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    Originally Posted by E Mama
    So, are you saying you think 10-12 are well rounded enough to be in college full time? Maybe well rounded for 12 year olds, but their intellect alone does not make them well rounded- in my opinion.
    You sound as if you are looking for a "fight". I stated it is my opinion. I do not need to agree with you ,nor have I asked anyone to agree with me.

    Yes, I think there are preteens out there who are such extreme outliers not just in terms of intellect, but maturity and diverse talents that it can be hard to imagine unless you've met a few. It can make a person feel inadequate to meet an 11 year old who is more well rounded than you are an adult... but yup, they are out there.

    It is a topic for another thread if well roundedness is a college prerequisite. I'm thinking if it was we'd be losing out on a good share of our engineers, writers, computer programmers, physicists, etc. We should all be aware of that well roundedness can be used as a tool to deny gifted children an appropriate education. Some kids, probably many gifted kids, are never going to be well rounded and that's not a bad thing. Denying them an appropriate education until they appear more normal is. Extreme outliers often aren't normal - that's in the definition.

    The reason I responded to unfair assumptions about early college students and the reason I'm posting on this thread is that parenting a child who is such an extreme outlier can be really scary. It can be difficult to find information. I'm imaging there might be somebody out there who is in a place similar to where I was years ago. You might have a kid who is entirely different from anything you have the basis of experience to understand and anything you could have imagined. You see your child's profound joy in learning and you believe that it is a a reasonable expectation for your child to want to learn. Perhaps it becomes obvious your plans of "going wide" are wearing thin and they are not at all what your child wants. And, you realize attending college your child can finally go at something remotely close to the right pace and connect with intellectual peers.

    Unfortunately, what parents are too often told in this situation is that the kids will end up profoundly maladjusted, without friends, not well rounded, suicidal, preyed upon sexually, etc. We've heard it all and unfortunately much of it on this board that is supposed to be a place of support for gifted families.

    None of those negative things bear any relationship to anything we've experienced and they don't seem to be a good characterization of the other kids we've known who have gone to college early. This unconventional path is probably not one you ever expected to consider but it may be a place where your child is very happy. There are not perfect solutions for many gifted kids - but there can be very good ones and for some kids that will mean early college, even very early college. So my message would be ignore scare tactics and listen to your child and be open to what they need.




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    Originally Posted by Bostonian
    If children finish college earlier, they can start working earlier, and the resulting extra earnings over their career should not be ignored. If peak career earnings are about $100K for a bright college graduate, and if 4 years (say) are added to the peak earning period, that's $400K extra dollars. That's a lot of money!

    Interesting point. Another exciting thing for some people is that they feel more flexible getting more in depth education and degrees in multiple fields. This can offer really exciting possibilities because too often we have disciplines totally separate from each other with researchers and academics struggling to understand anyone from a different field. People who can bridge multiple domains may do really exciting work.


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    Originally Posted by Wren
    Why don't you answer or is your kid totally not well rounded and just pursuing academics for some parental pressure?

    Ren

    As Howler Karma commented earlier in the thread, I'm not about to post personal information about my child on a public forum. And, really I can't imagine who would submit their child for inspection in response to that sort of question.

    I will say again, we've got a very happy child who is wonderfully engaged and enjoying life. We would not have that without early college. I feel very fortunate that we have the option and I hope families who face a similar decision will make that not shut down a good option based on fear.

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    My opinion, which is based on my experience, is that kids mature at different rates in different ways and that variation includes kids who are mature, and well rounded, much younger than many would guess possible.

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    Originally Posted by Sailing
    Having said that, I recently met a 40 something woman who was academically accelerated and started college at 15. In her case, she wanted to be with her peers, but her parents insisted she move ahead and stay challenged. This girl said, she didn't have any friends because college students didn't want to hang out with her and younger kids were busy with their school lives. She ended up not finishing college and dropping out at 18. She did eventually go back and finished a degree at a much later date. She said she wished her parents hadn't done that to her. This was a very sobering story for me. It has been on my mind a lot. I think the key in this situation is that she didn't want to go to college. She wanted to be with friends, but her parents pushed. I think that has to be the difference - a kid pushing versus parents demanding.
    The problem with these stories is that no one can ever know all the pieces of the story, and 16 year old impressions have to be taken with a grain of salt. I know several kids who were afraid that they couldn't cut it in a more challenging situation after years of enforced underachievement, and instead of saying 'Yeah, I'm afraid I can't do it and I desperately need to protect my ego by not trying' say things like 'It's friendships that really matter to me.'

    Of course it may be that friendships really were what this individual wanted at that moment, but I still feel that parents have an obligation to look at the big picture and make their best judgement. Wanting a child to 'stay challenged' isn't such a monstrous thing to want. And it isn't her parent's fault that there were no other workable options for her at that particular time and place. It may be that the parents perceived the child at risk for dropping out well before high school, and that this way she had a lot more credits pre-drop out than another possible way. It is the job of the parents to make their best judgement. Is making one's best judgement a guarantee of success? No it is not.

    This person says that she wishes her parents hadn't 'done that to her' and it may be that her parents were totally wrong and doing it for their own ego reasons. But it's just as likely that they saw things that she didn't see about her own behavior. It's easy to want to change things if the current situation is pretty crumby. Maybe the friends that this women left were objectionable to her parents in some way? Maybe this woman complained bitterly about how bored she was but doesn't remember that?

