Why didn’t you have him take a gap-year between high school and college, when you realized you wished you had redshirted him?
Have him take a gap year? He was 18 and ready to make his own decisions, and he most definitely wanted to go to college. It was a sensible decision: we lived in a small rural town, and a gap year would have meant working in a stultifying minimum wage job. Also, it’s not like he had the emotional maturity of a 17-year-old at 18 simply because of his emotional maturity at age 6. It doesn’t work that way. My regret at not having red-shirted him has more to do with his primary grade experiences than with his middle and high school years. A gap year after high school would have done nothing to change that.
Same as @nelliebly.
The lil’wrekker was ready to get out of the rural confines of this place.
I hated to see her go. In fact I tried to rent a dorm room next to her(kidding).
It was a hard wrench but we got through it.
Now she may be getting the gap year because of the COVID lock down.
She has found out she was right, she doesn’t like manual labor of any kind.
Hey all. We decided to send her to school. The teachers were adamant that they can handle age difference and will bring in help if they discover any educational difficulties.
She’s definitely the youngest in the class and it shows, although her best friend is one of the oldest funnily enough!
Good that it worked out for you!
I’m surprised to see that I didn’t participate in the original incarnation of this thread … if I had, I would have been on Team God-I’m-Glad-I-Started-School-Early, so going ahead and starting, and then having it be okay seems like a pretty good result to me.
I had a similar experience. I was the youngest in my class. My parents were convinced that because I was smart, I would be bored if I waited. I did well with the academics, but struggled with social issues all the way through school. I imagine that you’ll be able to skip your child ahead later if they are ready. I wouldn’t start them in school yet.
Girls, boys, and reading (brookings.edu)
Girls are already older than and more advanced than the other half of the class, even if they are chronologically younger than everyone else.
November birthday, male, 1950. By about 6th grade I was aware of being the youngest in my class, and by mid-High School it was a source of real social anxiety and embarrassment. Had I ever become the parent of a Summer-Fall birthday child I would definitely have let them start school later.
Probably way too late, but in case anyone else has the same question…
Studies show that older kids (i.e. kids are 5.5 - 6 yo) do better than younger children in the same class (i.e. kids who are 5 - 5.5 yo) on most assessments. A child who is nearly a year younger will likely be at the bottom of the class, unless they are exceptional. It matters because children who do better early on get more support and encouragement, which leads them to do better later on. Your child may well be exceptional. And gender matters – girls do better than boys in the early grades. But unless there are solid indicators that your child should be in kindergarten, it will probably benefit them to wait til next year.
Could you elaborate on why you are glad you started early?
Sure. First of all, I was tall and I hated it. I was never really reconciled to being tall until way into my twenties when I realised how much more respect it gets you - I remember my primary school career as one long litany of getting pushed to the back of groups “so that the smaller girls can see”. I was very self-conscious about it.
Schoolwork wasn’t a problem, I was good at that (which was the whole reason for starting me early). And it was good for my ego - I was really proud of being young for my year. There was another girl I recall as being on the old side for the class (I think her parents held her back till she was ready) - she was average-to-not-great at school work and my memory is that she got no respect at all. You didn’t necessarily want to be the smartypants to be popular (sports was the way to that, as in most schools) but you definitely didn’t want to be thought dumb either, specially if you ‘ought to’ be doing better.
Socially I was shockingly bad, but there was nothing about holding off school for a year that was going to help me with that. I would have spent the year happily swinging on swings in parks by myself and drawing pictures. If you’re going to practice social interaction you have to be where the other humans are, which I never was except for school.
My dad was even younger than me for his year (not at the start, but he skipped a couple of grades). I don’t remember him saying anything particularly bad about that experience - he was pretty down on the concept of starting Uni at 16 though, that was too young. But we’re basically a big family of nerds, and in general the concept of doing things earlier than you’re meant to be able to, because you can, holds strong appeal.