I saw this on TV a few days ago and thought I would share. Interesting that the father's perspective is that anyone can do this. I think there has to be a combination of innate talent AND drive.

Super interesting! That family is fascinating. I totally disagree that anyone could do college by 12, it's just not feasible otherwise it would be done more, especially by hot-housing types!
I'd love to see more about this family.

Great family. It's apparent those kids are very smart, are supported, and are ambitious.

And of course the father states that all families could do that because he has something to sell. All cynicism aside, I imagine that getting rid of a lot of time wasted at school could make a huge impact.

I think there's two families I've read about in the last year that are doing and promoting this very specific type of acceleration. This one is the Mona Lisa Harding family, and there's the Swann family. They're doing it by following a boxed curriculum set at an accelerated pace. Obviously you get done faster that way.


http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/t...d-getting-into-college/page__hl__college

http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/t...-college-by-12-its-about-a-hsing-family/

Here's the two threads where the other forum discussed the Hardings and the Swanns. They went to a small private Christian college, which was able to make accomidations. ((State U's or Community College are reportedly less willing to make age accomidations because of homeschoolers doing exactly this.))

(I really hope I'm not breaking forum rules by linking to the homeschooling forum too much. I'm not spamming I'm just lumping my frequent forums togeather as "the internet" and yes, I mostly quote what I mostly read).

The homeschooling ladies in the other forum pretty much agreed that some kids will need college early, but most kids who can go to a so-so school early, can go to a great school if they work at it a little longer. Compare to the students who are profiled in the Davidson newsletter... the graduates this year looked like they all went to their first choice school, a lot of big names in there. Better to get a solid education than a fast one. Some kids do both.

I'm reading online about very smart kids who are homeschooled and many of them are doing highschool algebra by seven years old. They're not just spending all day long studying and doing nothing else. They're just very smart and learning at their own pace doing the average school day or even less time. I have to ask, what are you supposed to do about that? The answer is not to hold them back. Not to just do school all day and nothing else, obviously... because that's not healthy. But to consider it a good thing if that's how they learn.

I have more questions than answers.

I wish there was a video explaining what and how to teach your kids to be ready socially, emotionally, and educationally if they are noticably more rapid. I'm not sure "stick them in Calvert", (or Abeka,) or any other boxed curriculum and say "go" is it, is it? Is it?! I don't understand... what is comprehensiveness and breadth and depth? I read that gifted kids do well when matched with a mentor who's passionate and educated about something.

I hear you'll know more about what your kid needs by the time they needs it. The internet parenting quote I love best is, "I'm not raising children, I'm raising adults." I really just want to know how best to hand them full control of their life choices at a time and how to raise them to take that responsibility, in case it's earlier than eighteen. Here's the video lecture on how to recognize if your kid is at the age where they need to go to college early:


I guess the guy in the video (linked in the original post) is selling the missing piece I was hoping for, what to teach your rapid learner before then so they'll be ready. I don't want to buy the program just to find out. Why doesn't he come discuss his ideas for free on the forums, darn it!

FWIW, I keep reading the phrase, "The evidence supports acceleration as a beneficial educational choice."

La Tex, I think about this as a balancing act-- on the one hand, you have a PG child's innnate cognitive engine driving forward, and on the other, you have their innate chronological and developmental maturity acting as a drag on things.

While I do NOT believe in holding kids in lockstep with their chronological age (obviously!), I am also not in denial that there is a price to be paid for acceleration.

I am shortening my daughter's childhood by a full year every time we allow/encourage/support a full acceleration.

This is why at some point, that becomes a matter of thinking "This is wrong, no matter how 'right' it is for her, intellectually-- she deserves to BE a child while she is still a child."

This is one big reason why we have tried several means of slowing our daughter down by adding extracurricular activities, encouraging non-academic interests, etc, and keeping her in the slowest/lowest progression that she tolerates reasonably well.

While I'm not raising my child to be a child... I also don't want to raise an adult that never had a childhood.

And, uh-- not to overstate the obvious here, but NO, not "most" reasonably bright children can do college at 12-13yo.

Just-- no.

