Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Cold feet with upcoming grade skip

I am the parent who did not grade skip my child and felt it was the right decision. However, the school has NOT differentiated work for him or met his academic needs in ANY way. The only reason I feel it was the right decision for him is because he is very immature and it would have been a disaster socially. Due to his personality, we had no good options. If he had been mature for his age, I would have certainly grade skipped him. My daughters previous school strongly recommended a grade skip for her, but because she is so shy and already young for her grade, we denied it. I very much regret that decision because now she is even more shy as she feels that she does not fit in with her class since she is so far ahead of them. However she is at a new school that will not grade skip:( As long as your child is emotionally mature enough to handle the new grade she will be in, she may feel more comfortable with them since they are closer to her cognitive level.

If you have a child that is thought of as immature it may very well be personality and be a lifelong misfit not something they grow out of. Is not fitting in with a group of kids the same age really a reason to deny adequate academics? It feels like it is when the reacher says it but it never worked for me.

I have learned that ... no placement is ever ideal for a profoundly gifted child ... If the child is only a few grade levels ahead, outgoing, and wants to be with older kids a grade skip is wonderful.
I have a more introverted child who is short for his age and we never considered a grade skip because a) our son didn't want it and b) he would have been very much out of place in the next two grade levels as well. Being the youngest AND academically furthest ahead is a difficult place to be and requires confidence and a thick skin ...
If you have a child who learns with 1-2 repetitions it doesn't matter where you place him - academically they'll pull ahead because schools move at a slower pace. The question is if they prefer being with older kids and can handle the move socially. Some gifted kids want to be with older peers and some don't.
A grade skip won't fix the academic gap - it is not as if they will eventually level out and start learning at a slower pace. It can help some children but is not a " one size fits all" approach ...

If I had a dollar (or rather a euro - believe it or not, this issue is universal) for every parent who told me they’d never accelerate their child) and a bonus 50c for every one who told me how great it was for their child to be held back...sigh.
It appears to be almost a knee jerk reaction, to make sure you’re feeling a bit worse for thinking your child is smarter than theirs.

Guess what - your child probably is. And that’s why being held back would have been a disaster, and grade level a slough.

I’ve become very jaded, with one child one year ahead (entered early, refused second skip), one child almost two years ahead (young for grade and subsequently skipped), one child old for grade (just a couple days after the cutoff, so really a year behind, at least for our family lol). Each time unique circumstances for a unique child, unique decisions and loads of sceptics and second guessers on the way putting in their 2 cents.

Are their concerns, your concerns, valid? Yes, skipping is rarely the ideal solution, and there may be bumps in the road. It is, however, usually a much better solution than leaving a HG+ kid in the age grade.

If someone insists that differentiation works just fine for their kid, either their teacher is a superstar (I am assuming they exist) or, more probably, the difference between their kid and the average kid in class is not that great - either the kid is not that smart, or the other kids aren’t exactly that average, depending on the demographic of the school.

I had a job stopping my hysterical laughter over that one. My! My ribs are still sore. I just had lung surgery too so I hope I didn't break anything back open there.

If *only* we all lived in the parallel reality that the person uttering that remark lived in or that that reality existed anywhere outside of that person's poor simple and deluded mind.

Need to wipe the tears out of my eyes now...

Gosh, please take better care of yourself! Maybe get off the Internet for good for a few days, in order to not be exposed to so much ludicrousness.

Once you are recovered, you can head over to the recent thread on inclusion and find that the majority of the “total inclusion” advocates tend to live in this deluded parallel reality.
The rest will insist that school is only for the social experience anyway.

As I have previously suggsted, remarks like these are all about the remarkers inability to wrap their minds around the idea that the remarkee’s kid might be so much smarter than their own that the reality doesn’t work for them like that. The cognitive dissonance between the idea “my child is one of the smartest and surely just as smart as yours” and “my child’s needs appear to be met without a grade skip” cannot be bridged any other way,

If only! My non-skipped child is bored to death in the gifted program in our school. There's 1 month left in the 6th grade and I seriously think, every day, about pulling her out. EVERY. DAY. The only reason I haven't is that I'm afraid of pssing off the school and making trouble for my younger child.

