Two points:
First, my son was diagnosed as a late talker by our pediatrician and by the county at 2.5. Scared the shit out of me and my wife. We put him in a county speech program and, by age 4, he was speaking at his level. Take home point is that a diagnosed speech delay that early is not necessarily indicative of serious problems but, of course, it might. We were lucky YMMV.
Second, the county preschool speech teacher thought my son may be too immature for kindergarten but expressed to us that she thought he was very intelligent. We finally, after much agonizing, decided to put him in kindergarten in a private school so, if things do not work out, we can enroll him in public kindergarten without a mark on his record (what the public school system doesn’t know won’t hurt them). As of now he is doing very well and we hope that he will progress to 1st grade without any issue. If anything we feel that exposure to “normally developing” children WRT speech has helped his communication.
Retention where you just grind the kid through the same year in the same school is not at all the same thing as withdrawing the kid and home schooling him for a year, or sending him to a local private school for a year, or any number of other options.
I just think that socio-emotional preparedness is a much bigger deal than academics, and that a bright boy who simply cannot behave as expected, say, is facing a lifetime of warped self-image–that they are “bad” and that people in authority always dislike them. And if a kid looks to be a late-bloomer, physically, on top of already being younger, it’s very traumatic. I teach high school, and the boys that still look like middle schoolers at the end of Freshman year really suffer for it.
I also teach high school, and I’ve never seen a kid suffer for looking younger, including my own son, a senior, who regularly gets mistaken for being 4-5 years younger. Social development, perhaps…but physical? Not in my experience. The one kid I’ve seen really suffer is the one who was started late and then held back so that he’s two years older than his classmates.
I haven’t seen kids moved to a different school to be held back, and I haven’t seen statistics on it. From what I’ve seen of homeschooling, though, most of the kids aren’t learning good social skills despite what every homeschooling mom wants to point out about plenty of socialization opportunities. We’ve had a number of kids come through after being homeschooled, and every one of them had issues fitting in; they just seemed a little socially immature.
Unfortunately, it’s just easier all around to pick an arbitrary cut-off date than to evaluate each child to determine the best time to start school. My husband’s brother, now 55, *still *has issues with being held back in 3rd grade. Maybe it wouldn’t have been a big deal if he’d started school a year later, but I can hardly believe that a man of his age hasn’t gotten over what happened when he was 8.
Then there are the parents who take it as a personal affront when a teacher suggests perhaps Sissy or Junior would be better off going back one level. You’re not necessarily a failure as a mom because your kid is better suited for kindergarten than first grade, and the kid likely won’t care as long as you don’t make a big deal about it.
The first year my daughter was teaching, she had 2nd graders, and one little girl was really struggling. It took a lot of persuading, but her parents finally consented to putting her back in the 1st grade, and it was absolutely the right move. A few years later, my daughter was teaching 5th grade and she had this little girl in her class again - she said the girl was right where she needed to be. Sometimes things work out…
My point is simply that if you start your kid early, and after two or three years you start to see a widening gap between them and their peers in terms of emotional/social development, you need to be open to trying to find a creative way to fix the problem, not wave your hands in the air and hope it will all work out, because an emerging gap in the third grade is going to get worse, not better.
In terms of homeschooling, again, it’s one of many options to delay a kid a year. It might well be the right choice for some kids–and whatever the social impact of homeschooling, doing it for a year is a dramatically different situation than doing it permanently. Different flavors of private school would be another option. Charter and alternative public schools are yet another option. What, IMO, is the worst option is assuming that once you are on the treadmill, you have to stay in lock-step until the end.
Back in the dark ages, when I started school, one could start kindergarten when you were four, if you would be five before January 1 of the next year.
My birthday is December 31, so I could have started school at a very early age, and my parents decided to wait until the next year. So instead of being the youngest, least developed kid in class(and it matters more when you are that young) I had a year’s worth of extra growth and maturing.
To the OP I’d say that you know your kid best. If you really think that holding him back would help, then do it.
I completely agree with you. And so for what you said about college graduates: Most people don’t graduate college on time. Just look at these statistics.
So I’d say that someone who starts Kindergarten at 4 will become a college graduate at 22, well someone who starts Kindergarten at 5 will become a college graduate at 23. So yeah, redshirting will really delay the child’s life, so I say that it shouldn’t be done.
Please don’t redshirt him. I’m begging you. It’ll be so unfair to the other kids. If you redshirt him, he’ll naturally be at the top of his class as he’d be so much older than everyone else. You’d be sending him the message that it’s okay to cheat and that he doesn’t have to earn his way towards his achievements. If he doesn’t learn to work hard early on, his adult life is going to be very difficult. Just play by the rules and send him on time. Do you will praise you for cheating.
Redshirting isn’t cheating; it’s treating your child as an individual and doing what makes the most sense for him or her at that time. Yes, it’s a decision that follows them through their entire educational years, but it’s not cheating.
A redshirted kid isn’t necessarily going to be at the top of the class academically. There are many other factors besides age involved.
