Moved to IMHO, since it’s asking for opinions and would probably fit in better there.
You could always do kindergarten twice. No harm in seeing how the first time around works and then redshirting a year.
Malcom Gladwell is certainly worth a read.
I have a child with severe speech delays. About 20 words at age 5, and while immensely improved is not overly conversational at age 10.
Net net, I would red shirt unless there is an overwhelming body of evidence that your child is in fact leading the pack (and not parental aspirations - which by starting this thread suggests isn’t the case). YMMV
Ditto. December baby here. I was already reading, counting, and adding/subtracting when I started Kindergarten. I can’t imagine having to wait another year.
I did fine in school – graduated #20 in a class of just over 400. Started college with several “101”-level classes out of the way thanks to a dual program and AP coursework.
Until some time in the early 60s Philadelphia schools had two grades a year. Basically this meant that the age spread in the classroom was only 6 months. I think this was healthier all around.
My own experience was that my birthday was 9 days before the cutoff date of Jan. 31 so I didn’t turn 5 until near the end of the first term and finished HS at 17 and 5 months. Socially, I was certainly retarded. I was a good student, but not super and got no scholarships (in those days, there were no need-based scholarships).
Would I have done better to hold off and start K in Feb? Probably, but I cannot be sure. Certainly being the oldest in my class would have been different from being the youngest, but with a spread of only 6 months, the difference would not have been as profound.
In the case of the OP, I would ask whether the speech difficulty is just one thing or if there are other development difficulties. If the latter, I would certainly hold her back.
I’d say it’s different for each kid.
The Firebug’s birthday is about a month before school begins, so he’s one of the youngest kids in his class, and a couple of family members suggested redshirting. We didn’t remotely consider it, though: he’s a smart kid, smart enough that he was a little bored in pre-K, and would have been bored shitless and likely have become a troublemaker just to alleviate the boredom if we’d kept him in pre-K an extra year.
I’d be iffy about redshirting a kid whose birthday is in the middle of the year, though. He’s not going to just be the oldest kid in the class - he’ll be several months older than the next oldest kids. And since he’s tall, he’ll stand out even more. But then there’s the speech delay thing on the other side of the equation.
I don’t see any urgency in making a decision, though. If he’s going to start 5-day pre-K this fall at the age of 4.5, you’ve got a year to see how he adapts to that before deciding what to do about kindergarten. By June, you should have a pretty good read on how he’ll do in kindergarten, and have a much better sense of whether it makes sense to hold him back or not.
Unless what you’re really asking is, should he be in 5-day pre-K this fall, or should he just be in day care another year instead?
I teach English at a couple of kindergartens and there are always a few children who have ADHD or other problems. One issue I see is that although the adults try hard, the teacher-child interaction is significantly different. Some normal children, usually boys, also just don’t have the development to stay still in class. They wind up being set aside at times and it develops into a bad cycle. I have seen children grow out of it. I’m not the main teacher so I don’t have enough experience to be of better help, but I would definitely talk to both the speech therapist and the kindergarten teachers.
OTOH, since your son is going to be in pre-k then I really wouldn’t worry so much about it now. You’ve got a year ahead of you, which is a lifetime for that young of kids.
I’d put the speech delay on the same side. Being oldest, tallest, AND unable to speak at the same level as peers seems very likely to create the impression of an intellectual disability and a lot of frustration for the poor kid who can’t articulate himself well.
Kindergarten has literally no prerequisite besides age. If the kid has been going to pre-K, he is surely already able to be away from home for the day and rely on non-home adults for help and guidance. What else is there?
My son started “Junior Kindergarten” at age 3 and 9 months, (December Baby, and the cut off was the end of the year). He had a speech delay that no one could believe by the time he started school. (Speech delay was resolved a year earlier by myringotomies… despite my repeated asking for them to test his hearing. )
I wish I had really understood that I could have kept him back another year. He was clearly bright, so I did want him to have the intellectual stimulation. I had found good daycare and it would have served him as well or better to be there. Instead I had the stress ofmaking sure someone picked him up every day and looked after him from the end of the school day until my shift ended at 715 pm. His brief career as “the little guy on the bus” ended when a driver didn’t check at the end of the run to his school, and he ended up at a different one. I didn’t retry… only a few years previously a Junior Kindergarten child died on the school bus and was found at the end of the run.
