[jfricker]

"that challenging kids and allowing them to excel is considered child abuse."

Actually that's nothing like my sentiment. There is an age and time appropriateness that shouldn't be overlooked. Immersive study is excellent - my own daughter had my support to immerse into Argentina for 6 months when she was only 17 and I certainly wouldn't have considered it unless she had life skills, coping skills and emotional maturity.

But, plunking a kindergartener into an immersive foreign language and culture environment is dubious wisdom.

While parenting is most certainly not deterministic, it does seem to me that the child (especially the youngest) experienced quite a bit of unnecessary suffering so that the author could proceed with an experiment. That the suffering ended with fairly positive results is as serendipitous as any non-deterministic process.

(edited for some grammar)