7-year old going on 25-- what do we do here?

Your daughter may be indeed happier a grade up. Thanks Also, I’d talk to her pediatrician about the possibility of putting her on puberty blockers for a couple of years. Sometimes, very early puberty can be confusing and even a little  traumatic for kids. It can bring a lot of unwelcome attention. Blockers might not be the right choice in her case—it’s a very individual decision— but it wouldn’t hurt to have the conversation with the doctor. 

Have you tested her IQ with a professional? If she's gifted, you can seek out one of the private schools that only accept gifted students. For instance, I know that The Nueva School in South Bay only accepts students with an IQ of 130(?). 

Oh wow, that was me as a kid.  My mom tells me that I scared her when I was tested at a 9th grade reading level in Kindergarten (and now that I'm a mom, I can see why.)  I'm happy to chat with you offline but here's my first thought:  does she have friends in her current grade?  How is she with making friends?  Given that she's that advanced, skipping a grade isn't going to make that much of a difference - if she's reading at an 8th grade level (or beyond) then being in third grade vs. second grade doesn't matter really.  But as you already know, it's the social-emotional part that's important here.  In my case (back in the 1970s), my parents didn't have me skip a grade, BUT the school didn't know what to do with me, so I was on my own for most of the day and didn't really have friends or learn how to make friends until 7th grade or so (when I finally went to a different, much smaller school.)  The silver lining, though, was that my education was completely self-directed - I got to explore whatever I was curious about, and with the help of great librarians, developed many different interests.  I would say that if she has friends in her current grade, and the school is good at academic differentiation as well as social emotional education, then her current grade is probably just fine.  Give her lots of opportunities to explore independent interests, and reinforce that we all have strengths and challenges.  Finally, ask her what she thinks!  It doesn't mean she gets to make the decision, but it will let her know that you considered the decision carefully, including her feelings about it.  All the best to you!

I think if you’re going to move up a grade ( which makes a lot of sense from your description) this is a great time to do it. 
my daughter is the oldest in her grade by a whole year( long story having to do with Waldorf :)) and she’s now ready to be out in the world but has a year of high school to go. In the spring of 4th grade, there was talk of moving her up but that was a terrible time to try to figure it out as she would have had to find a middle school to go to immediately and make an even bigger adjustment to being with much older kids. Just my 2 cents! 

From what I read in your post, it might be best for you to get her evaluated and recommended for acceleration, although it also has to be what she would want for herself. My son is similar and currently 8 going on 9 years old this September and we've been on acceleration path for a few years now. He skipped a few times and is currently about to complete 6th grade course work since online learning has excelled him so much last year with the pandemic. Are you in a school district where they would allowed for individualize learning plan? From personal experience though, with the way you described your daughter, she may benefit from consulting with the Davidson Institute for the gifted, https://www.davidsongifted.org/. If you apply her to their young scholar program, there are a lot of supports that they can provide free of charge! Let me know if you want to connect for any other questions.

What do you think about including her in the conversation? She might enjoy having the chance to think about if she’d like to stay with her class or move on to material that may challenge her more- where she will no longer be the oldest/tallest. 

I know about 6-7 kids who skipped 1 (and 2) grades due to parents prioritizing academic ability, and ALL have had numerous problems starting at about 7th grade. ALL. Developing breasts does not equal maturity! I know, because I had that exact situation. Do you really want boys and kids a year older than her to be targeting her next year, vs the younger kids in her own class? Because that’s what’s going to happen. 

By MS the age differences catch up. I can tell you really want to do this, but I advise you to think long and hard and consider long term scenarios. For example, you understand that if she skips a grade she will graduate a year earlier and leave for college a year sooner, taking away a year of your time with her - right? A year of time with your child. Think on it - and overhaul your diet, reduce meat consumption, discuss her development with her pediatrician.