At the October the “6 weeks in” meeting with the teacher, she commented that my son was “a bit behind what she would want to see in self care skills.” i.e zipping jacket, remembering which boot to put on which foot. I commented, “We are working on that, but he is still three.”
Her comment: “Oh, well that changes things. He is fine. He is well spoken, tall and mature for his age!”
He does have a learning disability, and is both “gifted” and “learning challenged”. We kept him back to redo grade 4. His grades and psychological assessment showed that his UNDERSTANDING was at an advanced level, but his reading and writing were drastically below expectations. He has caught up considerably, and he tells people, “I’m supposed to be going into Grade 7 but I chose to re do grade 4.”
I wish I had kept him back from JK. He doesn’t really mind, but I know there is a slight annoyance factor for him.
Just to add that I revisited and you’re talking about red shirting kindergarten. You’ve got time and can get feedback from people that actually know your child, but I’d suggest repeating kindergarten (red shirting elementary school) if he doesn’t seem ready
I was 4 yrs 10 months and several days old when I started kindergarten. I was the youngest in my class. I turned 5 in mid-September of that year. I was able to read well before I started, and some kids that were quite older started and didn’t even have a firm grasp on the alphabet. It was a point of pride for me to be the youngest throughout school. When my elementary merged with the other in the county to funnel into middle school, I became friend’s with that school’s youngest, who was two months older than me. We did discuss what it was like being the youngest, and neither of us felt academically stunted for it. Socially, maybe a little because we might not have been physically behind our peers (we were tall and large framed, not pipsqueaks) we were behind them in terms of milestones such as getting a permit to drive, or turning 18 so we could buy tobacco, etc.
On the other hand, we looked at the oldest kids in our class as some sort of freaks. They had either started school at the latest, or had been held back. They had beards early, drove early, went on dates early, and got into trouble early. They smoked, drank and chewed tobacco before anyone else in our grade. They were generally bad influences and potential trouble for all of us younger students that were in the same grade. Bringing a friend for a sleepover that was almost two years older than the rest of the group was not welcomed by a lot of parents, because they knew those kids didn’t fit in. And they didn’t fit in with the older kids, because they weren’t in the same classes. My advice is to aim for grouping your kid into the start year that will be closest in age for him. If you have to choose between him being the oldest or the youngest, go with youngest. It’d be even worse if you make him the oldest to begin with AND THEN he has to be held back a year, making him the only 6th grader with a full beard and driver’s license.
I wanted to mention that redshirting is becoming a larger issue in some school districts, as parents hold back kids more and more. Now kids with birth dates in June, July are being considered “young” and close to half the class could be 6 at the start of Kindergarten. This drift begins to create a real problem. Our district had to put a policy in place to fix this issue - all 6 year olds are placed in 1st grade.
I’m not sure I understand the question/process, but I think I do. He’s starting Pre-K now. So he’s not starting school a year late, but he might go 2 years of Pre-K instead of 1 to delay K by a year (a red-shirt Pre-K year)? Or are you considering withdrawing him from this year before it starts?
I never considered this for my kids, but I did consider starting school a year later in general (having daughter start preschool at 5 instead of 4). We registered our daughter for preschool (MWF 1/2 days) at the last minute when she was 4. THAT worked out OK, and so did Kindergarten at 5 (M-F 1/2 days). Academically she is/was ahead but for us the social aspects are going to be difficult at any age. I think in her case it would have been worse waiting.
On the other hand, our older son was not “held back” but he was one of the oldest in his class due to the weird early start and age cutoff here. I don’t think it helped him any.
When I was a kid, preschool wasn’t very common. I think it was mostly an extension of daycare for kids usually from single parent households. Most kids were all starting somewhat evenly at Kindergarten. I was given a speech therapist when I started, though I didn’t need one (weird experience). Even though I was very socially inept and anxious I somehow made it OK until 7th or 8th grade before I had any problems.
