Late to this thread, but I do think some are misunderstanding the difference between gifted, even very gifted, and profoundly gifted. With all due respect to PG, I don’t think you can translate your experience to that of the boy in the OP’s article. It’s a very very small number of children who fall into the profoundly gifted category and for those children, I think traditional schooling can be very uncomfortable. As the article cited further up in the thread points out:
"Differences between moderately and extremely gifted children are not, of course, confined to the cognitive domain. Hollingworth (1926) defined the IQ range 125-155 as “socially optimal intelligence.” She found that children scoring within this range were well-balanced, self-confident, and outgoing individuals who were able to win the confidence of age peers. She claimed, however, that above the level of IQ 160 the difference between the exceptionally gifted child and his or her age-mates is so great that it leads to special problems of development which are correlated with social isolation. These difficulties appear particularly acute at ages 4 through 9 (Hollingworth, 1942).
DeHaan and Havighurst (1961), examining the differences between what they termed second- order" (IQ 125-160) and “first-order” (IQ 160+) gifted children, reinforced Hollingworth’s findings. These findings suggested that the second-order gifted child achieves good social adjustment because he has sufficient intelligence to overcome minor social difficulties but is not “different” enough to induce the severe problems of salience encountered by the exceptionally gifted student. Janos (1983) compared the psychosocial development of 32 children aged 6-9 with IQs in excess of 164, with that of 40 age peers of moderately superior intellectual ability. The findings of Janos emphasized that the social difficulties experienced by this highly gifted group did not stem from a pre-existing emotional disturbance, but rather were caused by the absence of a suitable peer group with whom to relate. There are virtually no points of common experience and common interest between a 6-year-old with a mental age of 6 and a 6-year-old with a mental age of 12.”
I think it’s incredibly challenging to parent a child who differs so extremely from his peers, in intelligence or in any other fashion, and so I feel for parents of the profoundly gifted. If anyone is interested in getting a glimpse inside how one family dealt with their precocious son (child who became the youngest to produce nuclear fusion at the age of 14 and ended up attending Davidson school for the gifted) check out this article, http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-02/boy-who-played-fusion. There’s a book by the same name which really gives you an inside view of the life of a profoundly gifted child and his family.