Thanks for bringing up this topic. We're facing something similar with my 19 month old. He's not very verbal, but it's clear that he interacts a lot more with older kids and he won't even look at or consider kids his age. While I agree that there's value in the social skills a child can learn from same-age peers, there may not be value for him if he won't even interact with them.
We're really only considering mixed-age environments because of that, so he gets a bit of everything, but that significantly limits our choices in this area.