I think this is a huge YMMV. If he’s going to Pre-K this year regardless, it’s probably something you will get a better idea about as this school year goes on. And to not worry about too much until you see how it goes.
Happy birthday to your son! My daughter’s birthday is today also, and the start date was September 1 also, and we held her back. It turned out to be great, she was always one of the most mature in her class. She turned out just fine.
Our school district in NJ had pre-first, where kids who were a little young for kindergarten could go before the more rigorous first grade. It was not considered failing kindergarten at all, and we had pretty pushy parents.
I was pretty young when I was in school, and I could have used an extra year to catch up to the others in my class.
Maybe three.
That’s the way I’m used to seeing it happen, too. You delay after kindergarten, not before. But there is one issue: the first graders might remember him and wonder why he was held back.
But I don’t know if that’s a concern at that age. It is later, I think. My cousin was held back in 6th grade, and that did seem to color people’s opinions. (He was born in September, but our cut off date is October 1st, even though school starts in mid-August.)
Though I admit it didn’t color them that much, and his parents were right to do it. I just didn’t like it because it put him in the same grade as me.
Well, duh…they’re bigger.
Absolutely not. It would be so unfair to the other kids. You’d send him the message that it’s okay to cheat. He’ll naturally be at the top of his class in everything, but it’ll only be because he’s the oldest, not because he actually earned his way there. Teach your son to accomplish things on his own 2 feet, otherwise his adult life will be very difficult. No one’s going to praise you for cheating. Just play by the rules, and your son will be grateful in the end.
You’ve posted this same stuff in multiple threads, and it doesn’t make sense anywhere.
How is it “cheating” to make sure your kid is in the appropriate grade at the appropriate time? Pushing a kid into school before he’s ready is doing him no favors, and it’s not benefiting the other kids to have somebody in class with them who is not prepared to be there. (And what makes you think he’ll “naturally” be at the top anyway? That’s not usually how it works.)
Simply unconscionable. Kindergarteners are supposed to have their whole lives ahead of them. Only the most reprehensible starship captain would send them as sacrificial lambs on an away mission.
Okay, nevermind.
I was born in early November, and the town in which we lived offered my parents the choice of me starting Kindergarten before my 6th birthday or waiting a year. They chose the former.
I was always aware that I was younger than everyone else in my class, but it didn’t really seem to matter. It always seemed that they were a year older than me in September, then I caught up, then in the spring they started having birthdays and pulling away again.
But it did affect one major decision later: my high school offered a way to graduate in 3 years instead of 4. You had to take 5 classes each yea, but had the option of taking 7, and I believe you needed to pass 17 total to graduate, sp graduating in 3 years was actually kinda easy. The only weird part was that you had to take 4 different English classes, so in your final year you’d take both Junior and Senior English.
I thought about it, and the main reason I decided against it was my age. I believe the way I put it to my mother was, “I’m already going to be dealing with being 17 in my Freshman year of college. Being a Freshman at 16 will just make me a freak.”
In my Senior year, I learned that one of my classmates had the exact opposite problem: he’d been born at the beginning of September, and his parents had decided to hold him back a year before Kindergarten, so he had actually turned 19 at the start of Senior year.
He had intentionally waited to start driving because he didn’t want to call attention to his age.
I suspect a big part of why he didn’t want to let people know how old he was was that … a guy I knew had flunked third grade. When he repeated 3rd grade, he was a year older than all the other third graders, including his younger brother. And for the rest of his time in school, every time his age came up, it brought up that he’d had to repeat a grade.
I suspect that Mr. September Birthday was afraid other kids would think he’d repeated a grade, rather than just starting late, and he didn’t want to seem dumb.
(I also suspect he was genuinely redshirted. His father was the head PhysEd teacher at the High School, and I suspect his decision to have his son start kindergarten later was based on how that would make him 20 in his first year of college athletics.)
So there’s two anecdotes on what it is like to be in High School and be either younger or older than everyone else in your class.