> I don't think you can really just bucket kids by size and ignore age though... there's a lot of mental development between 10U hockey and 12U hockey, and putting a big 10 year old on the 12U team is often not right because the level of play is so much different, most 10 year olds won't keep up.
A friend of mine has a son who is giant for his age. The kid is 7 but he's the size of a late middle-schooler.
One of the things that ends up being really difficult for him is that everyone around him assumes that he should be smarter and more mature than he is. They inadvertently expect him to be mentally the same age as kids the same size as him. It sucks because it makes him seem developmentally disabled or emotionally unregulated. He's not! He's a totally normal seven-year-old. Just a really tall one.
Yeah, we definitely get/got a lot of that. At his current size/age, it's not so bad, but it was definitely a bigger deal when he was a newborn that looked like 2 months old (delivery nurses didn't understand why we were in their ward), and a preschooler who looks older, where there's a lot of development happening in a short amount of time.
A friend of mine has a son who is giant for his age. The kid is 7 but he's the size of a late middle-schooler.
One of the things that ends up being really difficult for him is that everyone around him assumes that he should be smarter and more mature than he is. They inadvertently expect him to be mentally the same age as kids the same size as him. It sucks because it makes him seem developmentally disabled or emotionally unregulated. He's not! He's a totally normal seven-year-old. Just a really tall one.