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Comment by brianberns | Hacker News Reader

Here's my data point to the contrary: I entered college a few weeks short of my 17th birthday in the early 1980's. I was about 1.5 years younger than others in my class, on average. I made many good friends, but my relative lack of maturity still had a huge impact on my emotional well-being (especially when it came to dating). I'm now in my 50's and still dealing with the psychological repercussions of my parents' decision to accelerate me.

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My University had a dedicated staff, dorms, and extracurricular programming to help accelerated students make the transition during their first year.

I resented much of the structure at the time (who wants to have a curfew during their first semester of college?), but looking back I think this was critical for addressing many of the things you experienced.

I would be very interested in research that contrasts institutionally-supported acceleration with more of a "self-service" approach to acceleration. I wonder if these differences are measurable.

This was my own father's experience. Not being able to drive for an entire year after his peers got their license was a major social handicap, especially in a more rural area. When I skipped a grade to get into an accelerated program, my dad deliberately held me back a year the following year to prevent the same from happening to me. It worked out ok because it was a tiny school district and the accelerated class was 30 kids across three grades under a single teacher.

1.5 years isn't even that much? I mean you can probably find that variance within any cohort so I doubt it was the acceleration that caused any psychological repercussions.

True, though small differences when you are young can seem radically more important than they really are. tldr; Teenagers are very very insecure.

The development of 1.5 during those years is huge. The difference between interacting with a 16 and 18 year old are night and day in experience and maturity. But I agree with you this would be incredibly difficult to accurately measure differences with a lack of accelerated students and subjective questions/answers.

I'll never know for sure, since I can't run the counterfactual. It's certainly possible that the outcome might have been similar if I hadn't been accelerated.

That said, girls tend to mature faster than boys, and I can assure you that most 18 year old females are not very interested romantically in younger males (in that era and place, at least). A year makes a huge difference in that regard. I suspect the study in question didn't account for this.

When you’re 15, 1.5 years is 10% of your whole life. I know I seriously struggled with being significantly younger than the others in my classes. Having gone through a PhD since then, there is no way I would have handled it well at 20.

Besides, my experience is that if you’re so bright, there are plenty of opportunities everywhere to satisfy your curiosity (or at least work on it). It does not have to be at school.

Same here. I would trade those 2 years for being with classmates of my age.

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