Those children who can would be considered BOTH hothoused and HG, probably HG+.

Believe me, we've heard a lot of that kind of rhetoric over the years from people who THINK that we are into pushing our DD to college as fast as we possibly can (on the basis of her 3y acceleration and partially also on her home-based education). They think (and sometimes say) two things-- how could you do that to your child, and just as often-- "oh, my {son/daughter} could have done that, too... but we chose for her/him to be normal."

Two things about that, obviously. Point number one is that they usually have no real concept of how difficult my DD's curriculum is when they're saying it. In her AP English class this year, they read TEN full-length novels/plays, and dozens and dozens of shorter selections... and were expected to analyze/synthesize information about all of it. So no, I do NOT expect that most of the kids that I've seen who are in even regular gifted classes could do that with as little relative effort as it has taken my DD. She's not "the smartest" and I'm not about that anyway-- but I just don't buy that MG kids or bright ones could do it, cognitively and developmentally speaking.

Secondly, we didn't "make" our daughter anything. Not our choice, really, the epigenetics involved in producing this particular cocktail of features. It's ironic in light of how hard we've worked to NOT have a 11-12yo college student how much we are judged for having one who will be 15.

Yes, I do actually think that hothousing is necessary for a child of 11-13 to be "at home" in a collegiate setting-- particularly to be independent in that setting.

It is not necessarily the case that one may only hothouse academic skills. In fact, I tend to think that early college entrants probably are more frequently in need of other types of hothousing-- cultivating beyond-age-appropriate skills in any domain where they are not naturally occurring/developing so rapidly.

On the social front, the executive front, yes-- I'd say that the vast majority of even those PG children who are ready to manage college at early adolescence probably require hothousing.


I'm not suggesting that this is an inappropriate thing, however-- for some children it is the least-worst option.

But it does serve to make them adults in a functional sense when they are chronologically still children.

I see it as a last resort, honestly.

But the other kids childhood includes a lot of hours of education, like it's "good for every child except the eg/pg kid". They're supposed to learn about the real world, which apparently means learning more about how other children learn and how teachers think, than about actual education. The whole world agrees that education is good for kids, why not for the brightest, also?
From what I've read (I think CFK said it) we can plan several gap years in between elementary, middle, highschool, and college but it won't work because once you've lit the fire for learning the kid's not going to take a break despite your plans. (except, like, signing them up to be a foreign exchange student.)
I don't think it's taking away a kids childhood to educate them. We send every kid to school.

I think, just from what the internet says, the kids need to somehow have an internal locus of control over their own education. Great, but when the school offers a young kid the choice between busy work and getting out of doing any work is that really a choice? I'm guessing they need to have executive function skills by about the sixth grade level, which is asynchronously awfully young for an accelerated kid. I've already been told I sound like a hothouse mamma. That's fine by me. I'm just trying to get my bearings and do this parenting thing right for my kids. Hothousing and scaffolding and "ready to learn zone" honestly sound the same to me.

No, but what is "taking childhood away" may look very different to a 10 yo versus a 30 yo.

Part of the social fabric of daily life is shared experiences with those around us.

We, as parents, feel that ANY action that serves to produce a singularity of childhood experience, or to deny a common childhood experience, is one that we have to undertake with a great deal of thought. Those things are not worthy goals, in our minds. Not without other reasons why alternatives don't work.

That's my complaint about this. The notion that this is a GOOD idea for-- well, for many children. That, I disagree with.

We are choosing our child's opportunity costs for her, basically.

So sure, she COULD go to college at ten. (And really, ours could have-- at least at the local community college.)

OR... she could slog through high school (building similarity with nearly everyone else she'll encounter in college and after) at a pace that is tolerable (not ideal), and enter a higher-level collegiate environment when she is five years older.


Putting her in college as soon as she is academically ready was never a goal in our minds.

We certainly didn't set out to GROOM her for that outcome. My goodness. I think this is a terrible reason for homeschooling, myself (and yes, I've seen a tiny handful of people who do precisely that in order to place 16yo in community colleges or regional public colleges).

It's one thing if it is child-led. It's quite another if it is push-parenting.

