I have two issues, and I don’t know what the best way to deal with them is.
One, I don’t buy the “bored” argument, especially as a reason to start bright kids early. I generally think a kid that’s going to be bored with the academics in kindergarten will be bored by the academics in first grade, too. It’s true that pushing on to kindergarten instead of repeating the same preschool program probably makes sense, but another option would be finding a different pre-school with a different program. I tend to feel that bright kids, especially, need more academics, not the same academics faster, and it’s a mistake to use that excess capacity to just get to the same place as everyone else a little sooner. If 1st grade is ridiculously easy for a kid, cut a deal with the school that he won’t be spending time doing homework that is redundant for him and instead read more, experiment more, learn a second language, or do art or whatever. Don’t push him up to find a level of normal learning that is reasonably challenging.
The real kicker, though, is middle school. Toddlers and pre-schoolers are all over the place in terms of development: there is a huge range of “normal”. Around 5-6, that tends to even out some. There is still a range, of course, but not nearly as extreme. But at 10-12 for girls and 11-13 for boys it all goes to hell again–physically, obviously, but also emotionally and socially. And I don’t know that you can predict who will be the early bloomers and the late ones based on trends as toddlers. If you guess wrong and put a kid on the double-opposite end of a spectrum from what is appropriate, it’s a mess: having boobs two years before everyone else is awful, but so is still being interested in dolls and make-believe when everyone else is into music and boys.
I think the best thing, if you have a kid on an extreme edge, is to pay attention and be willing to take additional steps if an adjustment needs to be made. If you start a kid early and he does fine until 3rd grade and then suddenly those differences are obviously a problem, be willing to pull him out and put him in a different school to repeat third grade. And think about the middle school issue from the get-go and stay aware of how a student may be falling out of step with their peers in different ways, and take steps to help mitigate the damage it might be causing.
In an ideal world, gifted children would be considered special needs and eligible for IEPs mandating participation in enrichment activities like art, foreign language, critical thinking, debate, blowing cool shit up 101, etc. In the real world, though, access to accelerated programs depends entirely on the school district.
In poorer districts (like mine), teachers spend much less time with smart kids because they “don’t need” the help. Since the value of a school district is nearly always expressed in terms of test scores, there’s no profit in helping a couple kids go from the 92nd percentile to the 96th percentile. There aren’t many public school teachers who provide enrichment opportunities to the kid who always finishes her hour’s worth of homework in 15 minutes (other than, go read a book and stop bothering me, I’m trying to grade these tests). Because of the way we’ve set up the system to judge the success of a school, teachers’ time is better spent helping the kids who are failing and/or disruptive.
I’m not judging teachers who don’t take the time to help their gifted students, by any means. They work enough hours as it is. But I am criticizing the fact that it’s a *systemic *problem. Kids on the high end of the academic spectrum fall through the cracks when they’re **never **challenged, too. You just don’t see it until later on.
Right, but this thread is about what should *parents *do when trying to place kids, not what should teachers do. One argument seems to be that “if a kid is academically advanced, it’s often in their best interest to push them to be the youngest rather than hold them back to be the oldest”. I am suggesting that in those cases, an alternative is for the parent to hold them back but to enhance their education through outside-of-school activities, or to work with the teacher to provide actually enriching things for the kid to do.
Can all parents do this? Of course not, and they should probably just push the higher achieving kid forward as the lesser of two evils. But I think that those kids are just as likely to be bored academically as the youngest kid as they were to be bored academically as the oldest kid, plus they are socially immature. So I do tend to think the ideal is for a parent to enrich their kids’ education, rather than just get them through it faster.
It depends on what you’re talking about. I’d agree that you don’t want to take a kid with an April birthday and jump her a whole year ahead to keep her from being bored - or, if she’s an average kid, you shouldn’t hold her back a year in pre-K so she’ll be a whole year older and more able than her peers in kindergarten.
