Thanks for the recommendation. She goes to a summer music camp in Colorado where she feels more "in". I worry about her overall feeling. Yes, she has had several friends tell private things about her and she is very sensitive about it.
Ellipses,
Check your pms. My dd13 may be at the same camp this summer and she's having a hard year socially this year as well. She, too, is a 9th grader and, while she thinks that the other kids at her school are all nice, she is lacking in rapport with most of them and is very lonely.
I've also wondered if some of her difficulties are due to the emotional changes that come with being a teen. I do also think that some of it is the difficulty in finding other HG peers. The kids she is looking for are found in small quantities in life, but they are there somewhere. I'm really pushing my dd to get involved in mock trial and other extracurriculars at school next year to see if she meets more like souls there. She's also thinking of starting a club to raise $ for spay and neuter clinics for animals in developing nations. We were in Costa Rica last summer, which was the first big vacation our family has ever taken. It took a while to pay it off, but it was very worth it and sparked dd's interest in working to improve the conditions of the animals we saw there.
Another issue my dd has run into is that she is being raised in a family with different religious and political beliefs than many of her peers. While she does know some kids who are very bright at her school and who seem nice, she's having a hard time getting past things like class discussions in pre-AP bio where a lot of the kids say that evolution conflicts with their religious beliefs and they don't believe in it. Dh and I were both raised Catholic, but he is atheist now and I lean toward Buddhism. Dds haven't been raised in a particularly religious home. I have also been vegan for 23 yrs and dds have been vegetarian their entire lives. Dd13 has recently become vegan as well.
She has a lot that makes her different and that is hard as a teen. I think that HG kids, like our girls, have a hard enough time finding peers, but when you add in other things (shyness, different beliefs, etc.), it can be even that much harder. We've told dd that she needs to stick it out next year and are trying to give her to tools to work toward making the school experience better and to work on self advocacy, but if she is still this unhappy by the end of her sophomore year, we may have to consider something else.