Wow, this turned a lot more interesting then I thought it would.
I bet those older kids are a big help in the education of the younger ones.
If everything is as it seems the parents could just coast from here on out and sale their product.

I thought I agreed. I put my kid in school to try to keep him normal. Now I think he's normal either way. He was normal when I put him in school, right, and that was before he had any school. He'll keep being normal (on the playground) wether I send him to school or not. He will not necessarily get an education if no one insists on giving him one. I don't think education is a normal thing that will automatically happen. That's why we built a whole system to educate kids.

A friend arguing for socialization over education reinforced this concept with her choice of wording, "what if he forgets how to play with the other kids?" Is that really likely to happen, I wonder? I think forgetting how to play with kids is less likely to happen naturally than growing all the way up without a good education.

I agree.

See, we're not even near thinking about that yet. For now the only question is accelerate at their pace, or try for lock-step (too late, we pre-schooled). I guess now it's just how and what to hothouse.. how to be a teachers helper, or how to accelerate.

I think some children can be suited for university. I know with my eldest I tried to baby him with Elmo quiltcovers and playdates with age peers. I was worried that he would miss out on being a child because of all his grown up hobbies. I forget how young he is, sometimes- he talks like an adult, his mannerisms are mature, he is so sensible and reasonable, and he even has a charming and handsome face that looks older. The thing that reminds me he is six is his skinny, little arms lol.

I am fighting against his natural personality. I realised earlier this year that he is different from the average child, and I need to follow his lead with most things. I still won't let him watch anything that is rated beyond 'G' or let him do anything that is unsuitable for his age, but I stopped trying to make him be a kid. However, I wouldn't be able to send my baby away to a university; I know he could handle it but I couldn't!

Before I had kids, I always thought ... I'd never want my kids to learn much before school. I want them to be kids. Plenty of time for learning when they go to school. Then I got our two boys and they proved me wrong. It had nothing to do with me and what I had planned and everything with their personality and learning styles. I don't teach them. They absorb information from any source they find. So I gave up on holding them back. I am excited about the speed with which they learn! I do sometimes think about the future, especially since we are considering homeschooling at least for DS3.2 but most likely also DS4.9, though he's registered for K this fall and we are hoping he will go through K ok (only half day). After his Kindergarten year, the school we belong to will be closing down and he'll belong to a different school, at which point we'll decide what's next. I am quite sure they'll go through the curriculum a lot faster than they would in a regular school. The question is, do I want them to learn faster? For now, my "plan" is to just follow their lead. If they learn faster and keep asking for more in a particular subject, they will get more. But aside from that, I am hoping to use the extra time that we'll get by them learning faster so they can explore other areas. Areas that really interest them. My goal isn't for them to be in college by 12-13. My goal still is for them to be kids ... but not the way others around us think kids should be / act ... I want them to be the kids THEY want to be. If that means acting like kids, than fine. If it means acting more mature for their age, fine too. In the later case, we can make adjustments to our academic plans and they can head in whatever direction we all see fit. I wasn't PG, more likely, I was HG/HG+ but I know for a fact I WAS mature enough and emotionally ready to start college by the time I was 14/15. My kids might be the same way but I would NOT want them to be in college that early. Taking college classes for dual credit, yes but not full time college. I'd much rather give them one or two gap years and have them explore their interests. But again, we follow THEIR lead so who know what will happen when they are in that age

WA has a program called Running Start that allows for juniors and seniors to attend college instead of high school.

http://www.k12.wa.us/SecondaryEducation/CareerCollegeReadiness/RunningStart.aspx

There are also two programs at UW for early entrants.

https://depts.washington.edu/cscy/programs/

The Early Entrance Program seems like a good program that addresses some of the concerns raised here.

Wow. You are so lucky to have these amazing programs for kids! How nice it must be to just give your child what they need, just because they need it. Rather than having to fight for every single beeping thing , just to give your child half of what they need.

I don't think that you and I actually disagree on this point.

It is the right thing for some kids. MOST of that cohort will need some kind of hothousing of social/emotional/executive skills in order to be truly at home in that academic setting (which comes as a package deal with adult-ish expectations in those other domains).

