Well, I think in many ways it depends so much on the school and the community in which you find yourself (not to mention the personalities of the child, the class, and the teacher). My husband skipped and was happy--he loved school, and remembers it very fondly--but he was in a unique situation, growing up in a "closed" community--essentially an isolated company town for a scientific research facility, and every student in the school had at least one parent with a Ph.D. There were several children in each grade who had skipped at least once, and several in the school as a whole who had skipped more than once.
I was told I needn't show up for kindergarten, had a mid-year skip from first to second, which my parents accepted primarily for social reasons (in one of those demographic anomalies that occasionally pop up in small towns, there were no other girls in my original class); they rejected another offered skip because it would have put me in the same class as my sister, and my sister said she didn't want me there (it was a small school--only one class per grade). I wasn't very happy, but I'm not sure I would have been happy there anyway--and it got me out the door having spent only 11 years in the building instead of 13, a remission of my "sentence" which seemed worth the occasional skip-related inconveniences (track meets, driver's ed, etc.). It wasn't a place that valued academics--many of the boys dropped out as soon as they were legally able, in order to work in the fields. I was doomed socially from the get-go, anyway, skip or no skip, as we were the "wrong" ethnicity/religion in an otherwise utterly homogeneous community. Also, in those days, teachers had to pay their own substitutes, so my first-grade teacher used me every time she was sick, to save money, and therefore I never really had a chance to feel like just a regular member of the group anyway. It was nice to go to university, though, and make some friends!
I've realized, on looking this over, that we both grew up in such weird places that our stories will be of no help to you whatsoever!!!!!! So maybe I shouldn't post this, I don't know.
minnie
