So I’ve noticed that a lot of parents said there sole reason for redshirting their fall child was that they didn’t want them to go to college at 17. But if that’s the only reason, why not have them take a gap year instead? I understand there are other reasons for redshirting, but to do it solely because you don’t want your kid starting college at 17 is just silly. It’s 13 years away. And besides, how do you even know they’ll want to go college? Most people don’t these days. You should make a decision based on what your child’s like now, not what you think they’ll be like 13 years from now. Another good reason to send your child on time is that it leaves both doors. If, indeed, when they are 17, you still feel like they’re still not ready for college, you can just have them take a gap year. And if you feel like they are ready for college, you can send them at 17, as they will have finished high school. However, if you redshirt and it turns out that they were ready to go at 17 after all, they won’t be able to go at 17 because they’ll still have another year of high school to complete. So it’s simple. You should send your kids on time, because you can always adjust later, but the same cannot be said if you redshirt.
Just to be clear, I understand that some parents redshirt their fall children for different reasons, but for the parents who have no concerns about their child in elementary, middle, and high school, and are only worried about college, why not send them on time then have them take a gap year after high school?
I’m not entirely familiar with your repeated term of art. Are you suggesting there’s an epidemic of people sending their children down to uncharted planets to be killed in five minutes by a bug-eyed or godlike monster?
I’ve never heard of this, but I’ll give an explanation anyway.
The negative consequences of repeating the kindergarten are minimal. Taking a gap year, however, carries a big risk. It assumes your 17-year-old is self-directed enough to not get side-tracked on the road to college. If all their friends are going off to university, who are they going to hang out with? Probably the “bad crowd” kids you didn’t want them associating with in high school, that’s who. Those losers who couldn’t even get into college and have no interest in doing anything with their lives. Who would want their son or daughter to be lumped in with this group? What is to keep Junior from suddenly deciding he’d rather aim for assistant manager at the Baskin Robbins than waste time writing term papers and studying for exams? People can get accustomed to the “yay, no homework!” lifestyle real fast and never want to go back.
Of course, you could let your 17-year-old discover themselves by sending them abroad to Europe, like you sometimes hear about. But that’s a rich people thing. Most “gap years” are spent working behind a register somewhere or dicking around at home. I think more parents generally aspire for something more impressive.
I don’t think that’s the main reason why people redshirt. I’ve mostly heard it from people who feel their kids are too immature, and not up for the level of structure found in modern kindergartens. They’d rather their child’s introduction to formal schooling be at a point where they are developmentally prepared for it, and the kid is less likely to be frustrated and disruptive.
If you’re serious, it comes from a practice in college athletics, especially college football, where an athlete will not start playing (and start using eligibility) until their second year. That’s a redshirt freshman, as distinguished from a true freshman who starts playing that first year. It also means that a senior that redshirted is a fifth-year senior.
I was technically redshirted as a child. My birthday being right on the cusp of the cut-off date (I think it was a week after my birthday), I could have either been the youngest child or the oldest child in class every single year. Being a boy (and possibly for other reasons), my parents decided to keep me in preschool an extra year. I didn’t repeat kindergarten like monstro is describing. It’s probably a little different starting college at 19, but I’ve never discussed it with anyone. On the plus side, it gave me two full years of legal drinking in college.
The purpose of redshirting is to give the child an advantage (or to not give the child a disadvantage) all throughout the schools years. And it makes total sense, too. Being just 6 moths behind is a huge gap, percentage-wise, in the early years.
Oh, I see the OP was gotten the ultimate redshirting. That is, beamed down tot he surface and never to be heard from again!
Let’s be reasonable. Some of your children inherently have more potential than others, and you have to prioritize your resources. Plus, it serves as an example pour encourager les autres: “…And that’s what happens when you don’t get an ‘A’ in Statistics.” Just because your other kids are blueshirts doesn’t mean they can’t use a little push in the right direction, and there is no better incentive than seeing one of their siblings pointlessly immolated by a lava monster.
