You need to factor in different state laws. I was born in October. In 1949 in Pennsylvania kids as young as January 31 started to school the fall before.
The application toward sports based on artificial cutoff dates doesn’t apply to everything. It may work in the academic situation, but parents also push or hold back their kids from starting school in a particular year based on their opinion of how ready a child is. There are innumerable other factors in success that are based on being in the right place at the right time. And those times are pretty random and arbitrary.
Maybe not, but it is one of the best paths to happiness and success.
Only in the sense that buying lottery tickets is the best path to wealth.
The overwhelming majority of school athletes will never make a dime of their athletic skills. They’ll wake up one morning in the twenties and realize that while their peers were learning useful skills and have now started careers, they spent their school years learning how to throw a ball.
And the oldest child in a family is the Aplha, the middle child the diplomat, and the youngest is the goof.
What if the oldest kid in the class is fat and awkward, will they still be singled out in gym for excellence? What if the oldest comes from a broken home and developed emotional problems, are they destined to be teachers pets?
Parents have a great amount of leeway in when they enroll their children and don’t forget being perceived as ‘left behind’ is a stigma too.
I heard from some source other than Gladwell (I think) that a lot of MLB players, more than just random, were born in late summer. Hence when they went into little league, in June, they played at the age they were, not the age they would be in a couple of months.
However, I had a kid in August (not for purposes of cultivating a future MLB player I might note, he was pretty much a surprise) and while he played baseball for years and years he was not notably better than kids who were almost a whole year smaller, so there has to be something else. My most athletic kid, in fact, was the one born in April.
I sure don’t think preselecting their birth month is the single best thing you can do, that’s ridiculous. Let’s remember that Scott Adams is a *cartoonist, *not a sociologist.
This isn’t the first time Scott Adams has advocated an idea with dubious merit, he was one of the first I’ve noticed that endorsed a version “the secret”. There was an entire chapter about it in one of his books.
I think the looniest thing about it is the idea that it’s something readily controlled. I mean, even if you accepted this “worked”, you’d have to be really cautious not to be too early (because if you were aiming for Jan 1st and got December 31st instead, you’re in the worst possible spot) and if you were more than a couple months into the year the effect would be seriously hampered. So really you are aiming to get pregnant in one, maybe two particular ovulation cycles. Are you then supposed to wait a year and try again? How many years would you spend?
Gladwell’s study is specifically on Ice Hockey, where a pure size difference can be a lot more important than in baseball at the lower ages, I imagine.
My comment assumed you already hold the winning lottery ticket.
I read that article in New Yorker and ever since I was wondering if Malcolm is giving a stamp of approval to zodiac theory.
Or it means that kids who are going to be successful in life don’t like marshmallows or other sweets that much and so it doesn’t take a lot to persuade them not to eat one. Seriously, there’s a school of thought along those lines too.
Anecdotally, I suspect it’s quite the opposite. Parents don’t get to choose how intelligent their kids are, but they can control what grade they are in. I have a late summer birthday, right before the cutoff date, but because I was above average intelligence, my parents insisted I be allowed to go to kindergarten at age 4 and the youngest in the grade. My younger brother, who has a birthday a month earlier (i.e. “older”), is of average intelligence and my parents decided to have him repeat kindergarten.
Thus, the smart kid was the youngest kid and the average kid was the oldest kid in the grade.
There is always that, on the other hand. I did suffer socially both because of my outstanding intelligence and my relative lack of maturity.
You may have read about it in one of the Freakonomics books (I don’t recall which one it was in). Or there in a Slate article about this idea.
Does the study control for this? Perhaps by analyzing previous eating habits or trying the study with multiple different objects (read: not food).
On the surface, that also makes sense. However, there are a lot of theoretical factors that make sense.
For example, that attractive women are more successful, as are tall and muscular men. It also makes sense, but is it really true, that is another question.
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Pretty sure it was a TED talk.
And by that you mean it is nothing more than candy speech by some guy with a PhD?
In that case this is just a silly thread.
Intelligence does not necessarily mean being precocious. Kids rise to their natural level of intelligence at different rates. I was young in my class, and I didn’t read in kindergarten (not common back then) or at the beginning of first grade - but I went from Dick and Jane to reading Jules Verne in about two weeks in the middle of first grade.
My parents also didn’t let me take the 2 year enriched program in junior high, and I went to the three year enriched program instead. Good move, not the least because I would have gotten drafted if I finished college a year earlier.
We know plenty of parents who wanted to get their kids into school early, but I don’t see the benefit - except for getting the kid out of the house earlier. I think we rush kids too much already as it is.
Not registering your kid is different from the kid being left behind.
Our quite well off district had a pre-first program, where kids who weren’t quite mature enough went for a year instead of first grade or repeating kindergarten. It was actually quite popular.
If this were true there would be only a small market for really expensive high end candy and chocolate. So, I guess it has been falsified.