Your daughter sounds a lot like mine except my daughter is probably not as gifted as yours and quite a bit needier. How amazing that your child required zero support from you during the pandemic schooling! I'm so envious.  My daughter is very bright and advanced (about 2 grade levels above) but isn't as self directed as yours. She also finished reading Harry Potter books, loves math games -- she does math for fun and loves to make up her own math problems and solve them. Anyways, my daughter has a Sept. birthday and we did TK at OUSD. She began developing breast buds at age 7.5.  She's also the tallest kid. She's 8 years old but wears size 12.  Her pediatrician doesn't seem concerned at all and says she's within a normal range. *sigh* Too early! Because she is academically advanced and her best friends are all a grade above, we often ask this question ourselves. Should she skip a grade? We are deciding not to skip a grade for the following reasons:

- We asked her a few times. She prefers to stay in the same grade. She says she likes being the tallest kid.

- While her reading and math are advanced, her writing and spelling are not at the level we want to see. She meets the grade level competency for writing, but we'd want her to be more fluent and advanced in writing and this is an area we hope she'll work on when school starts in the fall. She won't write on her own and we don't have the bandwidth to drill her down and get ther to write more while we work full time. This doesn't seem to be an issue for your child. 

- By high school, 1 - 2 year age difference really doesn't matter. Most kids, especially girls, all even out in terms of physical and emotional development. 

What school does your child go to? We decided to switch her to a private school after spending over a year at home with zoom school which was extremely challenging, and it's clear that OUSD will be dealing with a lot of learning loss and catching kids up. Even pre-pandemic, it was always a struggle to get differentiated instruction at OUSD and my kid was often bored, but it's nearly impossible now. We're hopeful that the private school will be able to provide a more differentiated instruction and we've been told that the way they teach math at this private school allows them to provide advanced instruction.  

There is no “right” answer to your “problem” here. Considering the array of problems that one could have with their child, this is a good one to have. 

Our family was in a similar situation with our now 16-year-old “Jane.” Jane was and is super gifted academically. In her early years we tried to broaden her field of experiences by signing her up for many different kinds of classes: cooking, music, art, gymnastics, martial arts, to name a few. From age 3 to 13, my husband’s work took us out of state at first and then abroad. With limited resources at int’l schools in “2nd tier” cities, we made the difficult decision to have Jane skip 1st grade. While the principal warned us that skipping grades was not beneficial to students mentally and emotionally (problems surfacing mostly often in the teenage years), the school’s evaluation of Jane supported the grade skip. Academically, emotionally, and mentally she fit right in with the 2nd graders.

We returned to the US when Jane was in 4th grade and had her reevaluated. We were actually ready to have her repeat 3rd grade. But instead, she was placed into the gifted program for 4th grade. Then she tested into a middle school that taught an accelerated curriculum.
We ended up going back to the “2nd tier city” when Jane was 11 where the int’l school found that she had already covered the 7th grade curriculum at the accelerated MS. Thus, she advanced yet another grade. 

By the time we returned to the Bay Area 3 years ago,  Jane was 13, had already completed her HS freshman year, and had completed an AP class successfully with a high “4” score. She was ready for 10th grade. But we made her repeat her freshman year so that she would be more closer in age with her grade peers. Jane was not happy with this decision for at least a year.

However, now that Jane’s younger brother just completed 6th grade, she started to understand how awkward it would be to have a 12-year-old in HS. Jane is also a singer and has come to understand that her younger body is somewhat of a disadvantage because her voice lacks the maturity of other HS juniors. If she were at her age-level grade, she could have had another year for her voice to mature and to qualify for other highly competitive art programs. 

For Jane, the one year grade skip worked and she fits right in emotionally and mentally with kids who are at least one year older than her. Academically, as her first principal pointed out, Jane could have skipped 3 grades and she would have been successful. People hardly notice that she is a year younger than her grade peers (it  comes up when talking about things like driver’s license). Socially, she does better with older kids than younger kids but has not had any problems even with our relocation every 2-3 years. Physically, Jane is a little slower in development and so she has always been the “petite and cute” one of the group. Thankfully, this label worked in her favor, although it certainly doesn’t help with her current posture. 