But we’re for the most part talking about what to do about kids that are right around the edges of the 12-month range that goes into a grade. And let’s face it, someone’s got to be the youngest and someone’s got to be the oldest. If the one who is going to be youngest - or is just missing the cutoff - is more than ready to get on with it, it’s better that they be the youngest than some kid who’s in the middle of the pack.
I don’t know that I would consider a child who turns 5 in April to be young for kindergarten that fall. She would turn 18 in April of her senior year of high school. Having said that, you could reasonably go either way, and there would be nothing wrong in holding her back so that she entered kindergarten at 6 and graduate right after turning 19. You could also let her attend kindergarten and see how it goes, and have her repeat K if there seems to be issues with maturity or academics (see below). In general, being one of the oldest in a class is usually better than being one of the youngest when it comes to general maturity, sports, starting to drive, etc.
We moved from one state to another when your kids were very young, and the cutoff dates were different. Our youngest entered kindergarten at four, turning five at the end of September. He was by far the youngest in his class, and more than a year younger than many of his classmates. He ended up repeating kindergarten to get back on track with his age cohort. It ended up being the right thing to do. Had we not done that, he wouldn’t have turned 18 until he was already in college.
I was redshirted. My parents did it for the eventual advantage in sports. It worked out great. The only hitch from my POV was that I always thought the girls in the grade ahead of me were cuter and the boys were cooler.
A classmate of mine had been redshirted and heldback a year sometime in grade school. As a result, he was 18 nearly his entire junior year. The nearby college town had a number of 18 year-olds allowed bars. Good times.
When I started school, I don’t think many people thought holding kids back was an option. I was just under five years old when I started kindergarten, and I believe I was the youngest kid in my class.
I was one who would have benefited from being held back. I was small and emotionally immature for my age and I remember always feeling overwhelmed by my more forward and aggressive classmates. School was a misery for me.
IMO, it’s probably better to hold your kid back a year before he starts if he needs it than pushing him beyond what he’s capable of and wind up having to hold him back later on some point at a higher grade, making him leave one group of kids/friends for a younger one, the teasing likely to entail if that happens, etc.
Granted, there’s no guarantee that holding back now will completely prevent holding back later, but if you think your kid needs it, hey, follow your instincts.
My birthday is in late January and in Philly in 1941 or 42, the cutoff date was Jan. 31 so I was likely the youngest in the class. But there were two classes a year, so the difference wasn’t so striking. They abandoned that system around 1960, although I think it was better since it obviously reduced the spread of ages. FWIW, I was no better than average in elementary school, well above in HS, near the top in college and best of my grad student cohort. Did my being the youngest make a difference? Who knows?
My own personal datum. I was born about six weeks before the cut-off date so I was always one of the youngest kids in my class. And it was kind of annoying because kids do have status based on their age. It wasn’t a huge thing but I would have rather been one of the older kids rather than one of the younger ones.
Our daughter would have been the youngest in her class by far, and she had speech problems also. We held her back, and it worked out just great. Our school district in NJ had a pre-first also, and friends whose kids went liked it, but we were just as happy that she didn’t need it. She is just engaged so is old enough that we can state that the experiment was a success.
I was fairly young also, and while I didn’t get held back, my parents didn’t let me take a program where you did 3 years of junior high in 2 years. They were definitely right about that.
A bonus was that our daughter was a bit more mature than most of her class, which was good for friends and for teachers.
I had the option of holding my son, born September 4, back a year. I did, and never regretted it. Better the oldest and biggest in the class than the youngest and smallest.
Yikes. This thread makes me so nervous. My son’s b-day is September 24. He is 5. We weren’t going to start him at age 4. But his preschool teacher told us he was ready, we’d be doing him a disservice, etc. Now he is in kindergarten and he likes it, and we thought everything was fine. But now apparently the teacher told my husband she thinks he might bave to repeat! It seems odd because he is starting to sound out words and such and seems to be able to do his homework (with belp). She said something about him not following and/or focusing – but then two days later she said she might have spoken too soon. Wtf? Parent/teacher conferences are coming up so I plan to interrogate her then. Because of scheduling, my husband always drops him off so I haven’t talked to her about it yet. It may not matter too much if he does repeat because we are going to be applying to choice in to other schools for next year anyway. So the people will all be new. I just worry we did the wrong thing…
That was our cutoff, too. My birthday is in November (next week, actually), and I was one of the youngest, if not the youngest in my class.