Stranger
“You’re still doing that, buddy? (To himself) I’ve got to work on that kid’s self esteem.”
The state of Virginia allows parents to hold their kids back from kindergarten for one year. A lot of parents take this option. Concerns over college are never the main reason. The main reason is almost invariably to give your child an throughout their educational career. Shure they lose a year of life but they will be more mature (physically intellectually and emotionally) during their school years. This can accumulate into a large difference over the 13 years between kindergarten and high school.
In my kid’s kindergarten class and we just had the first birthday where a kid turned six. We have already had three birthdays but the kids were turning seven (that’s right there were kids that were ALMOST 6 years old but their parents kept them in the montesorri or whatever so that they could be a year older when they start kindergarten) but there were no kids turning 6 in the first half of the year. The reading and math level of the seven year olds are noticeably higher than the six year olds. and my impression is that while this advantage shrinks over the years, it does not go away.
I’ve only ever heard college come up this way: “If he’d been born in the middle of the school year, he’d be a decent student of regular size; born at the cutoff, he’ll always be the smallest kid in the class, and the worst reader – or he’ll be bigger and stronger than the little kids who can’t read as well as he does. Who’s more likely to get a scholarship: the jock with good grades, or the slow-witted runt he bullies? Man, tough choice.”
A football coach who used to work in my district held his son back a year in first grade. The kid was doing fine academically, but his dad wanted him to be bigger than all the other kids so he could play football in junior high and high school. The kid’s mom was a coach, too.
I thought it was an asshole thing to do to the kid. I also objected to the fine taxpayers of my state and community having to pay for an extra year of public school for this kid.
Back when I started school, it usually started after Labor Day, rather than the first/second week of August. My birthday is September 14, which made me four at the time I entered kindergarten. As a result, I was always the youngest in my class (at least until eighth grade, when a girl that had skipped a year transferred to our school). As a result of that, I was almost always the smallest in any of my school years.
I used to wonder what my life would have been like if my parents had waited a year before sending me to school. I would have been one of the oldest in my classes, and probably one of the bigger kids. That would have given me more confidence in myself than I ever actually had.
Later on, I began to realize that I would have been incredibly bored! While in the third grade, my teacher recommended to my mother that I be tested for intelligence. When the results came back, I learned that I was, at that time, capable of learning material presented in the sixth grade. (I thought that it would mean I would leapfrog my older sister, two years older and two years ahead of me in school. Didn’t happen.)
If I had been held back a year, being smart enough to handle sixth grade would have made school impossibly boring to me; even though I was the youngest, I always got the best grades (at least until I hit geography and history). Plus, I don’t think I would have put up with that, since my older sister got to go to school, and I always wanted to do whatever she did.
I am kind of shocked that this is a thing, though as someone who was perpetually at the tail end of my scholastic age group (August 20th birthday) I guess I can see some upside size-wise.
The one thing I remember is that a gap year seriously reduces your chances at scholarships. There seems to be a priority given to high school seniors (or juniors if it’s long enough away).
I don’t know why you would redshirt instead of just waiting a year for kindergarten though. What school district would allow parents to have their kid held back, but not let them start kindergarten late?
I also agree that the OP may be in a weird place where this is more common, as I’ve never heard of that being used as a reason. It’s always about the kids being too young for grade school or junior high.
I’ve met a few people that waited till they were 20 to take their gap year between community college and then living in their parent’s basement and working at GameStop. It was described as a year of exploration.
I find it amusing that so many people’s egos are so frail, that they decided to invent a named concept (“redshirting”) to cover up the fact that they decided to make a practical judgment call about themselves or their child.
The trouble with inventing a concept as a cover story, is that it takes on a life of it’s own, and people start demanding that this entirely imaginary fantasy, has to follow rules, and be coordinated with other real world considerations.