deficits on a college campus while being well under 18. Would not do it. I think-- and this may be among the most judgmental things I've ever posted on this forum-- that it is distinctly unwise to do that on any campus intended for your adults who have legal autonomy and generally are busy spending that autonomy doing things that are unwise-to-downright-dumb.
The reasons are completely pragmatic. If your child becomes ill in class, nobody will walk him/her to the nurse-- they're expected to make their own way to student health or the local medical clinic. If your child experiences a roommate dispute, they have to live with the situation or negotiate a better one-- themselves. If your child is found in violation of a college policy, the college is under no obligation to notify you-- and they won't.
Kids do dumb things. They do them at 18, too. But the younger they are, the more life experience they tend to lack. The more SHELTERED or NAIVE they are, the more life experience they tend to lack.
So.
What that means, in summation, is that a 12yo who has had to
work hard at high school-- spending long days keeping up with schoolwork after a radical acceleration at age 10? May not be in a good position over all to be entering college at 13 or 14. Not only will they be missing that 3-5 y that everyone around them has-- they also will not have made up much ground if they were scrambling to keep up academically rather than doing it with ease and spending a LOT of free time maturing socially and emotionally (like their older peers were doing).
On the other hand, a socially
savvy child, one that is globally advanced in social/emotional maturation as well as cognitively and HAS spent that time doing what other middle- and high-schoolers have? Well, then-- yes-- maybe. But only if you have some idea what you're getting into.
Unfortunately, to some extent, I think that this die is often case back in 1st-3rd grade, and whether or not you accelerate is probably BEST determined then, when they can adjust and move with their cohort, learning the same things alongside them for almost decade.
Our daughter DID do that. She wasn't "accelerated" so much as "compressed" three years-- also sort of functionally "jumped" from being about 2-3yo to being about 5-8yo during a period of 18 months or so-- developmentally, and naturally. We didn't make that happen, it just did.
Know your child's quirks. The WORST area to be more or less synchronous in development, when considering acceleration, is probably executive function, IME. There is far more acceptance for social quirkiness or immaturity now than used to be the case. But college now is
brutal for executive skills.
We knew that our daughter was going to need to be reigned in wrt dating partners being FAR TOO OLD for her. Our rule is that she can't date anyone who isn't also an undergraduate, and she hasn't tested our limits within that by dating anyone who is a returning/non-traditional student. Her friends have to understand that we're more involved with her than THEIR parents are
because she is still dealing with some horrible stuff, and also because she is so young.I also still have to push her to not procrastinate when she is feeling avoidance over her perfectionistic ways. No, I don't check her homework and haven't done a bit of that since her first year of high school. But I
do regularly sniff out whether she's skipping class or turning assignments in on time.
Each and every HG+ child is a singularity. By definition. The patterns of asynchronous development that emerge in adolescence are profoundly not those of NT people-- but they are also not those of any other HG child, either.
Being PG is hard. The wrong placement can make it even harder.
For our DD, not being accelerated was the wrong choice-- I firmly believe that, seeing how she is "older" than the 18-19yo freshmen who are actually 3y older than she is... and seeing how her maturity matches best with the peers who are juniors and seniors right now, and are 20-23.