    I do think that at age 16, many parents would be likely to take a child's perspective into account, but we'll never know exactly what happened back there.

    It's interesting to me that this storyteller never takes any responsibility for her actions at any point in the story, but seems to retell it from a victim perspective. From my reading, her perspective is that the problem was not that she didn't get enough resource to handle the challenges she was faced with, but that she was asked to do what couldn't be done. I have to question that.

    As you point out Sailing, there are a lot more options at this moment in time, such as PEG and Simon's Rock, and taking college classes as a High School student, and we can all be glad of that.

    Love and More Love,
    Grinity


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    Originally Posted by Grinity
    It is the job of the parents to make their best judgement. Is making one's best judgement a guarantee of success? No it is not.

    I agree. I don't think repeating horror stories with incomplete facts does anyone any good and it runs the real risk of adding to the burden of parents who are already struggling to do the best they can do. For many of our kids there are not going to be perfect solutions. We need to do what we can to hope we make the right decisions and always keep in mind there are few decisions that can't be undone. Sometimes kids and circumstances change and we'll make a change - more often than not it will turn out.

    Also, I think we should all keep in mind that adolescence and young adult life can be complicated for lots of kids, gifted or not. Many kids leave college or pick a new direction in life. That is something that maybe shouldn't be shocking no matter the student's age.

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    Originally Posted by passthepotatoes
    .I agree. I don't think repeating horror stories with incomplete facts does anyone any good and it runs the real risk of adding to the burden of parents who are already struggling to do the best they can do. For many of our kids there are not going to be perfect solutions. We need to do what we can to hope we make the right decisions and always keep in mind there are few decisions that can't be undone. Sometimes kids and circumstances change and we'll make a change - more often than not it will turn out.

    I have to strongly agree with this while carefully making it clear that I still want to hear every story anybody would like to tell. Stories can not guide us now for several reasons. Stories are mulitifaceted. Stories are individual. Time changes everything. Different stories have different settings. Different colleges have different teachers at different times. Every child is different.


    Youth lives by personality, age lives by calculation. -- Aristotle on a calendar
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    I found this while scanning the database located on the sidebar of this forum. This is an autobiography of a twelve year old college student. It features the kind of story that nobody can find objectionable. The child skipped several grades without his parents finding out about it. There are so many shades of grey between the following story and engaged parents who are actively involved in advocating for their children as students.
    http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/Articles_id_10157.aspx


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    I think an issue that we are dancing around, is that College in general - as currently conceived of in the US, doesn't really appear to be a healthy environment for young people of age 16- 26.

    I remember that when I was in college my 'outer-directed perfectionism' was highly active and I was very judgmental of the general behavior of my agemates. I was also judgmental of the Adults who said: "Aw, this is their only time in their life to cut loose and have fun, why be such a soil sport?" It seemed to me that the far too many young people suffered far too much, sometimes from the pressures of the academics, sometimes at their own hands and sometimes at the hands of their peers.

    Although Spike Lee's 1988 film School Daze was written in a way that addressed some specific issues faced by students at historically black colleges, it really resonated with me overall and my experience at a very different university. Like the character at the end, I wanted to run around yelling: "Wake up...Wake up....Wake up!"

    Humans are social creatures, so putting kids in large groups that have norms which are very different from the rest of society and very unhealthy, worries me as much at 18 as it does at 16. Of course I shouldn't have read:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Charlotte_Simmons
    but I can only hope that the novel is an exaggeration.

    I don't have any answers, but I do want to raise this issue out of the background. I remember reading an article that talked about the deeply held belief in the US that college is the means to a good life. To qualify as a bubble, the deeply held belief has to be a irrational. Here's one http://inflation.us/collegebubble.html

    I think that sending kids off for 5 years of partying is irresponsible. I think that kids who can think for themselves, and go to college to work hard and learn while continuing to mature into an adult who can create a lifestyle that includes basic self-care, should definitely go, if they have the wherewithal to realize what they are getting into. Personally, I think I had much more wherewithal to see the big picture at 15 than most of my 18 year old 'peers' had when I got to college at 17. I think being HG helped me have more of a big picture, but it wasn't my only quality that helped me steer a reasonable course.

    I think living at home while going to college seems much more reasonable for most college-aged people. When I read the 'insider's guide' sorts of books that describe the various colleges and read that at a particular school it's normal for students to avoid Friday classes so that their alcohol binges can start on Thursday night, I think is very unfortunate.

    Love and More Love,
    Grinity


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    I'm not a mod or anything, but I would like to remind everyone that sometimes it is hard to discern another person's intent just by reading her posts. I've had the experience of getting very worked up and later rereading the thread only to find that I had seriously misunderstood another person's responses.

    I will also say that I didn't find anything PtP said to be offensive and it didn't seem to me that she was trying to put words in anyone's mouth or judge anyone else's experience. I, for one, thought she was making a pretty good point, which is simply that if a child is ready for college-level academic material early that does not mean that the child is less well-rounded than his or her peers, nor does it mean that he or she has been hothoused, nor does it mean that the child should be punished by not being given access to an available resource that would help him or her to learn appropriate material at an appropriate level. If other children who are academically advanced have not needed early college, that doesn't invalidate PtP's point that it can be a valuable and appropriate resource for some children.

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