DS7, on the other hand, wants more than anything to play basketball and football (of all things! lol!) with his best friends who are literally a foot taller than him!
It sounds like socially, he's doing great. Academically, he's doing great. If you remove his unusual age from the equation, you have an extremely small 2nd grader, likely to hit puberty on the late side, who is otherwise happy and successful. If he were not young, but his doctor gave him a diagnosis amounting to this, would you hold him back?
We look for a solution that works one kid at a time, one year at a time. It is very hard to know if the solution you think of today will actually work tomorrow. By middle school, he might need another skip to be comfortable socially, or he might have other issues that mean a change in school, or... At the beginning of 2nd grade, we had a pretty happy kid. By the end of 3rd, she was badly anxious, depressed, unwilling to dress herself or walk to the classroom, and we pulled her out to another environment. I certainly don't think everyone has this experience, but giving up today to plan for tomorrow with an unusual child (or any child, for that matter) has its drawbacks.
For this year, would it solve the problem for him to have outside athletics with other kids his own age? If you hold him back he will need to make new friends to do sports with anyway. If you ask for the school to help, would it make more sense for him to do PE with younger kids rather than all his academics with older ones? What age are his friends - in a mixed-age group, does he gravitate toward 7-year-olds, or 2nd graders?
