When a kid’s development is out of sync with their peers, what’s a parent to do?
But during third grade, things changed — for the worse.
Dini had a huge range of knowledge, sometimes knowing even more than the teachers. She was eager to share this, but instead, often ended up getting squashed by her teachers. On top of that, she had jealousy from peers to contend with. Much to the astonishment and dismay of her parents, “School became a struggle,” says her mother.
Then, one day, Dini suddenly declared she wasn’t feeling well. For a full three weeks she stayed home, her parents assuming she’d contracted some kind of low-grade virus. But they eventually realized that Dini’s physical symptoms were actually rooted in her unhappiness in school. They took her to be assessed by an educational psychologist, on whose test she scored at a 16-year-old level in a number of areas, even though she was only eight.
Dini’s parents discovered there was a name for this situation — Asynchronous Development — in which children develop at an advanced rate across the emotional/social, intellectual, or physical spectrums, making them out of sync with their chronological age. Typically, a child who develops asynchronously is well ahead in one of these areas, but may struggle in other areas because of this lack of synchronization.
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