My dd13 is in a somewhat similar situation as Dottie's ds13, but he's a tad younger and probably a good deal brighter
. Mine started K as the youngest in grade with a bd that just made the cut. She skipped later (5th), but probably should have sooner b/c it had gotten to the point where her work habits were truly suffering and she was spending a good bit of her school day tutoring other kids.
Mine is also now in 9th grade. She was 12 at the start of the year, too, but turned 13 not too long after this school year started. As a girl, and a girl whose sports interests are really atypical (she's open water SCUBA certified, for instance, but doesn't do team sports), that hasn't been an issue for her at all.
We have seen the academic & talent search competitions issue. She has still rec'd awards for her grade in talent search and won a regional writing competition last year for her grade, but I'm pretty sure her awards would have been highest honors or high score vs. honors if she had been 1-2 grade lower in placement. None the less, I can't see placing a child inappropriately in order to increase her odds of winning academic contests.
While she is a later developer, she has grown tremendously over the past three years and I'm quite sure that she doesn't stand out as younger than the other high school freshman. Re dating, she did have a 17 yr old boy ask her if she was 15 or 16 this year. Fortunately, when she told him she was 13, he was wise enough to realize that she isn't dating material. I suspect that it is more of a problem for boys to be younger in terms of dating possibilities in high school. For girls, it is more an issue of not getting involved in dating relationships where there is a power differential due to age differences.
We, too, did not find the skip to put dd in with a group of peers in and of itself. The other kids are not HG just b/c they are older than her. She still has some significant frustrations with others' work ethic, cheating, reasoning processes, etc. In her strong subjects, language arts in particular, I can probably reasonably say that dd has only had two or three years of her entire schooling experience where she'd had a teacher who has taught her anything at all.
It is still better than the alternative and the sheer quantity of work that she's experienced post-skip has done a lot for her in terms of learning how to manage her time. She has the coupling of lower processing speed and a school system that equates rigor with quantity especially in middle and high school.
