... the answer, IMO, depends so much upon the individual child and family. (But you knew that, right??)
The honest answer is that a child like this probably is NOT going to be very well-served in nearly any group of other children.
Even among other PG children, they are all so asynchronous and different from one another...
So sure, mixed-ages is great-- but-- that still doesn't mean that your 6yo IS a fifth grader... nor that he will take as long to master the material as that more-typical child 4y older.
This was the problem that we ran into again and again. Something would work for a while... but nothing worked for very long.
We ALWAYS knew that anything that
was working was only termporary. Ephemeral.
Our goal became to get her through her childhood without profound damage to her.
The ultimate in least-worst calculations, basically. It was the best we could do under the idiosyncratic circumstances presented to us. Not everyone is as limited as we were-- but some people are even MORE limited. It's individual.
We opted to limit DD's time spent among children to the smallest amount that seemed to serve her developmental needs. That's the bottom line. I have no regrets about that-- save this-- I kind of wish that we had been even more aggressive about that approach, ultimately. Trying to keep her with "peers" was probably unwise, for a number of reasons-- not least of which was that they weren't actually true peers 99% of the time.
We aren't raising our children to be CHILDREN among peers, anyway-- but hopefully to be functional adults who have reasonably good mental health and can live lives that meet their own aspirations/expectations. None of us is surrounded by "true peers" as adults, now, are we? Right.
So why we believe that this is the correct thing, developmentally, for children-- that kind of eludes me, honestly. I believe that this is mostly cultural, and a relatively recent desire in parenting....
The other unpleasant thing to consider about that is that there are a LOT of theories about child development that are pretty flimsy on the evidentiary side, when you consider how sound they are... and that is with
neurotypical children. How valid they are for non-NT kids is anyone's guess, but that assumes that the mechanistic hypothesis is correct to begin with.
I'm pretty skeptical at this point. I think that kids develop best when the adults in their lives respond to what THEY as individuals seem to need, without stopping to think so darned hard about what so-called child development experts "know" (and they don't, that's what I'm suggesting).
There is no handbook. Nobody has a better crystal ball for an individual HG+ child than his/her loving and functional parents do.
You can choose to give your child enough social capital that they can "pass" (to put it crassly) among more typical peers over the course of their lives-- but understand that nothing comes without a cost. We did a lot of that, and I'm not sure that it was worth it, in the end. We also didn't have a choice about life outside of Western cultural norms (or any others, really, either)-- but if you DO have such a choice, ask yourselves how important it is to adhere to those cultural norms. How isolating does it feel to live apart from them? Is it okay with you to do that? What about your child's temperment-- is s/he a joiner/pleaser with a need to "belong" or a loner who doesn't really find that important?
HTH-- it's not easy.