Most isn't "all" however. But it does explain why I firmly believe that 12yo children on college/uni campuses ought to be rare. If that ever becomes commonplace, then there is something very very seriously wrong with our K-12 educational system, and probably something equally wrong with higher ed.

The other thing that I wonder about... is the necessity of putting a very young teen into a position where his/her decision-making is impacting the entire course of his/her life and career.

Yes, these are PG children-- I think that at least that, we can all agree upon. This is NOT a good plan for bright or MG kids, right?

But they are still a long way from having fully developed executive skills, no matter how good those skills are relative to population norms in the moment.

Again, it's one thing if it's truly child-led, this kind of academic forging. But it does mean that instead of making errors as an 18yo college freshman, such children are going to be making errors in their first JOBS after graduation instead.

It compresses the time to "adulthood" by societal standards. That's the nature of my concern. It has little to do with what seems normative. Normative doesn't really exist for PG children anyway. Common experience can, but that doesn't mean that perceptions and analysis of those experiences will be the same. Nor does all of that intellect substitute for life experience.



Very well-stated. I am deeply troubled by the video in the OP primarily because it does seem to be presented as a "goal" of some kind-- and the assertion that if one just buys their "curriculum" or "book" that it can be made true for ANY child... well, I think that is likely to be profoundly awful for some children who are bright but not HG/HG+.

I, too, was a child that would have benefited enormously from college at 14-16 (and in fact, my BFF did because her parents were more flexible than my own).

YES.

There are other programs like this-- Simon's Rock, I think, is another which specializes in very early college matriculation.

I have a problem with this being the goal of any homeschool, and of the parents selling a product promoting it. We homeschool to work at dd's pace, I don't think I am hothousing though when I help support and work with her on her weakest areas. I am doing so in order to help her become more in synch with her higher areas so that life is easier for her, mostly at her request. For DD, this has been writing. She was struggling to get the ideas out of her head and onto paper...writing on a 2nd grade level, when your thoughts are that of an upper middle schooler, is frustrating....just ask dd. Is it hot housing to help her develop this skill more? I don't think so...to me it is parenting and doing what I can to support her, same as I would if she was a normal developing child, I would do what she needed to help her succeed. Do I know if she will be ready for full time college at 12? Absolutely not. Could she be? Absolutely, that is a possibility, although I wouldn't consider her truly ready unless she had taken rigorous highschool level classes first. I would help her seek out mentors, research experiences for her first before we would consider full time college, but that truly could be where a PG child may feel most comfortable, a PG child may have the executive functions needed already at that point, or may with slight support. Who knows. I grew up around a few HG-PG kids who definitely had it all going, no 2E issues and great executive functioning....had they been hothoused there, I don't think so...to me it seemed more of their personality. Will my child be like that...who knows? But she is already definitely self motivated and while extremely reserved around her peers and even those several years older, put her with kids 9 years older to her to adults and she will blow you away with her personality, wit, and the conversations she holds. I got a chance to witness this with her over the last few days. She got to spend time with 2 medical students who are here at the clinic for a few weeks and she thrived...and blew them away. The next day she ended up making two wonderful connections to some consultants who had come onto the island for 2 days to work with Dh's job. The conversations she has, the connections she made, and the way I see her open up and blossom, shows me that I know if college at 10-12 whatever gave her those same responses, then I would go for it, because to see your child, that turned on and alive would be hard to turn my back on just because "she wouldn't have a childhood." I firmly believe she could still be a child, have a childhood, but pursue an education and social life that was appropriate for her, whatever that may be, and whether that would be ideal for anyone else of not.

Okay that was totally rambling, and I have no clue if it even makes since because I was interrupted by DD twice so that she could share something she had just read and the dog kept bring me every toy in the house so that I would play with her. LOL

Oh- And the programs like those in Washington are amazing and would definitely be a first choice option when looking at what DD needed if it was early college, but everyplace does not have something like that, and we might not be in a position to move to a place just for that, so you do the best you can with what you have.

To be clear, I don't necessarily see "hothousing" as a pejorative term.

I fully admit that we hothouse DD's executive skills.

