My experience has lead me to feel the "accelerate or not" question is far more complicated than usually discussed on these boards. In failing to accelerate, I evolved as a kid who didn't know how to work and who expected all academic things to be effortless. But I also evolved as a kid who could do a wide variety of activities well, thought of myself as successful, and had an easy (and happy) school life as a child. Seems to me there are positives and negatives on both sides.
J
Thanks for bringing up the complexity of skipping. I was skipped one grade and vowed to never do that to my child unless it was the only option(that would be my baggage right there). The single grade skip did little to challenge me academically, but I felt like it made my social life harder in elementary and middle school. I had good friends in my old grade and had trouble making new friends once I skipped--I just felt like I didn't fit. And I remember how annoying it was when I finally had made friends that they all started going nuts for boys more than a year before I did (I was a late bloomer to start with and the skip just increased the gap between me and the other girls).
By high school, I had made friends and things went pretty well. I was still not challenged academically, but, as a result, had lots of time to challenge myself socially. I was president of a few clubs and held student body offices. I kept statistics for sports and got to travel around the state with the teams. I am actually a pretty shy person with totally average leadership skills and so these were great opportunities and real challenges for me. I was never going to run for office again in my life, but being really smart in a smallish school gave me many chances to try my wings that I would not have had if I had been skipped up to the point where I would have been challenged academically. I went into college with a lot more poise and confidence because I had already had chances to get out of my comfort zone. I even wondered at the time how much more might have accomplished in HS had I not had that one year of elementary "stolen" from my by skipping.
I just think that there are plenty of ways of challenging kids that do not involve skipping grades and that is what we are trying to do with our son. We have DS subject accelerated in a few subjects and he is doing music, sports, and a foreign language on his own, plus he has plenty of time to run around and play with the neighborhood kids. He is happy. We were offered a skip this year and he turned it down. He says wants to be with his class--I think he feels the same loyalty to his class as I did, and I plan to respect that.
Knowing that most of us feel insecure about our parenting decisions, I am afraid that this posting will create more anxiety. That is not my intent. I do think that there could have been circumstances that would have made me decide to skip DS. I don't suggest that those of you whose kids skipped have done anything wrong or that you should second-guess your decisions. I just suspect that gifted people will have baggage whether they are skipped or not. As Gratified3 said, it's complicated. There are benefits and problems both ways and you have to weigh them for your own circumstance.
