It is because you didn’t develop the skill set in pre-kindergarten.
Here is an interesting point you make, the idea that being around age peers is optimal.
I disagree. I think that it is very important that children be exposed to as many people, at many different ages as possible, and that many issues we have as a society is from age stratification.
Think of retirement communities, hell, retirement states. Cul-de-sacs where every parent is within 5 years of each other. Schools that only have a few grades together at a time.
My kids go to a preschool - 8th grade school. Granted we are in a smaller town, and a smaller parochial school. They team up the older kids with the younger ones-reading buddies, etc. I think it’s very healthy. My 7th grader was talking the other day about how she has a fan club consisting of 2nd grade kids that mob her at lunch, and won’t let her eat because they idolize her. This is great for her, and great for the kids. It encourages her to volunteer for things, and encourages the younger kids to try harder to please a “cool” older kid. My preschooler is loved by a whole bunch of 7th graders waiting in lunch line whenever I drop him off. This makes him more inclined to want to go to school, and teaches him to socialize with a bunch of different ages.
Different grades also go to the nursing home 2-3 times a month, make little decorations, cookies, play bingo and other games with them. It’s great to see how little kids make just about anyone happy, (at least in small doses) and teaches the kids that even though some people are old, or in wheelchairs, or their body doesn’t work right, they are still pretty cool.
We also do it the other way, that the parochial high schoolers will come and do stuff with the younger kids, and that 7th-8th graders can go to the high school to shadow the older students, do athletic type events.
As **Shagnasty **and Dangerosa note I think what partially is driving this trend is that really the choice for some percentage of 4-5-6 year olds in the U.S. in 2008 (lets say “half” though likely its is more ) is not a choice between picking PB&J with Mom vs. all day Kindergarten, but all Day Kindergarten vs. some form of Day Care.
That doesn’t make it OK if it is harmful. Points about forcing kids to learn academic structure too soon being taken. An idyllic vision of how these young years should be acknowledged. But I think that needs to be noted.
*
– Jimmmy - whose now 9 year old was in an all day Kindergarten and it seems to have been the best place for him. *
One of the reasons we didn’t put our son in full day kindergarten was that they had room for 40 kids - and 60 applications - and only about 75 kids in his class. Full day kindergarten with district before and after care - even when they did charge - was far cheaper than half day daycare around here, and a lot of parents were desperate to get rid of those daycare bills. We weren’t, and it would have been more of a hassle, so he had a half day of each.
It did lead to an interesting observation - my son in half day kindergarten made friends with kids who had SAHMs and married parents and generally a higher socioeconomic class. My daughter, in full day kindergarten, made friends whose parents worked, and were sometimes divorced. The people who wanted half day kindergarten for their kids pretty overwhelmingly were home with them - and several of the Moms admitted it was them that wasn’t ready for all day school - not their kids.
What I see driving the trend is money. The school district wants my kid in full day kindergarten so she’ll do better on standardized tests and they’ll get more money. (They left out the part about them getting more money in the sales pitch, but I think it’s fairly obvious.)
Of course, the district getting more money is good for my kids too, so it’s not an entirely selfish argument on their part.
Wow. Interesting thread.
My kids started at a small Montessori school in preschool. They went to preschool from 8:45-2:45. We felt that it was the best way for them to get social exposure, as we lived on a street with no kids their age. My oldest started at 3 days a week but we quickly moved to 5 days a week because he loved being there. Social skills, academics, practical life stuff- it was awesome.
So of course kindergarten was full day too (ours was actually a blended pre-K/K classroom, which was great). Now both boys are in a blended elementary classroom (grades 1-3) and doing well. The younger one actually moved into that class 6 months early.
I do have a point here. 
I guess if you don’t agree with full-day kindergarten then your daughter shouldn’t go. Simple. The decision was a “no brainer” for us, because everything was positive- academics AND social stuff. And we did pull out my oldest son for speech therapy twice a week, and it was fine.
As parents, we need to go with our gut feelings more. Trust yourself and quit letting other people make you feel guilty- why do you give a shit what they think or say? 
Bottom line- I fully support full-day kinder for the reasons other posters have listed, but I fully support your right to opt out.
In the real world. I take you’re female? My boys played dress up just like my daughter did–they liked heels and clip on earrings best. When I made up that example, I wasn’t saying that it happened, but that it could happen and no one would blink (at least not at the preschool we attended). My son for freshman year Halloween went as a “fairy”–pink tutu over jeans and a fairy crown in his hair (he even had a wand). No one beat him up (and no, he’s not gay)–his friends thought it was funny. Anyway, kids in preschool play dress up and gender bend quite a bit.
