May I ask: how do your parents remember those years? What do they have to say about their choice to grade-skip you? Why didn't they try something else with you when it became clear that you were unhappy? Did they not know how hard it was on you?
I've been wondering about that, since I think virtually all parents--certainly you, me, and everyone on this forum!--would advocate for a change if our kids were unhappy with an intervention. I find your parents' lack of action to be confusing, particularly since it comes on the heels of a grade-skip, the action biggie! Clearly your parents weren't uninvolved in your education. I guess I feel like I don't understand their part of the story.
I'm not totally sure what happened on their side either, but I have some ideas.
I remember deciding that I did not want them to know I was having problems. I remember my mother asking me how it was going and me just blowing her question off. Six-year-olds are not entirely rational creatures and I don't really remember why I didn't want her involved but I do know I didn't. This may be what was happening in my mind: I wanted to handle it on my own; I didn't want my mom to feel bad; I didn't want to make a big deal of it; I didn't want to attract more attention than I already had; I liked my new teacher (more than the old one). In retrospect, I can say that I did not really want to go
back to first, I just never wanted to have left it. Going back would have not been any better than staying in second; the damage was already done. How embarrassing to fail at a skip, especially after causing all that commotion by skipping!
The big question is how could my parents have missed the signs of my distress. Remember the biggest issue was my best friend. But she was still my
home best friend so my mother would have seen us playing happily at our house most days after school. So there would have been no reason to suspect she wasn't the same at school; I'm sure I did not tell my mother about that problem. Also, I was alway high strung, perfectionistic, and cried a lot (even when I was
happy in K). There may have been an increase in these symptoms, but I don't know how much more it would take to register. I know that my parents talked about my stress level with the 3rd grade teacher. Their conclusion was that I put a lot of pressure on myself, that it was intrinsic in my personality and that there was not much to be done except support and reassurance (which I think is true at least to a point).
Finally, remember that my parents were themselves blindsided by the skip. The teacher called my mother out of the blue and told her to get my eyes checked so they could go ahead with the skip. She was stunned; no one had mentioned a skip before that call. I think I was skipped within a week--the school did not want to wait at all. There was not plan B in place if the skip did not work out--no exit strategy. I have two older PG sibs who were not happy in school and I suspect my parents hoped that the skip would head off some of the problems they had had with them. (I think it is reasonable to consider the possibility that the skip
did head off problems; I cannot be my own control group and we don't know what would have happened if I hadn't been skipped. All we know is that I did not like it and that it could have been handled more smoothely).
My mother and I have always been very close and I have rarely kept secrets from her, but I know I kept this from her as best a could. My mother is articulate and feisty. She lets no injustice go unconfronted. She was a regular fixture at the school, keeping teachings, administrators, etc in line. So I really think that had she known there was a problem and believed that there was even a slight hope of correcting the problem, she would have been all over it. So either she must not have known, not believed there was help, or respected that I wanted to handle on my own (and believed I could). More than 3 decades later she claims to have not felt the problem was very big--certainly that is what I wanted her to believe.
