My experience with my kid, which is now 15 years in the past, is that 5-year-olds with a certain cutoff date (I think Sept. 15) went into kindergarten, but at some point during the kindergarten year it was recommended to let a few of them do kindergarten again, as they were just not quite ready. The school emphasized that this shouldn’t be considered as flunking kindergarten. I would say 4 or 5 in my son’s class got this recommendation. (And it was only a recommendation. They did not flunk kindergarten.)
I think my son (August birthday) should have probably gone in a year later, but that’s hindsight. I don’t know if he would have liked school any better. He was one of the younger kids in class, exactly because a lot of parents held their kids, particularly boys, back. He pretty much hated school all the way through, which might have happened whether we waited or not.
I will say, with a birthday in August, he was always one of the older ones on the sports teams, because they wanted the deciding birthday to be something like June 1. And he did pretty well in sports.
Huh. This made me look up the actual legal position in Ireland. As far as I can tell from this thread, in the US there’s a one-year age span in which the kid is supposed to start school, right? Like, if you’re born between 1 September 2009 and 1 September 2010, you’re supposed to start this year?
Over here it’s a two-year window - kids may start school once they turn 4 (apparently almost 40% of kids do that) and must have started by the time they turn 6. I like that better. It avoids the problem some people have mentioned in this thread, where older kids are embarrassed because people think they failed a year.
When I read the thread title, all I could think of was parents putting red shirts on the other children, so that they’d be picked off first by the Gorns.
This is very helpful. Thank you for all who answered and for making me look up Gorns on Google (also the rules in Illinois where I live).
Could care less about sports (I was a very good athlete so I don’t need to relive my glory days through my kids, so long as they do something then I am happy). For me it’s all about what will be best for my son. Our neighbour has five boys and the one that is my son’s age (born three months earlier, nice kid) talks literal circles around him. Granted he may be a very bright kid but my son isn’t even at the races when the two interact (that is, until my son decides he’s had enough and levels the other kid. He’s a gentle boy until he is riled up and then he does have a temper).
Anyways, he will be five in April of 2016. He is going into all day pre-k next week for the year. Illinois lets you start kindergarten if you are five by September 1. So he could absolutely start in September of 2016 when he would be nearly 5.5. Or I could hold him back until September of 2017 when he would be nearly 6.5. Too old for Kindergarten? God willing he would be near over 18 starting senior year of HS.
I was four when I started Kindergarten and turned 5 soon after starting. I could already read, but had a speech problem. I hated Kindergarten and most of school but found it to be easy and boring. I can’t imagine being a year older and doing the same work. It would have been so dull. Another advantage is that I got to start college earlier since I graduated high school at 17. Hereis an article about some research in this area. In Sweden they found that kids who start school earlier to better in life outcomes than those who started later.
Each child is different but it is easier to hold a child back if the need to than have them skip a grade if they are bored.
My family had this discussion about my brother’s youngest. The kid was born in mid-November, with a cut-off date of December 1 for kindergarten. My mom, who taught elementary school for 40 years, was gung-ho in favor of redshirting my nephew. The choice was basically either youngest in his class forever or oldest. My mom’s opinion is that she’s almost always in favor of redshirting a kid who was born near the deadline - and doubly so if the kid is a boy. Boys often aren’t as far along the developmental path with language and social skills as girls of the same age, particularly when they’re in the kindergarten age bracket.
She thinks - and her own experience as an early childhood educator bears this out - that holding a boy back a year helps his academic performance and confidence levels tremendously. I would imagine this is doubly the case for a child who already has language delays. She also thinks that in a lot of cases, the kids who end up being held back a year in higher grades (which actually is an embarrassment for the kid and the parents a lot of times), would not have needed that if they’d just been redshirted a year instead and spent that year in pre-school.
My brother and his wife redshirted their son. He’s a fourth grader now and doing really well - all indications are that he’d be doing less well if he were a fifth grader instead.
Since I was in grad school when my kids were young, there was NO WAY I was going to pay for another year of daycare when I could send them to kindergarten instead. The kids starting school was like getting a substantial raise!
My daughter, currently going into 4th grade, is one of the younger kids in her grade and is short and kind of immature for her age in some ways. However, she’s near the top of her class academically. She does OK socially at school - people to eat lunch with and play with at recess, she gets invited to birthday parties, etc. - but she prefers playing with kids who are slightly younger than her after school and on weekends. Her BFF is 18 months and 2 grades behind her. It all works out.