As I stated earlier, there is no right answer to this problem. But here is one academic journey about 10 years out from where you are with your daughter. Good luck.

We used to say our middle son was 30 when he was 3 because he was much as you describe your daughter. He has a summer birthday though and started just after he turned 5 and he still got "top marks" in Kindergarten for both academics and soft skills. He was also the tallest by several inches even though probably a quarter of his classmates were more than a year older than he. We thought about skipping him then (at the urging of the teacher) but didn't because we didn't want to push him. This continued all through elementary school and the teacher he had in 4th grade again suggested we skip him (so skip the last year of elementary and put him straight into middle school). Again we didn't, this time because he had a nice group of friends he wanted to stay with. His friend group wound up falling apart in middle school anyway.

Our son is now in high school. He is involved in every activity under the sun -- sports, scouting, music, robotics, speech & debate, takes extra academic classes,.... -- maybe because school is so easy for him and he wants to fill his time. He has friends but does gravitate to kids who are older. I'm still not sure if we made the right decision not skipping him -- and he's nearly a year younger than your daughter (compared to classmates)! There are some kids who just get it, both academically and socially. I think if I were in your shoes, I would probably skip your daughter.

One more thing -- our youngest is very very smart academically. He also started school on time but it was just too easy for him. He didn't have the soft skills though so we didn't think seriously about skipping him. He started hating school because everything was so boring he just checked out. We found some academic classes online and sent him to some academic camps (mostly in math because that's what he loves), and being challenged in something outside of school made a huge difference for him in school as well. So if you decide not to skip your daughter and she starts getting bored, that could be a route to take.

My advice is do not have your daughter skip a grade but instead look into private school and/or something else creative that will keep her interested.  My daughter was talking in complete sentences at age 1, reading chapter books at age 3 and had read all of the Harry Potter books by the end of first grade.  Her first grade public school teacher told us that private school or un-schooling might be a better approach for her.  She ended up doing public school until middle school and then homeschooling/alternative school for high school.  Kept herself busy with art.  More academics is not what these kids need.  They need more creative outlets, and the academics will take care of itself.  It would have been a disaster if she skipped grades because she needed to still hang out with kids her own age for social reasons...and also who wants a 13 year old in the same grade as 16 year olds.  She is headed off to college in a few weeks, along with kids her own age. 

I know that many are uncomfortable with the "g" word (gifted), but whether or not you choose to use that word, that is the world you are now in. There are so many ways to approach this. As those of us know who've been immersed in this world, "when you've seen one gifted kid, you've seen one gifted kid." The solutions depend so much on how the particular school responds to an advanced learner, and the particular needs of your child. You will do your child a huge favor by doing a little bit of reading. With my kid (now a sophomore in college), we ended up with many approaches (public school, then private school, and then with my great reluctance, homeschooling -- through high school). I was also very resistant to getting tests done, but in the end, it is what gave me the permission to make our own course for him, since that was really what was needed. It was clear he needed something different, and this helped me to let go of anybody else's (uneducated) opinion. And that is what has helped him flourish. A creative, quirky, fast learner, he was able to keep going at his own pace, and that is where his joy was. Many who criticize parents who accommodate their gifted kids think we're pushing them; in reality, we're running to catch up, and to feed them what they want at their natural pace. I highly recommend reading "Is it a Cheetah?" on hoagiesgifted.org, and the Gifted 101 page (and poking around that site). I'd also look into the Summit Center in Walnut Creek, or even the Gifted Development Center in CO. The truth is, even private schools often don't know how to approach gifted kids, especially if they're in the extremely or profoundly gifted range. That is why it can be so very helpful to have assessments; then you know what you're trying to accommodate. The numbers are certainly not the whole story, but, they can help you wrap your head around the alternate paths it sounds like your daughter needs. Feel free to reach out if you want to follow up!