Those are her weakest domain, and the rest of her is champing at the bit while those hold her back.

It's hothousing in my opinion because it is a deliberate effort to modulate her natural/innate developmental timeline. It's just good parenting, though, because it is ultimately for her benefit.

I think that good parents hothouse all the time, whether they call it that or not.

That makes since HK. I always see hothousing as a negative term probaby because when DD was younger people accused me of it...if they only knew that she was dragging me along and I was barely hanging on for dear life LOL. That;s what I was talking about, good parenting to help her on her weakest set, but it is for her own benefit and it was cause she chomping at the bit while those are holding her back.

http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19930510&slug=1700431

http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19990404&slug=2953340

These are just two I found quickly. If you want more information, search the Seattle Times. The program has been around awhile so there are several articles.

I think it's two different groups. I don't think they're selling the program to pg families, but hg families. If what they said in the other forum is true, these two families the Swanns and the Hardings put their kids through a boxed curriculum (like Abeka or Calvert) without any differentiation or rabbit trails. An hg kid, maybe even an mg kid, would finish a set curriculum quicker than normal if allowed to work at their own pace. It wouldn't even take more hours per day. Working faster is part of being, even mildly, gifted. The benefit would be, over a lifetime, a few more years of earning, an earlier or cushier retirement, or more time for a higher education before starting your family.
A pg kid, yours HK or the ones at Davidson academy, are a different group. The plan there is not to get to earning quicker, but to "feed the fire", find a passion. That's why all the back and forth in these chats about high iq not necessarily meaning high income. I don't think they're wrong to say many kids can do what they did, with good family support and structure. It also kinda fits with the "nation decieved" spiel and Hoagies gifted's deal spreading the message that acceleration is not usually detremental like was recently commonly believed. If skipping a grade or two in school is harmless, then so is accelerated homeschooling.
ETA: I'm worried that sounded elitist like mg/hg young adults don't need a passion to go to college and get a career. I meant the path a pg kid could take could lead them to a tougher degree from a tougher college so maybe the prerequisite knowledge might be different.

Quite honestly, I don't think you even need to be gifted at all to go through curriculum faster when homeschooling? You have all that "extra" time to learn that in a traditional school setting would be spent on non-productive activities like settling down, explaining instructions to the whole class over and over, waiting for the slower classmates, covering the same topics repeatedly, etc. So even without giftedness coming into place, you get more done in the same time period homeschooling that at a brick & mortar school. Not that I have any experience with it yet, I'm just using my logic

I still think that there is a big difference between skipping a COUPLE of grades (which would mean a child who is a 16yo college freshman) versus skipping 4-8 grades, which is what the Harding family seems to be suggesting is a desirable and attainable thing for any dedicated family if they just homeschool with the right mindset and materials.

Frankly, while there are homeschooling curricula that I'd call "solid" for K-8, most of the prepackaged ones are downright deplorable for science and math at the secondary level. I was not a fan of Calvert for science/math, and didn't think it was anything all that special for literacy, either. This is the curriculum that our charter school used when my DD was in 3rd-5th grade. I did not personally feel that it was all that great, and I looked at Abeka and found it highly deficient (in my opinion).

No better than public school curricula for the masses, basically.

Eclectic/WTM materials are another matter.

I guess the other thing is the notion of year-round homeschool, which many families do pursue. That generally results in about a 2y acceleration automatically if you do it for 10 years.

But it doesn't result in 3-4y accelerations unless you are pacing things faster or skimming topics.

Statistically, though, how unusual are HG children? Rare, right? So "many" is a specious term to be using there, and I am suspicious that this is about marketing, not reality, and is setting up kids who are bright/MG to be labeled failures because that kind of system doesn't "work" to produce the desired 12yo matriculations with that more plentiful cohort.



My horrified question there (being familiar with both, as noted)-- is WHY?? WHY would a parent do that?? If the child is advanced enough that a 2X rate is 'appropriate' and that college-level material is necessary at age 10-12...

then WHY would you keep your child locked into that type of lackluster curriculum for those first 7 years to begin with?? Wouldn't you seek out something more suitable for their learning needs?

