Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Grade skipped girls & dating

Mom2Four's dd21 seems to describe me pretty well in my younger years.

I was accelerated and wound up dating a few older boys. One was a 19-year-old classmate when I turned 15. Although I ended up being exposed to some more adult parties, he was a gentleman and understood that a 15-year-old isn't ready for some of the same college activities as a 19-year-old. Though we were at different points in our lives, he was a good fit for intellectual debating and playing sports.

Since then, I have dated guys around my own age, as well as a few older (mostly as a teenager). It evened out for me once I reached grad school/my career, where I can meet men my age who can carry on a good converstation about many different topics.

By "grown-up" I meant post-puberty and having the mental age of an adult. Gifted children can reach the latter milestone in their early teens.

That becomes a different question, then. Do we let our young teen kids make all decisions for themselves b/c they are mentally older than their age? I guess that is a parenting question and I'd lean toward saying "no" for our family. I have no intent of banning my dd from things and have let her make choices for some time regarding reading books that seem inappropriate for her age, for instance. In general, she's made good choices. We talk through things and I'm usually fine with the decisions she makes.

However, if the only alternative I can offer her to considering older guys is "don't date at all b/c boys your age are too immature," I don't suspect that is likely to be a good alternative. When she chose not to read the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo when we talked about it having some weird sexual stuff and bondage, the alternative wasn't "read nothing."

I guess that I'm trying to get from others if their HG+ girls were able to happily date boys their own age and where they found them or if they ran into fewer of the problems than typical in dating older boys by virtue of their greater maturity. Mature or not, I do know that human hormones play a part in our making good decisions when we are young, though.

Well this is certainly one of those threads that brings back memories of experiences that made my life measurably worse.

Great -- lol! May I ask how so?

Guess I'm going to disagree with you there. I don't think that being post-pubescent makes you an adult. Teenagers I've known (including pretty much every HG+ one I've ever met, and including people with IQs north of 160) have been a long way from being grownups.

Being able to read classic books or talk about politics doesn't make you a grownup. Being a grownup comes from having a body of life experiences that you've learned from, and simple arithmetic keeps this out of reach for 14-17-year-olds who live at home, haven't had babies, haven't had to pay bills every month, buy supplies for themselves, find housing, or get something done repeatedly without adult supervision, etc. etc. etc. Plus, there is also the issue of brain development, which continues into the 20s. Most 18 year-olds aren't really adults in the true sense of the word, though they're old enough to start feeling their way by that point.

If I recall correctly, I was only able to date people in whom I had no actual interest in dating while being unable to approach the people who I wanted to date.

I don't recommend that approach.

It doesn't work.

And you end up with people yelling at you and crying.

Plus, there was that time my parents tried to fix me up with someone who thought she was dating me, but I didn't think I was dating her.

And other stories, equally as stupid, and some much worse.

In a four-year residential college, many of the students living in dorms, especially those fully subsidized by their parents, are not adults by several of the criteria you mentioned, yet colleges make little effort to regulate their behavior, and it is impossible for parents to do so. I don't think there should be a supervision "cliff" at the time students enter college. What the slope should look like is hard to say.

And failure to appropriately navigate this cliff causes what I like to describe as Catastrophic Permanent Life Failure.

I still have nightmares about college on a regular basis.

I agree with Bostonian's point here.

Maybe, but you've ducked/segued away from your original point claiming that many gifted post-pubescent teenagers are basically grownups, which I disagreed with.

I'm not sure I follow your messages; the first one in this thread claimed that post-pubescent children (as young as 15 in girls and 16 in boys) are grownups and a question to ask is, "How much should their parents try to regulate their personal lives?"

I disagreed with that idea.

Then you said that there shouldn't be a supervision cliff when students enter college. To me, this implies that you think that these students need more supervision...yet you argued that many post-adolescents (especially if they're smart) are grownups and wondered if or how much their parents should be regulating their personal lives, implying...less supervision.



You often say that college attracts people with higher IQs. Here, you also said that having a high IQ can lead to a mental age of an adult at an earlier age. So, by that reasoning, many college students would meet your definition of being grownups by the time they were, say 17 or 18, (allowing for extra time for non-HG+ but smart students).

So there seems to be a contradiction in your messages that I don't follow.

For full clarity, I said that by 18 most people are ready to start feeling their way. If someone is footing the bill, college is, in many ways, a relatively gentle step into adulthood.* Someone is paying your way, there are real grownups around who have a certain amount of authority over you, and if you live in a dorm and have a meal plan, you avoid a lot of the messy details of adult life while you have a measure of independence, figure out how to get stuff done without an adult hovering over you, and figure out how to live and work with people who are very different from you.


*Compare to people who are expected to get a job and move out soon after they graduate from high school.