How to help a gifted child?

My sweet, kind and funny 7-year-old kid goes to an average elementary school. He has some good buddies, he plays sport, he does karate, he is popular and well-liked, no shortage of fun in his life. He also gets straight A+'s in every single subject at school which we never thought was much of a big deal since, like I said, he's only 7.During routine standardized testing at school earlier this year he has been discovered to be "exceptionally gifted" with a likely IQ of more than 165. This has been backed up by further testing and an assessment with a child psychologist. He is apparently reading, writing, spelling and doing math at the level of the average 12-year-old, which is almost twice his age.No one else in my family is anything but average.I'm sort of at a dead end trying to figure out what to do now to help him in his life. His father thinks we should just leave him alone, leave him in his normal classes and just let him be a little boy, and I tend to agree, since he's just such a happy kid right now. But I don't know what problems this will cause later in his life if he gets bored or restless with the curriculum.The psychologist recommends we pull him out of school soon as possible and put him into a private school for gifted kids but that's way beyond our means unless we took out massive loans.Home schooling is not an option because we (his very loving parents) both work for a living and also don't know enough to keep ahead of his interests - he is interested in math, science, engineering and robotics. We are most definitely not capable of understanding those subjects ourselves at a high level, let alone teach them to him.The school principal recommends to skip him a few grades in school but I don't want him to stigmatized or get bullied for being Doogie Howzer different. I don't know how his sweet trusting nature will be affected being surrounded by 12-year olds or how he will cope later when they're teenagers and he's only 8 or 9.What is the right thing to do to help him in life? What would you do? via /r/Parenting https://ift.tt/2XgauP9