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
