@aegisheart You could be describing my son at 3. He is now 20, a top student at a top university. Happy and thriving.
At 3-4 I was agonizing over what to do. His giftedness was obvious. He was behaviorally well adjusted at his montessori preschool. But his maturity was low and he had a fall birthday (before our state’s late cutoff, now changed). Socially he was a total wallflower - not disliked, not bullied, but never participating, only watching from the sidelines.
We enrolled him to start kindergarten a few weeks before he turned 5 but it never felt right. It was two teachers who changed my mind. His older brother’s kindergarten teacher, a respected old timer, asked me to reconsider - she didn’t think he was ready. But a teacher friend pointed out the thing I couldn’t quite put my finger on - his peers treated him like a younger child. He was at risk of becoming a mascot. A bell went off - suddenly I saw it.
We pulled him and found a private “JrK”. Academically he learned nothing, and I agonized over whether we made the right call. But the extra year was transformative. When I volunteered in kindergarten the following year I saw a different child, confident and self assured. A peer to his peers.
Many people choose gifted early because they are afraid that without extra challenge their kid will be bored and act out. That’s misguided, imo. Kindergarteners need to be engaged, not challenged. My son was engaged.
The sensory stuff was stressful, but over time he learned to deal with it. He needed and deserved extra time to adjust to that. He’s also dyslexic, as it turns out. There’s more than a few loose wires rattling around in that brain, but he’s so smart he defeated his first dyslexia assessment. (Conclusion: we have no idea why he can’t read, he keeps passing tests which makes no sense.)
Our schools don’t test for giftedness until 3rd grade and that’s a good thing. He was shocked when he was identified - he had no idea. (He couldn’t read, after all, and parental assurances don’t count because everybody knows parents are supposed to say that stuff.) Our schools have two tracks - self contained and supplement in place. His best friend’s mom, a teacher in the gifted program, kept her son supplemented in place. But since our son still couldn’t read we opted for self contained, which is where most of the quirky kids were.
It doesn’t matter how smart they are: happy students thrive and succeed; miserable students flail and fail. There are no bonus points for being the youngest kid to reach calcBC. What matters is developing the whole child. Don’t let the academics leave other things behind.
We had doubts in kindergarten, but none after - at every step we could see fresh evidence that we’d made the right call. For a different child, a different decision might have been better. You know her best.