My children are both on the younger side of their classmates and both started “on time”. My daughter, born in late June, will graduate at age 17 this May but has always excelled academically and socially. My son, born in early May, would have benefitted from being redshirted. Another year to mature before he entered the rat race that is school would have been good. But what’s done is done.
I’m guessing you live in an area with a December cut-off and that there probably aren’t any redshirted kids at your daughter’s school. In that case, she would be in the middle of the pack age-wise. As for your son, it’s completely ridiculous to think that you should redshirt a May birthday. He’d graduate high school at 19. You should never regret teaching your kids to play fair. That will be my main goal when I have kids.
Putting your own kids’ interests last, doing something that is not in their best interests, isn’t playing fair.
If the kid isn’t ready for school intellectually and/or socially (and the calendar can be only a rough guide here), then the kid isn’t ready. How do you think it fair to your own child to push him or her into something they’re not ready for, something that they are likely to have great difficulties with and something that may have lasting detrimental effects?
If the kid isn’t ready just because the calendar says so, pushing them into school anyway can be setting them up for failure. Graduating high school at 19 isn’t some huge problem. Not being able to graduate high school, or not being able to graduate with the necessary social and educational skills because of a rocky start, is a much bigger problem than an extra year in preschool. So’s flunking first or second grade, or failing to learn enough in those early grades to develop a solid foundation for future achievement.
Read some of the research of James Uphoff and June Gilmore. For example, in Uphoff’s study of Hebron (Nebraska) elementary students, kids born in the three months before the cutoff comprised about a quarter of the students, and three-quarters of those who flunked a grade (and flunking a grade in elementary school is a decent predictor of who’s going to drop out of high school). Uphoff and Gilmore also found, in a study in Montgomery County, Ohio, in the 1980s, that “summer children” (those born in the months immediately preceding the cutoff and hence the youngest in the class, the cutoff being in September there) were vastly over-represented in the suicide statistics.
You’re guessing incorrectly. Both children began school in districts that had a cut-off of Sept. 1. And both of my children are in the bottom quarter of their classes when sorted by age.
I understand that you don’t think it’s good to redshirt kids. That’s fine. But when you have children and are watching them develop, you may rethink. Fair isn’t always equal, and equal isn’t always fair.
When done for the right reasons, redshirting isn’t cheating. If a child at age five truly isn’t ready for Kindergarten, the parents should have the option of waiting a year. Kindergarten is much more academically intense than it was 20 years ago; many children simply aren’t ready for that level of intensity. I see redshirting as a way to help the parents align the curriculum to the needs of their child. And while my son will be 18 when he graduates, he will be barely 18. In retrospect, giving him an extra year to mature would not have been bad for him. Bear in mind that you don’t know him and don’t know my concerns for him. I won’t retain him now; that’s a stigma he doesn’t need or deserve, so we will continue to persevere through his challenges. But if I had it to do over again, I’d want to redshirt him.
Children develop at different rates, boys more slowly than girls. Whether you should delay K for your child depends on the child’s developmental level-which the school should be able to measure. That said, if there is any doubt in anyone’s mind, waiting an extra year is a wonderful idea. School is not a race. Giving your child the chance to be naturally a bit ahead of the class instead of a bit behind will benefit the child in every grade. We held back our son (here it is a formal process called Transitional First Grade) and it was a great idea. Incidentally, he had several friends in K, they all ended up repeating second or third grade and so the cohort ended up together. Worked for them, but easier on my child.
Sorry to resurrect a zombie thread but thought some people might be interested in how this all played out.
Thank you to everyone who commented. It really did help.
We met with my son’s JK teachers this morning. We scheduled the meeting after his speech therapist (once we asked her) recommended that our son do another year of JK. His JK teachers were very helpful but were clearly pushing us towards having him do another year of JK (query: Had we not asked, are JK teachers allowed to make suggestions?).
I won’t pretend that I am not a little disappointed as I wanted to hear that he is doing great but I agreed with everything that they said. As the community we live in only runs JK from 8:45 to 11 we are going to put him into a Catholic JK that goes from 8:45 to 1:15 and also to avoid his little sister who would be in his JK class).
So my son will be 6 when he starts Kindergarten. He will turn 7 in late April of his Kindergarten year so he will only be 7 for about month of kindergarten. He will be 19 when he graduates High School.
Why do you think it is that some young adults take 5 or 6 years to complete college, rather than 4? Could it be that if you’re starting college as an immature 17 or 18 year old, you’re not ready for the responsibility, and you waste a year or two floundering before you get yourself squared away? And if you started at 18 or 19 you’d be more ready for the challenge?
Again, it depends on the kid. My brother is a prime example. The trouble is that he was smart, but small and emotionally immature. So starting him in kindergarten at 4 meant he was on par with the other kids intellectually, but way behind them physically and emotionally. And this kept him isolated for years, and still affects him today. What good does it do to be intellectually capable of doing work a year or two or three ahead of the other kids, when you don’t actually do it? My brother barely graduated from high school because he nearly failed classes he could easily do, but didn’t actually bother to do. And he got good grades in college, when he did the work. Then he stopped doing the work, and got kicked out, and had to go back 20 years later to get his degree.