Holey moley, I do not understand that one. That curriculum-- alone, without side trips, etc-- is seriously not suited to gifted learning needs without a heckuva lot of differentiation and enrichment, and even then it is not a comfortable fit by any means. We should know-- we've been doing it for years.

In that case, I am still left scratching my head at the willingness to send the child to COLLEGE, but not to provide more meaningful preparation at the primary and secondary levels. It's like treating K-12 as a sprint or something. I don't get it-- for a MG child or for a PG one.

I'm horrified that a parent would push children to adulthood to "maximize lifetime earnings" for that child. If true, that is seriously among the very worst arguments I have ever heard for acceleration of a child. WOW.

A lot of people pay good money for their kids to go to private schools and use Abeka. My sister has a teachers degree and she's homeschooling my nephew with Abeka. I'm looking at wtm writing, aops, moems, those books Val said, etc... but a lot of people consider Abeka rigorous and private schools use it. I think Abekas strength is that it does a lot of memory work in the early grades. I think working memory is one thing the forums say is very plastic, and excercising it might make you a better student. I'm actually considering (learning and) introducing my kid to sports on tv and the internet so he can start learning players as memory work. I don't plan to use Bible, but I think memorizing might be good skills training (education) anyway.

I'm saying the program they're selling is target to mg/hg consumers because eg/pg parents would think there's more to education than getting a good job from it. Security and a job you enjoy is actually kind of a fine goal. What's making you squeamish about it is that it seems to suggest childhood is just "preparing for your real life to start." That's kind of a one-dimensional view of it. The kids probably do normal kid stuff every day and they work on making their future. They probably think they still have a life while it's happening.

I don't want to sound like I'm arguing in favor of the program. It doesn't look like something I want to buy. I'm afraid my post sounds like it, and I'm reminded again why sometimes people have called me a contrarian. Really, I just see the pros and cons of so many plans that I just don't think I should subscribe to.

Yeah, I guess I just see this as a pretty binary thing.

Just because you CAN doesn't mean that you SHOULD.

My basic assumption is that acceleration in the formal sense-- that is, a child entering an external setting one or more years prior to chronological age would ordinarily indicate--

is always a means of more-or-less last resort, and seldom something that should be done in the absence of other accommodations for learning rate/ability. I'm relying upon what I've read here (and seen in the TV clip) that indicates that this was boxed curriculum used as directed/intended, and without extensions/differentiation.

Ergo, if a child CAN be accelerated several years like that, they they SHOULD be accommodated by reaching deeper than standard curriculum goes, and broader as well. Not "instead of" but as a set of first line intervention strategies. If that isn't sufficient, then you start looking at acceleration or other alternatives.

The reason is that there are real and long-lasting consequences for being socially and chronologically that out of step with 99% of the other people you will ever encounter in your life. KWIM? It leaves you with gaps in shared experience when your high school years don't include driving, dating, or even puberty. Those things matter in terms of relating to others socially.

So you don't do that without the alternative being more or less "bad for the child."

I also know from many years of experience that kids who are actually capable of this kind of acceleration deeply deserve a better fit than curriculum that was written with average learners in mind. Faster pace doesn't make the material better all by itself.


I'm not against acceleration. But I do think that kids who need acceleration need other types of interventions, too. Kids who don't need acceleration, (I'm reluctant to say this because I know that it sounds elitist/harsh,) I truly think it's better for most of those kids NOT to accelerate them.


I guess part of my objection is that this seems to play to EXACTLY the very worst impulses that I see in the hyper-competitive parents we run into locally. The ones with MG kids who are determined to "discipline" them into PG status. Arms race. Tiger Parenting. Whatever you want to call it. Those parents are perfectly okay rationalizing 16 hour days out of their middleschoolers under the auspices of "instilling a good work ethic," even if I personally think that is abusive.

