Absolute value expressions in 5th grade?

Too abstract topics too early

One of my students is in 5th grade. Not long ago his homework consisted of writing down the full-blown English names of twelve-digit numbers, like 535,176,402,988. He kept busy writing line after line of tens of millions, and hundreds of billions. After a while, the assignment seemed pretty boring to me but my student was interested in the task all the way through. I think a big reason for his motivation was that he was able to do it. The big numbers seemed challenging to him, but the task was doable because he completely understood the principles involved in the translation.
Last week his parents asked me to go with him over some questions he got wrong in a quiz. I was amazed to find in this quiz questions involving absolute value expressions!
I was like: Absolute value in 5th grade? What for?
I don’t know about you but it does not make any sense to me. I mean, the first time I knew absolute value existed, I was in 12th grade, at the end of high school. Now they are covering absolute value in elementary school? Give me a break!
It was kind of hard to explain his mistakes to him, in part because the absolute value concept is way more abstract than the concept of hundreds of millions, and in part because he did not want to accept he made a mistake. So he was ecstatic when I discovered that in one of the three problems he was marked down he actually had selected the right answer. He was right on that particular problem, not wrong.
Which kind of proves my point, in a way. The absolute value concept is too abstract not only for most 5th grade students, but apparently for some 5th grade teachers as well.