Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments How do you know if it is working?

Hello Fellow Parents,
Here is our story in a nutshell:
Came to these forums when my son was 2. Tested at 3, WJIII Cog. result was I.Q. 138 with wording in the report at every subtest that it is an underestimate. For the next year and a half I "fought" (emails, letters, phone calls, meetings) to get him in public school at 4.5. It worked. He got a half year of K. The teacher wasn't a good match but he got the 6 months of social time he needed before 1st. Well, here we are in first grade, he is 5.5. The teacher completely gets him! It is like a dream come true. She knows she is unique in understanding children who develop on their own schedule and believes that his need for academics is imperative to his whole self. Great, right?
We had his parent-teacher conference. She presented me with scores to show how far ahead he is. He is supposed to be in Kindergarten but is almost done with 3rd grade curriculum and standards. His writing ability is catching up to his cognitive comprehension. He is writing out math equation now as well. I felt so optimistic (at times) that this grade skip was working. She started asking me if I have considered other schools, like Waldorf or schools that have multi-age classrooms. She said that he doesn't need practice, if she shows him something once, he gets it and she sees no reason why he won't end first grade being so far ahead that no differentiation can bridge the gap. Worth noting that he is extremely social and extremely tall, blends in with first graders completely.
I think by the end of this year, he will need 5th grade materials. We live in a semi-rural, beautiful,yet expensive community. It is progressive in many ways but in regard to schooling, the education does not match the cost of living. There is a self-contained GATE class at 4th through 6th grade, which may or may not still be there in a few years. It is not our hometown, we aren't eternally committed to the area, moving is an option (not easy but can happen). Which brings me to these questions I have for you fine parents:

How do YOU know if it is "working"?
How do you know that what you are doing is enough?
Would retesting and utilizing the Davidson Young Scholars be worth our while?
Has anyone moved for better schools and regretted it?
Thank you!

I don't have an answer for you, but wanted to sympathize with how difficult this question is. For atypical kids, I think the question is often whether it is working well enough, as opposed to working completely, which makes choices about whether or not to make a change even harder I believe.

I'd avoid Waldorf. There are several old threads on why. In an oversimplified nutshell, they think kids who read early are reincarnated demons or something equally kooky.

KJP, No worries, we are not considering Waldorf. I was just trying to illustrate the point that she gets our challenges with his education and she is looking ahead and not seeing it work and mentioned Waldorf. She was trying to brainstorm what situation could work. The frustrating part of these meetings as many of you know, as parents of these children, we are years ahead of them in realizing how challenging it is to serve them in schools. I have already spent the last 3 years researching what to do, what options we have and what we definitely do not want to do. His teacher, as amazing as she is, is just now having her lightbulb moment of "oh my word, what do we do with a kid like this?"

... 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.

If your child is truly happy, and feels well challenged academically, IMHO you both hit the lottery.

Our experience is similar to Portia's. One of us works from home, and the other of us works very close to home, which allows us jointly to homeschool the children, participate in a homeschool community with compatible parenting values (though we use it only rarely for its educational content), and adapt the children's schooling to their needs on a continuous basis.

So-called peer socialization is associated with our faith community and the children's athletic and artistic pursuits.

And I agree with HK that our NA culture highly over-values being normal (in the statistical sense). My objective is healthy, happy, and helping, whatever that looks like for each individual.

A word of caution - the "better schools" are usually better for those with IQs in the typical range, up to 125-130 or so, which is often described as the optimal IQ. They are not necessarily good or better for HG+ kiddos (highly gifted to profoundly gifted). Exceptions may be:
- local microschools for the gifted,
- moving to Illinois for children to be eligible to attend IMSA (boarding school),
- Davidson Academy.