My younger child went directly from preschool into the 1st grade. The first year was difficult, because his teacher made it difficult. She absolutely Did Not Approve of grade-skipping and complained incessently about his immaturity. He's very ADHD, but not terribly immature. He's just impulsive. He thrived in 2nd, and has done just dandy in 3rd, even though he was dx with dyslexia and dysgraphia. (The school doesn't believe in either dx, and has refused two IEP requests, because he's still above-grade-level-average in everything.) I am waiting with bated breath to see if he's admitted to the wholey-inadequate gifted program. It would probably be just right for him.

FWIW I did worry about the grade skip a LOT for the first half of the first year. Now I only worry about it when I think about high school, and mostly whether at some point dyslexia will become a real issue. But we'll deal with that when we get there. It wasn't even a known factor at the time we did the skip.

I just had a discussion over this with my sister recently. I graduated high school 30 years ago and she is older than me to give you an idea as to how long this has bothered us. You see, we both attended public school in the 70's where we were allowed to go at our own pace at the grade school levels. She entered 7th grade a year early and I was already up by a grade and likely to skip another grade before 7th. My family moved. At the new school district, they convinced my parents that being grade skipped was horrible and we both needed to be put back to our age grade. They claimed "socialization" was very important. (aka only popular kids should be allowed, which also means, only popular kids had a right to an education). It felt like a huge punishment to be forced to repeat 4th grade. I begged my mom to let me have books to learn from and she refused. The school had expressed concern that I was not popular and I spent too much time reading. WELL, I HAD friends when I was allowed to be with my academic peers. But I was basically a 5th/6th grader shoved back in to the 4th grade. To make matters worse, at this new school, the rule was when a student completed school work early, they had to put their head on the desk. We were punished for finishing early. Many of the students were just complete goof offs as a result. In 5th grade I was bullied a lot. Then, when I was 13 yrs old, my mom had a brain aneurysm so the remainder of my school years were without her. I ended up seeing a psychologist when I was 16 yrs old. My IQ was 160+. The psychologist said I had the highest IQ he had ever measured in his career. We talked about my frustration with basically being told that I was a defect for not being popular and academics were withheld in the name of trying to force me to be popular. He agreed that no child suddenly became popular because they were forced in with a group of younger children and had learning withheld. I had wanted to be a doctor. But by the time my parents allowed me to go to college, I was tired of school. I had spent so many years sitting in a classroom trying to not think about anything and not learning anything. I developed a lot of anxiety about being in the classroom. I also never established good classroom habits because I had not been in a classroom with a teacher teaching me all those years. I was in the classrooms for the purpose of making friends, not learning. AND, even when I did try to become a cheerleader, I was not coordinated enough. So much for my parents dream of a popular child and not accepting me as I was.

All I am saying is, I doubt anyone who has allowed their child to advance grades regrets it, but there are many of us who experienced cognitive abuse and have been left resentful for not being allowed to flourish and learn in an environment appropriate to us. If your child wants to go up a grade level, then let your child. If your child is not allowed to go to the grade appropriate to her level, then she is the one who will have to live with the emotional baggage and pain.

I think comparing what happened in the 1970's is difficult to compare to now. As to no one regretting grade skipping I think that's too blanket a statement to be true I don't have statistics on gifted program from the 1970's to now but I'm guessing there is more now.

summer70, I'm so sorry that happened to you. It is awful to be trapped by others' decisions and have our options limited or taken away. What an important, unfortunate, formative experience. Thank you for sharing.

The head-on-the-desk policy matches with other stories about creating underachievement.

Here is a roundup of threads/posts/resources related to acceleration (grade-skipping). Research backs the generally positive effects of acceleration. While there may always be a few who prefer not to accelerate (as so much depends upon the classmates, teacher, and other circumstances), fortunately the research-based Iowa Acceleration Scale (IAS) takes many factors into consideration to help parents and schools accurately anticipate the likelihood of a successful acceleration for a specific child at a given point in time.

For continuing growth and development, kids need:
1) appropriate academic challenge
2) true peers
For typical kids, these needs may be met in a general ed classroom, however for children with higher IQ/giftedness, these needs may not be met without intentional effort in providing advanced curriculum, and grouping for instruction with academic/intellectual peers.

Many adults gain perspective on their own schooling retroactively, often while advocating to improve the "fit" of their children's education.