I know I could have benefited from waiting a year – I was very young for my age, and was quite awkward physically, as well as socially, compared to my classmates. I had no trouble keeping up academically, though, which I think was probably the reason why my parents didn’t hold me back.
Reading through this thread, I’m surprised nobody has mentioned how negative being held back was once considered. In my neck of the woods it was a badge of shame in the you-must-be-stupid-academically sense.
My son has a July birthday, I sent him on with nary a thought. But then found out that there were a significant number of boys a year older than he in his class, all more mature, all readier for the “rigors” of kindergarten. I was annoyed because I felt him perfectly capable and on track for whatever is demanded of 5-year-olds in school, yet the was presented with more advanced work because just about all the class was ready for it. I questioned the kindergarten teacher who admitted that yes, the work is harder because so many kids are coming in more mature and ready for essentially first grade work in kindergarten.
He stayed behind all through elementary school. Whether that was his temperment (he was completely uninterested in school) or the redshirting of so many of his classmates, I have no idea.
I will say it’s made relatively no difference now however. He began to excel in sixth grade and now, as a high-school junior, is doing work commensurate with his ability and age.
I was born about a week and a half after the cutoff, and even though I was ready and eager to start school, the school district was inflexible. So I was the “bigger, older” kid in my class. It didn’t do me any good. I was bored silly, and I was shamed for my age, as people assumed that I had failed a grade.
Kids are ready for school when they’re ready, and a kid who is 5 is not automatically unready for kindergarten, and a kid who is 6 is not automatically ready for it. Holding a kid back when he’s ready to learn, or pushing a kid when he’s not ready, are both bad choices.
This is pretty much what happened to me, and I hated it when I was in grade school. The cutoff was Sept 1 and I was born at the end of September, so by the time I could start school I was ~11 months older than most of the other kids in my class. All through grade school I would be asked my age and then accused of having failed a grade. Hated it. It can be unpleasant to be the oldest child in the class. Some kids are always looking for things that make other kids different in any way, then they glom onto it and use it to try to make that child’s life miserable. (Some kids grow out of that, others stay that way as adults. )
Once I got into junior high kids didn’t seem to be so focused on who was what age anymore, but age is a big thing to little kids.
I agree with knowing your child. I also think that knee-jerk redshirting is a bad idea; as another poster pointed out, some child will always be the youngest in the class.
FWIW, Slate did a couple articles on this recently. This one seemed like a pretty balanced look at the issue.
Huh. I was always the oldest kid in class (my bday was 3 days after the cutoff, which was dec 1 at the time) and never took a bit of grief over it. I was big even for my age, though, and could have easily passed for a grade (or more) higher.
Oddly, there was a kid whose parents completely ignored the cutoff. His birthday was the day before mine, but he was born the year after me. So he was 364 days younger than me, we were the oldest and youngest, but neither of us really had any problems rising from it.
We were actually friends in K and 1st grade (and his dad and my dad were friends as well), but then switched schools and lost touch. Later, we both wound up going to another school together (5th though 8th grade) but never really rekindled the friendship. But no one ever cared about him being so young or me so old. Not sure who even knew.
I was always the tallest in my class so perhaps that drew attention and made the others think I might be older and want to ask my age. But you say looked older too. I don’t know. If they waited to ask me my age after the first month of school was over, I’d have to say I was 7 when they were almost all still 6), so they would say, “Did you fail a grade?” in a snotty voice. This only happened in the first few years of school though. This was back in the late 70s and early 80s - maybe kids are different now.
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