How do you know?
Well, you don't. Actually, of course no parent ever really knows... but it's worse when your child is not normative, because while everyone (it seems) is willing to tell you in great detail how what you're doing is "damaging" your child...
the conventional advice and lovely parenting books/recommendations just... don't... fit. To the point that some of it just leaves you perplexed/bewildered/exasperated. It's just OBVIOUSLY incorrect, but you don't necessarily have any basis for determining which alternatives are the right ones and which ones are also wrong.
Well, that leaves floundering in the dark and following your heart as the best paths forward. Which is cold comfort, actually, but at least you should be aware that you're not alone there.
{{hugs}}
My DD is 13 and is thriving in her (relatively high-pressure) junior year of high school. She should graduate in the top 0.5% of her high school class, and she has friends and is happily involved in healthy extracurricular activities. She's pretty comfortable in her own skin relative to a lot of her peers and her agemates, though she is sometimes sad that she doesn't fit completely with either group. It can work. We've ignored a lot of judgmental snide asides from pretty much everyone we know over the past seven years, though. The only thing we've had is the knowledge that the general parenting rules related to developmental timelines... do not apply.