Our son’s birthday is well past the cutoff of September 1st where we live, but even if he’d been born close to it, he would have benefited by the extra year of preschool he had before kindergarten.
I skipped kindergarten, so the opposite of redshirted. It was the right thing to do academically but the so so wrong thing socially. My son is a July baby, so we have no idea what we’re going to do when the time comes to decide.
It varies somewhat in the U.S., as most rules about schooling are handled at the state, rather than federal, level (and may even vary by city or school district).
Typically, children who are five years old are placed in kindergarten (which was traditionally the first year of “formal” schooling), and six-year-olds are placed in first grade. The actual cut-off date (by birthdate) for qualifying for those classes varies a bit, as you’ve seen. In recent decades, many (though not all) school districts have instituted “pre-K” programs for kids younger than 5. Also, it’s not uncommon for kindergarten to be a “full day” class now; when I was a kid (in the 1960s and 1970s), most kindergartens only ran a half-day.
I’ve heard of the “redshirting” idea before for kids in kindergarten (I was also familiar with the term, mostly from college athletics, though I don’t think I’d heard it applied to kindergarteners before).
Usually, I’ve heard of it being done with young boys, primarily due to being a little bit behind the curve on emotional and psychological development (boys tend to mature more slowly than girls). However, I’ve also heard of a few cases of a boy who shows athletic potential (or a boy whose parents want him to excel in sports) being “held back” a year, so that he has a better chance to be dominant in sports as he progresses through grade school and high school (because he’ll wind up being roughly a year older, physically, than most of his classmates and opponents).
I am in the exact same situation with a child of that age who is also speech delayed. I am also thinking of red shirting my daughter as I am afraid she will not be able to catch up otherwise.
My daughter had to enter Kindergarten when she was four. We would have waited, but she needed speech therapy and couldn’t get it in preschool once she was old enough to go to school. It would have put her as one of the youngest in her class. Since she tended to learn things late (but quickly), it could have been a disaster.
Luckily, our school had a pre-first program between kindergarten and first grade. We worked hard to get her into it, and it worked out very well (especially since she was sick with mono for a while). Pre-first has gone out of fashion, but it made all the difference for her.
It totally depends on the kid, but I see very little downside to holding back a kid who is ‘on the cusp,’ especially if they have hit other developmental milestones later than average.
Our daughter’s birthday is Sept 16 (the cutoff was 9/30) and we seriously considered holding her back - but she was already reading and is tall for her age. Her brother is also one year ahead and she would have been heartbroken to have to wait, so we let her go and she has thrived (she’s in fourth grade now). OTOH our neighbor’s kid turned five over the summer but is small and less mature and struggling in kindergarten now – they probably should have waited another year. You just have to know your kid and trust your instincts.
No, I said he was of average intelligence. At “turned five two days ago” average intelligence when compared to “will turn six in two weeks” with average intelligence is a huge gap in reading readiness.
Because I started school in a state with a different cutoff, I was the youngest kid in my high school class. And it made a difference - not academically - but socially.
One thing to consider when moving kids forward is that eventually you’ll have a ninth grader who is 13 in a school and doing activities with kids who are eighteen. My daughter was a 15 year old ninth grader (14 for two weeks of ninth grade) - and it was a little shocking to realize that suddenly she was getting a ride home from practice from kids often a lot older. One of her good friends is younger and a very “mature” younger - so was a 14 year old dating a Senior.
And for me, it meant that I was in a dorm at 17 and attending my first college courses at 16. And it takes some maturity that you don’t know whether or not they’ll have.
You can’t look at them when they are four and figure out that they’ll be cute and curvy and precocious at fourteen and you’d wish you’d kept them locked up in middle school for another year
Along these same lines, my son will be 18 for almost all his senior HS year. If he’s dating anyone at all, they are likely to be “under” 18. Will have to discuss with him some of the, uh, risks involved there.
Yes, I have heard the intended use of “red shirting,” but I stay here because, for most Dopers, Star Trek references are the first that come to my mind. College football? Not so much.
My twins needed that extra year to mature. Since then they’ve had another twenty and it still hasn’t worked, to wit: One has been engaged to a couple of guys she met through My Little Pony fandom.
