How to Raise a Genius: Lessons from a 45-Year Study of Supersmart Children

Parent Cafe
241

@roethlisburger :
I don’t think sports is particularly the big issue with skipping kids, if you are talking organized sports in school by the time a kid gets to middle school, when school sports programs start, most kids don’t participate. Yeah, there was gym class and such, but I doubt that is a big deal. If the kid plays sports outside school, then he/she would be playing with kids her own age shrug.

With skipping there is a kind of idea of where more damage lies. Yep, it will cause problems in high school and college, my mom graduated high school at 14, and I suspect that hurt her later on (hard to tell, there were a lot of things I think that caused her issues as an adult). A 14 or 15 year old going to college is likely going to have a hard time dating kids who are older (not to mention issues around sex…),and there can be problems with simple social interaction, depending on the kid. On the other hand, a lot of gifted kids prefer being with older kids, can better interact with them then people their own age, and might do better being with the older kids like that, and perhaps at worst no worse than being with their own age group.

It comes down to a hobsen’s choice, assuming that there is no other alternative, if i leave the kid with his/her age appropriate classmates, it can mean forcing that person to try and fit into something that isn’t a fit, being bored, forced to go through things the same way and at the same pace, which often is the answer in many schools, few have the ability or the desire, to be honest, to differentiate for the brighter kids…and what kind of damage will that do? (and one of the lamest excuses I have ever heard from schools is “well, these kids have to learn to deal with kids at all levels, they are going to have to get used to dealing with us poor ordinary people”, often said nastily…which is ridiculous,school sports teams hold tryouts and they don’t tell the athletically talented kids they have to play with the kid who is so so, they don’t even let them on the team). So do you face the possible emotional damage of leaving the kid to trudge along in school with kids his own age, or face the possible social issues of skipping them? I am not a fan of skipping, by the way, I think personally it is not an optimal solution for many or most kids but also is the ‘easy way’ to handle kids like this, since all they do is tell the kid “Okay, Johnnie, next year you will be going into 6th grade from 4th”.

242

Only if you’re a guy. A girl in this situation is less likely to have trouble finding dates (but perhaps more trouble with her older dates’ sexual expectations).

243

As someone who was skipped a grade in elementary school and had a good number of issues later on as a result* but eventually recovered nicely in adulthood, I just want to add an exclamatory Hear! Hear! to pretty much every word that @musicprnt wrote above in #240.

  • None of which related to sports—they were all social, which bled over into my academic life. I mean, starting your senior year of high school too young to have a drivers license really doesn’t make for a healthy social life in semi-rural America, you know?

Edited to clarify what I was responding to.

244

re #242 Sure, but starting your senior year in a town with good public transportation or at boarding school without a driver’s license is no problem at all. Both my kids (in their 20s) still don’t have licenses, though the younger one I hope will pass his driving test next Monday!

I think many gifted students won’t have adverse results from a one year skip, but it still likely that the general pace of school will still seem too slow. For my older son the solution was to spend all his free time learning what interested him.

245

Our kids both spent all their free time pursuing what interested them, without skipping any grades. It worked perfectly for them. We went to the libraries many times/week, as well as bookstores and gave them good computers and Internet access. We also traveled, especially to cities and national parks.

246

@mathmom #243, I’ll just note that a lot of gifted students are neither in an area with good public transportation nor at a boarding school—and besides, a year-or-two difference in age is a big deal in the mid- to upper teens for a lot of people. Like @musicprnt wrote, trying to figure out what’s best for a child isn’t as simple as a lot of discussion on interventions like grade-skipping makes it out to be.

247

While I have no doubt a girl could find some guy willing to violate the laws regarding sexual activity with minors, I wouldn’t characterize these guys as normal and they wouldn’t be the types of guys you would want anywhere near your daughter.

248

I was projecting my personal bias here. Most of my friends(at least the guys) played some team sport through middle school and at least part of high school, even if they were on the jv team or spent more time on the bench than the field or did something like cross-country, where the nominal tryouts accepted almost everyone who showed up. YMMV.

249

@roethlisburger:
Yeah, I hear you, it depends on who you hang out with. I saw a stat on sports participation, and by like age 11 participation in sports by kids drops precipitously, after that point school programs become picky and with things like Little League by then it kind of moves on to travel teams and such or the little league programs become very different as well.

250

@dfbdfb not disagreeing. I only skipped one grade, but IME no big deal. I do understand a lot depends on where you are. Sports was never my thing either.

251

The issue as I see it: You cannot compare the situation in which the exceedingly gifted student is grade-skipped with the situation in which the very bright, but not exceedingly gifted student stays in the age-peer grade. The latter is often the best situation, but that situation is not an option for the exceedingly gifted student, just due to the fact that the student is “severely gifted” and is not going to fit in. So while it makes sense to look at the disadvantages of grade-skipping, they have to be counter-balanced against the disadvantages of staying with the age group, for the “severely gifted.” A lot depends on the way the school is structured (they are very different across the US), and also on the student’s extra-curricular interests, and how much “free time” is left over, after the school’s requirements and the EC’s. I think the answer is very likely to differ from family to family.

252

And now we’re back to the question of how to define (and scale) gifted…

253

Ahhh–what is the definition of “exceedingly gifted”? A kiddo I know tried to improve a national standardized placement test at age 3. Another could accurately gauge how each child in a room of 12 kids felt and why at age 3. Does either qualify as exceedingly gifted? Whose criteria?

254

My dd skipped last half of kindie and went in to second half of first. It was really good for her. She thought there was something wrong with the kids in her class, like she’d been placed with babies even though she was one of the youngest. She’s exceptionally small, so size wasn’t an issue she was already smaller by inches than kids her age. She got ahead again in third, so I took her out and homeschooled her. Then she went to another school where there was a lot more individualization. I’m 100% sure that skipping her was the best thing that I could have ever done. If it were not for the gifted HS, she’d have had to skip more. It was an instant relief for her to not have to sit through those humiliating classes. It’s like getting a medical degree, then being told you have to deliver mail or cook fast food for a few years anyway. Very demoralizing to not match your peers in intellect. Although two years younger than the average college kids, she’s never had a problem being accepted at university. The university never brought it up. She had no real social problems due to age. The real problem is that if you skip once, you usually get ahead again every couple years. She takes double the units to avoid this.

255

There’s roughly 56k kids that take the ACT/SAT as part of the Duke TIPS program. Duke TIPS says the 75% of those students only roughly the top 14k students is when you want to consider steps like skipping grades. That’s roughly 0.4% of the total population, but not everyone eligible takes the test, so let’s say somewhere between the top 0.5% - top 1%. I get the impression QuantMech has a much more rarefied definition of exceedingly gifted, lying somewhere between Einstein and Hawking.

256

My definition is not really as extreme as roethlisburger suggests. The people that I consider “severely gifted” are probably in the top 0.01% or so–so quite rare, but not so rare as Einstein or Hawking. (This group does not include me–I did not skip grades and was perfectly well served by the somewhat accelerated and adapted education that I got in my public school.) In my opinion, many people who are in the top 0.5%-top 1% can accommodate themselves to education that is widely available. They may even be able to fit in comfortably, socially.

Some of the students who are Davidson Scholars are probably comfortable socially with many other people, but I would guess that some of them who are comfortable with other Davidson Scholars are pretty uncomfortable with most of their age peers.

The choices for education depend in part on personality. Some students are happy to go their own academic ways without creating a “fuss,” and find ways to see interesting elements in a curriculum that is not really suited to them. Others–I have known one or two, not in our family–have a really hard time with that, and become disruptive.