It's the standard rule that behind every lolcow, there is always a lolmom.
She actually pulled her special snowflake out of school specifically to prevent him from being socialized, apparently with the intent of turning him into an exceptional individual completely unable to exist in society who will now be orbiting her for the rest of his pathetic, pudgy life.
Pulling Skylar out of kindergarten because he was a precocious reader--and letting him know he was "too smart" for school--did him a huge disservice when it came to his social development, especially if he is on the autism spectrum.
There are plenty of ways to get academic enrichment for gifted kids, and since Mama Ittner was willing to homeschool, he definitely had a parent who could have made the school experience work for him academically (at least to the extent that he was truly
gifted, which is debatable). But he missed out on a lot of socialization that happens between kids, in school--his parents exempted him from it, and obviously fostered the idea that he was smarter than (and therefore superior to) those kids. Scouting wasn't enough to offset it, either--not with his dad as his Scoutmaster.
(Yes, I blame both of his parents in equal measure. Both were involved, hands-on parents, and they still failed to curb his budding arrogance and address his social deficiencies. Both of them contributed to this mess, and allowed it to flourish. So good for them; they can grow old with this smug, sanctimonious manchild still under their roof.)
Here's the thing about a lot of precocious kids, who get labeled as "gifted"
very early on--as adults, they might be marginally ahead of their peers, but for the most part they're at pretty much the same level as their smart-but-not-gifted peers who were simply good students. I can think of plenty of former gifted kids who, as adults, are not world-changing geniuses.
And I can think of a few (including a former pet lolcow) who stalled out as adults and are living mediocre, dead-end lives because after a childhood of being lauded as a gifted kids, and given lots of support for that, suddenly, in adulthood, nobody gave a shit. Can you do the job
and get along well with people, most of whom are no more than average in intelligence and academic ability? No? Well then who fucking cares that you were a precocious reader and a homeschooled National Merit Scholar? (Or, in my lolcow's case, started college at age 14?)
Lots of former gifted kids launch into adulthood, only to land flat on their faces. The ones who recover are the ones who can develop enough humility to admit they're just as capable of being stupid and short-sighted as anyone else, and overcoming that "gifted" identity. I don't see Skylar ever doing that. The seed of it isn't in him already, and he's got enabling parents. He's fucked.
