I agree with both Tigerle and Val.
With very asynchronous children, there may
be no "excellent" solution.
One hidden benefit to radical acceleration for such children is that it moves them
out of the realm of childhood that much sooner. For some children, childhood is
not that much fun-- it's more like a waiting game to be allowed into the places that will allow them the autonomy and agency to choose their own adventure... and they spend much/most of their time waiting and dreaming on the day, if that makes sense.
I'm also going to offer the gentle suggestion that for most of the children that
schools see a "need" to accelerate, the
actual need in question is probably so extreme that any ONE strategy is wholly inadequate by definition.
What I mean by that is that there are usually several strategies for making environment/education more appropriate for such asynchronous kids:
1. decouple educational setting from social settings-- let them be their chronological age for most/some social and athletic endeavors and allow them to 'float' to the right level educationally-- often this is either homeschooling or private tutoring, with every other activity done
a la carte. It's expensive and a full-time job for at least one parent.
2. group with children of similar (or similar-enough) ability/potential-- full-time gifted school, in other words.
3. Acceleration-- either a) subjects, as needed, and/or b) whole-grade, as tolerated.
The thing is, when you move past a certain level of giftedness, no ONE approach is ever going to be enough on its own. You just have to trust your instincts and know that at least a few people in your life are
always going to judge your parenting/decision-making as leading to anything that ever goes wrong. {sigh}
We used pretty much
all of those approaches with DD (now nearing 17y), and the arc that diverged from neurotypical development started pretty early-- at 36 months or so. She is happier academically in college than she ever was during K through 12, and the older she gets, the more aligned she is socially with her peer group, too. She's just a kid who has always been "old" that way, if that makes sense. She was always a bit reserved with kids her own age. It wasn't even that she gravitated to older CHILDREN... she gravitated to people who were mature adults.
For every activity supporting DD's development, we have learned to evaluate "what does she need from this? Where is she at with it? What does the RATE look like-- how long is that placement likely to fit?" before deciding upon placements. For a few things, that becomes a chronological placement, but for most of them, it turns out to be +2-7 years, where the fit is
suitable and allows her to grow as a human being.
You can't expect children who are not typical to always experience even the most carefully selected placements and opportunities
smoothly. Children aren't machines, and sometimes they opt to be stubborn, unappreciative, or just plain contrary, too.
So DD has gotten herself into hot water a few times in ways that had everything to do with being a child, and very little to do with our decision-making and her placement at the time. It's not as though being in 7th grade and not 11th grade would have made things BETTER, and I can see how they might actually have been
worse. I hope that makes some sense-- it's not that all children become "easy" to parent if you just make the right choices about their educational/social placements.
There really is no way to bring that radically divergent arc (as in the case of PG children)
back into alignment with NT development. Asynchrony leads to permanent differences in lived experience, and it happens no matter how much you fight that reality, in our experience. If you acknowledge that, and work WITH it rather than spending a lot of energy fighting it, you can see ways to flex your options in order to meet your individual, idiosyncratic child's needs better.
In some ways, though, you have to be willing to let go of your own expectations of
normalcy as a parent.
HTH.
Addendum: One problem socially that we really DIDN'T see coming is that in the past 20-30 years, at least in the US, people have become so litigious that EVERY activity now requires waivers, signed insurance forms, etc. etc. etc. background checks, etc. etc. What this means from a functional standpoint when you are a 16yo college junior is that MOST/MANY extracurriculars don't have a functional
way to allow you to participate. It's not that you're ineligible-- it's that the ASSUMPTIONS about participants not being minors mean that there isn't a check-box or parental permission form, nobody is quite sure what the insurance policy would do, that kind of thing. It produces a sort of twilight zone. This has been particularly depressing as a part of the social landscape of college and employment for DD-- internships and summer jobs require "background checks" which aren't
functionally possible for a candidate under the age of 18 (or in some cases, 21).
It's a temporary problem, but it means that EVERY activity requires bracing herself for several iterations and explanations, and likely our involvement somehow once those in charge are made to
understand what it is that they are being presented with.
So people still don't always know what to make of her. Chronologically is about the
only way that she is still a child, but the societal standards and walls between childhood and adulthood have become
more rigid than they used to be, in our experience. (I was also an HG+ child who lived among much older social/educational peers at her age-- nobody much asked for proof of my age because my conduct and appearance and competence was good enough for nobody to question it).
