My eldest was a globally mature child. She started long day care at six weeks of age and spent 55 hrs a week at the centre. As she neared her fourth birthday, it was clear that she was the most advanced child in the room of 4 & 5 year olds and she was indistinguishable in every way from the five year olds. As the child who spent the most time in the centre, she was socially very savvy and very popular. She had no trouble fitting in at school even though she was a year younger than her peers throughout school, but her sporting abilities also earned her a lot of respect (she won her first 2km school cross country race at age 4.25 yrs).
My middle child was more advanced academically than his sisters, but he lacked social maturity. At his day care centre, he was engrossed in his own explorations and often ignored his early childhood educators. We didn’t contemplate early enrolment for formal schooling as we could see that his behaviour might be disruptive. When he did start, he was still in the youngest third of his cohort. He would do parallel activities to his classmates - for example when they doing maths exercise sheets with simple operations, DS would do the same sheets in Roman numerals, binary, in different number bases. He has enjoyed radical maths acceleration in high school.
Both approaches worked, but I think DS has had much, much greater autonomy over his own education, whereas both of my daughters were early entry students and essentially just followed the standard curriculum one year ahead of their age peers.
