Big Decisions

Over Christmas vacation, Ethan heard a story about his cousin skipping a grade. He sort of lit up. He acted like "Wow, that's an option? I'm in!" Suddenly he talked about it all the time. Finally I told the school principal we were thinking about it. Ethan spend much of the month of February undergoing tests. I wasn't there, but I gather he was tested by at least 3 different people to determine at least 5 different factors. IQ, reading skills, writing skills, social readiness, and something called 'cycles of learning'. Then in the beginning of March I went down to the school for a meeting. Present were Ethan's teacher, the principal and assistant principal, and a few people from the 'gifted children' program at the district.
(side note: why have i never been informed that there even was a gifted program at the district? Seems that Ethan's teachers all know he's gifted, yet I've never been referred anywhere. Maybe I as the parent need to do my research a bit better)
At this meeting they gave me the results of the testing and told me that Ethan is an excellent candidate for skipping a grade. I asked a bunch of questions about the impact it might have on him. They showed me all these studies over the past 50 years showing that as long as the child meets certain requirements on those tests, skipping a grade is actually beneficial socially. I guess really smart kids stick out LESS when they are with older children. Who knew?
For the past 2 months I've been going over the pros and cons. Here's my problem: right now, most of Ethan's best friends are a grade ahead of him, so I'd be putting him with his friends instead of taking him away from them. That's a good thing right now. Also, it sort of cancels out some of the cons. When I list on the con side "his friends will all drive/date before he can" I have to qualify it by admitting that that will be the case regardless of which grade he's in. So then my con side pretty much disappears. But what if he and those friends grow apart? It happens to a lot of kids in Jr. High and High School. And there's absolutely no way of knowing if it will happen to these particular kids. Ack! I need a crystal ball.
Ethan still wants to do it, the powers that be recommend it, and James says "why not?" so on Monday I called the school and told them that Ethan will be skipping 5th grade and going straight into 6th. I feel good about this decision. Now he's doing some more testing to determine what he needs to catch up on over the summer. It's mostly math, I think. (Good thing I have a math ed major coming to live with me for the month of August.)
I guess when I had kids I thought that most of the traumatic parts for me would come when the kids did things wrong. I didn't realize I'd lose so much sleep because of things they were doing well. That's the thing about parenting: it's one surprise after another.