Had sone health issues that delayed my ability to contribute to this thread but the worst is now behind me - God willing.

We have one daughter now aged 13 who is about to complete 8th grade so that is the current ceiling on our experience thus far.

What we have found with our DYS and SET daughter is that unless a family has literally princely sums of money that there is no perfect solution and even being able to offer lessons from a modern day Aristotle as a personal tutor the child will still likely suffer in terms of social integration with age peers.

Our DD was miserable at school by second grade - she was so miserable that she became enraged over trivial things at home - really brittle. In desperation we had her evaluated and a whole grade skip right into fourth grade was arranged at the end of second grade.

What kept her ~sane was that I can mainly work from home and have been able to accelerate her Maths at her pace (well actually I got scared and slowed her down) so despite her pleading she did not start pre-Algebra until 4th grade - after school via AoPS. Maths is the easiest subject to accelerate in our experience.

Her 4th grade was awkward because we live in a tiny village so even with ka skip she had no real peers plus it seems that young girls can be very reluctant to except that a younger girl is better than them academically.

5th grade was happier and she had a couple of friends at school but the pace of school work bored her literally to tears but now we had 'baby CTY' and AoPS to keep her more stimulated in addition to some weekend G&T sessions offered by a local state college. She also needed to bring her EF up to grade level.

In sixth she encountered social issues because of her friends' puberty and the age difference became more apparent. The wheels finally coming off at the beginning of eighth grade with her former besties completely dropping her when their group merged with a another group and the alpha of that group took a dislike to our daughter. This was a very trying time for her and for us as parents as we are all empaths. Luckily she had CTY friends by then in nearby large cities but even so the prospect of sitting in the lunch room on her own was devastating for her. It all worked out well though in that she has a group of nerd boys to hang with and she is appears to now be more resilient and able to talk thing through with me. There were some horrible moments along the way that I still shudder about.

Our daughter will start HS going into pre-Calculus and a bio-medical 'academy' - we are hoping that larger pond of a regional HS will offer her more chance of meeting local peers.

In retrospect, I agree for the most part with Val - regarding the fact that puberty does impact things for skipped girls in our experience but this probably would be less of an issue for a girl who hits puberty earlier.

We have considered more than one skip in the past but we have no desire for our DD to go to college at even 17 let alone younger.

As someone said on this board before - when you have seen one high LOG kid all you have done is seen one high LOG kid - YMMV.


Become what you are