Congrats–you’re an outlier. I see no indication that the OPs daughter would suffer as you apparently did. Kindergarten is not designed to punish people. 12+ years is a long time to be without friends. I’m sorry to say this, but I don’t think it was it all them.
As the mom of 3 kids that are either going through or have gone through the Indiana school system, I think this is correct.
School systems quickly learned that 7-8 year olds do better on standardized tests geared to 6 year olds than do 6-year-olds and especially 5-year-olds, so there’s real pressure to have kids go to school a year or two older than the nation-wide norm. Also, kids that have had more schooling as 6-year-olds will do better than kids that have had less.
I ran into this with my first when she was 5 years old. She was born July 12 and the age cut off at the time was July1 (it has subsequently been moved). Because she would only be 5 years old for 2 months prior to the start of kindergarden, she was deemed too young, and was supposed to wait till she was over 6 years old to start kindergarden. When I began asking about this since she was clearly ready for formal schooling I was told in both veiled and blunt terms that it was usually “better” for kids to wait. When I said that I knew my child and that SHE was ready I was told that parents “like me” can get a “reputation.”
She (and her younger brother and sister) went to private kindergarden because they were able to. Ironically, your kid can be a fetus in Indiana and if they get through kindergarden they can enroll in 1st grade; there is no age cut off at all for first grade.
When my kids were in grade school, I volunteered at the school’s library one day a week. One day a handful of kids were brought in for a study hall. I asked about them, and was told that this was ISTEP day and these kids were either not native English speakers or recent transfers and it wouldn’t “be fair” to ask them to take the test. Pretty clearly it would be even less “fair” to the school to have some really, really low scoring kids on their record.
So, yeah, they are trying to push you so that they can game their system and get your kid to test better. Trust your feelings about what is best for your child, do what you want, and don’t worry one bit about what the school folks are telling you.
Oh- about my oldest daughter. I was correct, it wasn’t “better” for her to wait. She did just fine in grade school, high school, and college. As a matter if fact, she was her high school valedictarian.
I didn’t mean to imply that I want my son to be around only kids his age. I think being around diverse ages is great.
So does mine. There’s fifty kids in the whole school. The grades are broken up into groups of about 3-4 years spread, so my boy’s class (about 10 kids) currently has children aged around 7-10 years old. And he’s with children from 4 to 15 years at lunch and other times, for school plays, for field trips, and so forth.
He’s also enjoyed the side “benefit” of diverse ages, which is being bullied. Something the school put a stop to fairly quickly, but it goes with the territory.
Look, with the number of functional retards that are graduating these days, if your kid can say the word, “Exhilirating”, she’ll be fine. We have a paranoid culture that thinks you need to force academia down kids throats or they won’t be competitive. That’s a bunch of nonsense.
Just remember that A students go into Academia, and B students end up working for C students.
I never said it was. I was a really weird kid and have no illusions that I should have had dozens of good friends. But when every time you make an earnest attempt to reach out for friendship, in the way you think is good and right (and learning from what didn’t work before) and every time you’re made fun of for trying, are rejected or shot down, or, at best, make “friends” who never talked to you outside school, it’s not all you either. I went to school with some extremely mean people, and I don’t think it was just because I live somewhere weird or something. I think kids are a mean, nasty mob who want to string up the weird kid, and the OP’s kid would probably be a prime candidate for “weird” since, it seems, she’s smart, and that equals weird to a lot of kids who aren’t smart.
…if that.
I know why schools segregate children by age - it’s convenient and their ability to learn skills is very roughly the same in each group. I know this grouping is a way to “socialize” them. I don’t really understand how anybody could look at segregating large groups of children almost exclusively by their chronological age, putting them in large groups with relatively little adult oversight, and call this an ideal way to teach children to get along in a large, diverse society. Some will excel. A few will be bullied quite literally to death, and the vast majority will do anywhere in between the two on probably a bell curve.
Most of us - maybe all of us - went through this experience ourselves. I did. By the way, I was on the ‘weird geek with no friends’ end of the bell curve, my family moved every few years, and I do not consider my school “socialization” experiences to have been positive or even very helpful in learning me to get along with society. Do we perpetuate this on our own children because we believe it to be good, helpful and ideal, or because it is convenient, or because we ourselves went through it and if it was good enough for us, it’s good enough for them? How we perceive the institution depends entirely on what we think we’re getting out of it.
I myself do not believe in this kind of “socialization”. It has nothing to do with real society. Nothing at all.
