Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Struggles behaviorally with body management

My daughter is finishing first grade at a private gifted school. She's doing quite well academically, but struggles behaviorally with body management and impulse control. We have been told she has sensory processing disorder, specifically a subtype in which perception of body position and orientation are impaired, and sitting quietly for long stretches is hard. We're seeing an OT and discussing accommodations, but the staff seem lukewarm. DD is on-grade but is among the very youngest in her cohort, and she has told us all year that she misses kindergarten. I'm wondering if the real root cause here is developmental asynchrony. Should we have held her back last year to let her body catch up and give her another year of less-structured play? Given that we didn't, would having her repeat first grade have any positive effects? Have you seen similar problems in your kid? How did you handle them?

Thanks in advance for the advice.

Welcome, Dwayne! It takes a minute for new posters to show up in the feed, so sorry no one replied earlier.

We also had a relatively young first grader (a few years back!) who was wiggly and impulsive. On the whole, ours would have had even more difficulty with self-regulation if given less intellectual stimulation--which even the school staff acknowledged by the end of the school year.

With yours, repeating her due to nonresponsive staff seems, TBH, like forcing the child to take the consequences for adult failings. The data on retentions has been very consistent for decades, and finds that it is, at best, nonimpactful, and at worst, deleterious. There is usually a short-term bump in performance, followed by diminishing benefits until somewhere in the middle grades, concluding with losses compared to comparison peers by the end of high school.

Now obviously, group data do not determine individual outcomes, so for any given student-family-school combination, it is possible that repeating has good outcomes. But fwiw, the numbers do not favor retention.

In your position, I think I would let the OT have an opportunity to work with her on sensory processing strategies and accommodations. Even if the staff are not enthused, once they see the benefits to them (in reduced demands on staff for management), they may be more cooperative. Lukewarm staff, in my experience, respond better to concrete tools than to strategies. For example, many sensory kids do well with elastic bands across the front legs of their chairs as a kind of gross motor fidget (nice thing to bounce on instead of tipping the chair or tapping one's feet). Also it gives some body-in-space feedback. You can also try teaching her to wrap her feet around the front two legs of the chair, which stabilizes her in the seat, and gives some of that sensory feedback.

Your what-if question is fair, but also water under the bridge at this point! But as an academic point of discussion, really it's a question of which skill would have experienced developmental mismatch this year, and what would have been of more value for her and your family holistically. At least one of them would have--it just would have been different ones. You can speculate on that, but no one can say in hind-sight how it would have played out, nor could you have predicted it a year ago. As parents, we just make the best decisions we can based on the information and conditions we have available at the time.

It sounds like you’re really seeing the full picture of your daughter, which is a good place to be in.
What you’re describing does line up with developmental asynchrony in some kids—especially when they’re among the youngest in a grade and also dealing with sensory processing and body awareness challenges. In those cases, the issue usually isn’t academic ability, but regulation and physical readiness for long stretches of structured classroom time.
From what I’ve seen, repeating a grade can sometimes help socially/emotionally, but it doesn’t always fix the underlying sensory or impulse-control challenges. Many families have more success keeping the child on grade while adding supports like OT strategies, movement breaks, flexible seating, and clear transition routines.
If the school is open to it, even small accommodations can make a big difference over time.