No, I did not feel guilt then and I don't now. Most of my life, I just "knew" in a gut-feeling way, that skipping had been a bad thing for me. It was only when confronted in the last few years with the data that skipping was "good" that I came up with the best-friend theory to make sense of why my experience deviated from the data.
Hi Acs,
Grade skipping has costs, that's for sure, but not getting needed accomidations has it's costs as well. I was 'early enteranced' and still bored in elementary school, and grew up hating that I was always the youngest and most physically awkward. I blamed it my not being in sync with the age mates on being younger. L O L! Once tracked middle school started I was suddenly popular, although I didn't learn how to learn until AP Calculus in senior year of High School,and can easily believe that bright underchallenged flunk out of college, because I had to do some major scrambling to get caught up. Lucky for me I used those social skills to get the help I needed.
It wasn't until I was able to observe my own son interact with his agemates, that I realized that being the youngest wasn't the actual source of all my difficulties, only a few, and that the path
not taken would have had difficulties of it's own. One of the noted problems with grade skips, is that every difficulty the person ever has from then on tends to be attributed to the skip.
If I had a time machine, there are a lot of things I would be tempted to go back and change. Being early enteranced isn't one of them. Of course if you could offer me a school that understood the needs of young abstract thinkers who can't yet hold a pencil well, that's a whole 'nother story.
Love and More Love,
Grinity