I went to all day kindergarten in public school back in the early 60s in Brooklyn, NY. I didn’t know that part time was an option. Wow!
I’m sorry for your experiences, but I don’t think this is true of most kids. In my experience, children who get picked on are not the smart kids, but the kids with poor social skills. Sometimes those two things coincide, but far from always. I suspect that kids whose parents really value academic smarts sometimes see social skills as unimportant, so they don’t focus on those as much, to their kids’ detriment.
Don’t Call Me Shirley, you need to do what’s best for your family. But personally, I think there’s no harm in all-day kindergarten for most kids.
Exactly. Two of my kids are in both gifted and honors programs and both have wide circles of friends. I do think that social skills are a type of intelligence and they don’t come naturally to everyone. Some kids can be mean, but not all kids are mean all the time to everyone. I think that some parents just don’t value social skills (or think they aren’t learned) because I see kids in both the high end and the low who suffer from their lack.
And of course, it’s hard to develop social skills when your peers ostracize you, so it becomes a vicious circle.
Most of the time that I see children with sub-par social skills, their parents are suffering from that as well. Rarely will you find a maladjusted child with highly social competent parents. The children may be shy or introverted by nature, but they will still be socially competent. Intelligence rarely has anything to do with it, other than in some environments, it is looked down upon.
Because having a first grader - even one that reads at a fourth or fifth grade level - hanging out with fifth graders - who have started to go boy crazy and want to wear makeup and have cell phones, see movies and listen to music with more mature themes, (and in more extreme circumstances, have already discovered alcohol or sex) is not the sort of “socializing” a first grader needs. When my second grade daughter mixes with the fifth graders in before/after care her behavior is very different than when she spends time with the first and second graders - and it isn’t a positive difference for a second grader (it is age appropriate for a fifth grader).
By the time you leave high school, this sort of maturity difference stops meaning much - and you in fact benefit from the maturity of people older than you. But a seven year old doesn’t benefit from the “maturity” of the average twelve year old - because a twelve year old is still climbing the stupidity curve - and will until they are a late teen or young adult.
True enough–but then why blame the schools for the “ostracizing” of the child? Certainly, teachers and schools should promote civility and common courtesy, but their focus should be education, not remedial social skills.
No matter the population, there will always be those who are out of step with the mainstream. That doesn’t mean we alter everything to fit the few, but we should be more aware and attempt to include those outliers. School is really just a microcosm of life–groups will always exclude/include; people tend to stratify–that’s human nature. Frankly, if the parents aren’t teaching the skills, they are doing their children a disservice for their entire lives. No one is saying these kids need to be the life of the party, but basic skills need to taught. On the other side, differences need to be respected and tolerated (which does require monitoring by a responsible adult for at least some years).
I’ve been on both sides of the issue–I’ve been the shy outsider/loner; I’ve been Queen Bee, and I’ve been drummed out of a group–all of these positions have their own unique advantages and pressures/pain. Does anyone really think it’s “easier” to be popular?
Re the lumping the ages into grades etc: I’ve seen what happens when a kid excels so well academically that the district requires him/her to move up a grade. This is devastating to most kids–the one I knew of was a small boy, emotionally and physically immature. This did him a huge disservice–he was the butt of the middle school. He could (and did) outperform the other kids academically, but he got no social “training”–his eccentricities were reinforced by his isolation. He was a late bloomer, physically with puberty, too–so he had a double whammy. It was sad. It can work well for some kids, but it’s not a perfect solution.
I can see mixed grades, like 1st and 2nd together–that would work, but anything more than one grade up or down is pushing it, IMO.
Of course it’s easier. Is this a trick question? If you’re going for the “there’s a lot of pressure to be what other people want you to be, instead of being yourself,” that’s not really being popular, because friends who ask you to act like someone you’re not are not really friends.
I think I would have been fine, actually, with the whole “no real friends” thing in school. I’m sort of a loner by nature anyway, though I do like to have a few trusted, close friends. But it wasn’t just “I have no friends” for me in school. It was “I have no friends, and there is a significant portion of the school population who make a hobby of tormenting me.” If everyone would have left me the hell alone, I would have been better off. If they didn’t like my social skills, they could have gone off and did their own thing. That’s what I mean by children being cruel. No one can make people be someone’s friend, but the school system failed to keep me from being the butt of jokes and the target of emotional warfare from children who REALLY lacked social skills. (Because, seriously, I think “not ganging up on the chubby smart weird girl like a bunch of animals” is a more important social skill than “don’t be fawningly nice to people who don’t know you well, it creeps them out” and the other similar ones I lacked.)