From another thread:


I remember reading somewhere that changing schools is common among HG+ kids, primarily because a school that works this year may not work anymore in two or three years.

This has been our experience, with DD9 heading for her third school next year and DS13 also having been to multiple schools. I'd be very interested in hearing from others about this idea.

This might be worth a read, then: Study: Switching Schools May Give Your Kids Psychotic Symptoms

Portia you got here before I could and said exactly what I wanted to say. I come from a military family as well and boy did we move often! I LOVED it! I would change a little bit of who I am at every new school knowing that no one in this new school would know my past so they would easily accept the new me. It gave me freedom to experiment with everything from new hairstyles to new personalities. ( hmmm, maybe I am sounding psychotic:) anyway it helped me evolve without pressure of being judged. The only downside is that I have no friends- I never learnt the art of maintaining long term friendships. In the big scheme of things, it is not a big deal for me.

Heh, another military brat here. Except, darn it, we stayed at the same base from the time I was six. Supposedly for the kids (someone forgot to ask my opinion.)

Moved my son once during elementary to put him in the right gifted placement. He had been at the same alternative K-8 public school his sister attended the whole way through. But we moved him to the local elementary school that had the dedicated gifted class. Not entirely sure it was the right decision. Otherwise he has only moved to junior & then high school.

We've had to more or less revamp our entire approach about four times, maybe five.

(Not the same thing because of homeschool/virtual school, but still.)

Haha!

I probably made it sound more dramatic than it was. DS went to kindergarten at one school, and switched schools to skip first to go into second. Those two were in the same district. The third school was mid-year second to a good fit school. I think there would have been more psychotic symptoms if we had stayed the course at the first school.

ETA: Helps that my DS makes friends easily and also kept friends from the previous schools. And the good news is that he has been at the same good fit school from mid-year second to fifth grade. We are so happy to have gotten a spot for him there. Another school switch coming up for middle school.

And edited again to add: It would be very interesting if they did a study on how school moves affect gifted children, especially when the moves are from a bad school situation to a better fit. I am guessing that the school changes in the study Dude mentions were not primarily to find a better fit school for the child.

st pauli girl: I would also wonder how much of an outsized effect gifted children may have had on the study, because if parents of gifted children are frequently switching schools to find a reasonable fit, and they're not finding it, then that begs the question of causality - were the gifted children in this study more apt to develop psychotic symptoms because they were frequently switching schools, or was it because of the poor educational fit that triggered the frequent school switching?

The study cited "chronic marginalization and chronic exclusion" as the underlying causes... don't gifted children often find themselves confronted with those even when they stay in the same schools?

I'd also wonder if these students were "marginalized" or "excluded" at the original school. Many kids (not just gifted kids) are "easy targets" (for lack of a better term). It's a big jump to say moving around is the cause rather than the symptom.

Since GT kids are such a small portion of any population, I would have a hard time believing that they played a major role in this study. As for our personal experience, my kiddo was never bullied, marginalized, or excluded in the schools we moved him from. He made friends easily and kept them. I know we are lucky in that respect.

My daughter is in her fourth school and she is in fourth grade. I wish we hadn't had to move her so much, and so does she, but that was how it worked out despite our extensive efforts to interview schools before sending her and to make careful choices. We are planning on sending her to the same school next year, which is nice.

DD11's count is at 3: public / magnet / homeschool. But if you think about it, homeschool supports switching things up all the time. One year you could be in a co-op with the same group of kids, that summer you're at science camp for 3 weeks, then you switch it up and get tutored for math and join a writer's group.

My daughter doesn't deal well with change (when she was little she hated anything in her environment changing), but she deals with a bad educational environment even less well. She always made friends, but also felt different and isolated -- I don't think the changes made that worse or better.

I'm sad that she can't have the educational experience she wants (walking to school with her friends, continuity from year to year) but the emotional effects of the lack of appropriate education were so much worse for her.

As for the study, I don't know that you can extrapolate the experience of children in different cultures. There are cultures where continuity, tradition, and local networks are prized a lot higher than here in the US. The experience of moving and changing schools would be very different in these cultures as well.

My DS is at his 3rd school at age 6. We are looking at 2 more changes at the very least - for 4th grade and for high school. He is very social, funny, outgoing and easily makes friends. So, he seems to enjoy the oppportunity to meet new people and make more new friends - no psychotic symptoms, yet
The good thing is that each change put him in a more acdemically challenging classroom. We did have problems during the changes because we found that the increased academic demands were directly proportional to the writing requirements. My slow writer struggled on that front at every change but his writing has caught up mostly and he will not have any more problems on that front.

I didn't say "major role." I said "outsized," as in "more influence on the results than would be expected given the size of the group."