See, these are parents that actually are REALLY THINKING the wry things that JonLaw posts which make me laugh so hard. They really believe that they are preparing their kids to compete for scarce resources when the Zombie Apocalypse happens-- or at least to save themselves from a fate even worse... mediocrity. I don't laugh when I hear local parents say them, though-- because they mean them. They sincerely believe that if they groom their kids well enough, they can guarantee Harvard admission and the Busby Berkeley musical number that is your entire life afterwards, I guess. But it's Hard, Very Hard Work to get into get your child into Harvard. Oh, the shame if it were only Stanford or Brown or Princeton...

This produces a "hurried" child. It's one thing if the child is the one in a hurry-- many, many HG+ children are like that. For all I know, this is the case in the Harding clan.

It's very different if it's mom and dad working that magic ON a compliant son or daughter, though, and that's where I object to the statements that Mr. Harding made on television. Not only can "any family" not do this-- more to the point, most of them SHOULD not. But there is a terrified group of parents who are worried that their kids are not going to be "competitive" enough... who may be tempted to try.

Another thing that comes to mind for me - unless our boys get true full rides at whatever college or university they decide to attend, we expect them to WORK to help with supporting themselves in college. We would not be able to pay for their college if they went in at 12 or 13 years old. We want them to be old enough to be financially responsible or co-responsible for their higher eduction.

Good point, CFK.

I did concede that there are countless things which I absolutely do NOT know here:


Eventually I figured out what rubbed me so much the wrong way about it, though-- it wasn't that this particular family has sent their own kids to college at very young ages. It's that they seem to be advocating that this is a perfectly legitimate thing for parents to decide to DO to their kids, and oh look, I conveniently happen to be selling the tools to make it happen.

Strikes me as cashing in at least a little, and a bit disingenuous at best. I certainly wouldn't dream that parenting a HG+ child entitles me to write a book about how to homeschool such children, nevermind homeschooling MG children (which I truthfully know very little about).

So that is the part that bugged me about it. It came off as a bit infomercial-ish.

I'm certain that the Harding kids are very bright/gifted, but look at the colleges they attended/attend. They mention Faulkner University and Huntingdon College (both in Alabama). Take a look at the College Board website to see the 25%-75% percentile SAT scores for those schools. Not so great...how do gifted kids benefit by going to schools where the average SAT score is below the national average? Bright 12 years old kids going to college with 20 year olds that might be "not-so-good" students. Why not wait a few years and have them attend a good college with academic peers?

It seems unlikely that most or even many children can skip 6 years. A lot could skip 1, I think most homes hooked bright kids could skip 2 (if they had enough attention - I'm not sure the time wasting prevention arguement works if you are one of 6 kids under 10 including 2 year old triplets (there seem to be some very large families on the WTM boards. I do know as a child the time wasting really annoyed me and I am MG at best.

From discussion elsewhere I get the impression that the Hardings are adamant their kids are not gifted, and indicate in their book that their kids are getting credits/passing, not top of their class - it sounds like they are making average achievement but at high speed. I would not ever have that as a goal as a homeschooler. Oddly though in lower primary, for my Hg+ DD, I would rather she was sitting closer to the (upper) middle than the very top of her class. Personality wise she's not suited to being way out in front. She'll work to keep up or catch up so she's well placed in the class, but equally she'll work to hang back and blend in (or you could see this as slacking off ecause she can). Observably the best in the class is not her goal or her happy place. She'd be better off homeschooled, but she'd rocket ahead without the variety of ways that school puts the brakes on.

I fail to understand what exactly the Hardings think they are doing for their children then?

Middling grades at a middling college... so, they'll be 18 looking for jobs with a mediocre degree instead of 22 or older? How is that a good thing?

My question precisely.

They might have to take couple gap years after college ...

We have two gifted children and I don't think I could handle a third. How do these people handle ten? By my accounting that would be almost six hours of hyperventilating fits per day, three hours of anxiety, two hours of trying to get them to actually say what they feel, and three hours of fighting and peacemaking. Then we would try doing some schooling.

Ha! I marvel at people with two!

I am, quite frankly, terrified of having another child like DS before he is, at the very least, in kindergarten. He is a true labour of love and my greatest joy, but I fear my health and sanity would be seriously compromised if our second child exhibited the same intellectual horsepower and intensity that DS possesses.

That being said, if I could be assured of my sanity, I would love to have another child.