Not questioning your decision-making; just questioning the surrounding set-up.
Are you in TX now? If the rule is that the cutoff is age 5 on or before Sept 1, then what’s the rule that says you can (or can’t) “redshirt” a kid at will? Could a kid who was already 5 years 364 days old at his/her “normal” kindergarten cutoff date be “redshirted” by the parents? Could it be done for two years?
Just trying to understand the permutations possible where you are. Thanks.
Just to throw into your mix … being “the big kid” is a stress for kids too. They also get teased and using their size physically in response usually does not serve them well. Moreover being emotionally immature and bored with the class material is a risk for triggering behavior issues in the classroom.
Making these decisions at five is never easy and almost always includes completely wild assed guessing about the future. Thing is cognitive and emotional development do not have steady slopes. They are often stepped and the child who seems emotionally or cognitively immature at 5 can be suddenly mature to being ahead in one or the other by the next year. Regression to the mean and all that.
FWIW my take is that the default is to go with the default as defined by age cut-offs with a sizable burden of proof to justify doing something different. I am in retrospect sure that the combination of being somewhat short for my age and among the youngest in my grade had impacts for me socially on the playground and in regards to sports. I am also sure that my parents never gave one second consideration to the idea of holding me back (despite the fact that at that point they were thinking I was a bit … slow). But I am also fairly sure that had they tried to game the system for my benefit they would not have caused me to have any better or worse of a long term outcome.
I’m not in Texas, but the set-up usually is that a child must be five on or before a certain date to enroll in kindergarten but a child is not required to attend school until age six (or even later-there are states where compulsory education laws kick in at seven or even eight *). Typically, the law doesn’t require that the child start attending school on the day he or she turns six but allows them to begin attendance the next September. So if the kid is 5 years and 364 days old on the cutoff date, they would not be legally required to attend school until the next September. Unless there is an actual regulation * prohibiting it, most of those entering school for the first time at the age of six will be entering kindergarten.
I don’t think this is the case. It’s not that the youngest 10% of kids are always at a disadvantage–at some point, you hit diminishing returns. If, for example, a group of 6 and 7 year olds were to start Kindergarten, I don’t think the 7 years old kids would be particularly advantaged–they are all old enough, and factors other than age would have a much greater impact.
So it’s possible to have an age where virtually all kids are ready. In the space right below that age–a couple month range–you might have a real mix of “ready” and “not ready” and then below that, mostly not ready. If this is the case, it makes sense to let parents in that window made a determination about their child. The alternative would just be to move the cut-off to the point where virtually all are ready.
I’m a bit surprised that you think that.
Sure they may all be “ready” for what is currently considered KG curriculum but the 7 year olds would likely be bored (and possibly acting out as a result) if that was all that was covered. The 7 year old is still about 15% older than the 6 year old and that is still a big difference.
ETA: Not meaning to pile on here; DSeid’s post above appeared while I was typing.
@Manda JO: You’re by far the expert here. But as DSeid points out, parents actually knowing the right thing to do for their 5 year old is a tall order. Predicting the future, unsmooth maturity curves, and all that. Yes, there are easy decisions at both ends of the spectrum. Those hardly even qualify as “decisions”. The tough cases are the ones in the middle. Where fashion can have an outsized influence for good or for ill.
I’m a September baby. I wasn’t the youngest in my grade, but I was close. I’m also kinda small. My next youngest brother is 2.5 years younger than me and from ages 6 & 4 to about 14 & 12 he was my size or slightly larger. After that he got significantly bigger and stayed that way unto today.
I was extremely bored all throughout school. Fortunately I avoided falling in with the disaffected crowd. Instead I graduated HS in 3 years and got my BS in 3 years.
I shudder to think how awful my school career would have been had I been a year older in kindergarten. Which is what might well have happened if my parents had focused on my physical size or my somewhat introverted social skills.
I have no idea how much “redshirting” goes on in the US today. But if parents *en masse *get the idea it’s the cheap way to give their kid a leg up that won’t be a net good for society.
So we held one of our kids back. The local schools expected a child to be signing into the room every day with first and last name, be able to read, and gave out a homework packet due at the end of the week.
All of this in Kindergarten.
We made the decision to give our son another year before dropping him into that. There were times where he had his birthday at the same time as his classmates - but one year off. That was tough on him - but not as tough as it would have been to be the dumb one in class. We saw how those kids were treated the next year.
Due to re-shirting, the local kindergarten classes would have kids from 4.5 - 6 in the room. The teachers were stuck teaching to a wide spectrum of kids - benefitting nobody. They had to push homework due to one set of parents, and had kids enrolled at the earliest opportunity due to another set.
Historically, the normal process was that kids would stay at grade level until they got a job. So you’d have a 14yr old in 3rd grade.
The change to automatic progression was made in response to the problems of mixed-age classes. So it’s not like it’s never been tried.
You misunderstand me. LSLGuy argued that if you lop off the youngest 10%, that the new youngest 10% are now the disadvantaged kids, and that by holding their own kids back they are doing harm to those kids–that the new “youngest” kids are now worse off. As long as the curriculum stays the same, one parent holding their just-turned-5 year old back doesn’t make the 5-a-month-ago kid less capable.
Sure. But that doesn’t mean we should remove the right to make a decision because parents might get it wrong. All I’m arguing is that there is good reason to be flexible about kids on the cusp–and doing so doesn’t create a new “youngest 10%” with the same issues, because they are in a different position.
Do you really feel like it should be a hard cut off with no flexibility up or down?
I’m an early September birthday and was the oldest, and I think it was to my advantage. I was bored as hell, sure, but I think I’d have been bored a year earlier, too–like most very bright kids, I was multiple grade levels ahead in elementary school–so how would one year have helped? Gifted kids need different, not the same, faster. And I had a lot more self-control and maturity to amuse myself and pursue my own projects because I was a little older. But I probably would have been fine either way–as you would have, too. People are adaptable.
However, I do think that the focus on outcomes can miss the point. I have a student who started kinder at 4.5 who, by any objective measure, is successful. Among other things, he’s going to Harvard in the fall. But he’ll tell you, quite emphatically, that starting so early was a huge burden on him. He has always felt like he was running to keep up. Many academic tasks he has to brute-force because he’s just not as subtle a thinker as the other kids. And he can brute-force them–he’s brilliant–but he’s miserable. So a study might show that kid as a sterling example of how starting early doesn’t hurt outcomes, but it would’t show the personal cost. My mom started kinder at 4, graduated first in her class, and resented the hell out of it the whole time. Same deal.
Why not? As has been mentioned before, kindergarten these days covers what 1st grade covered a generation ago. If we’ve moved formal reading and arithmetic instruction back a full year, is it really a bad thing to admit that the kids who were barely ready for the much less rigorous kinder of our generation are truly not ready for what was our 1st grade? I think erring on the side of waiting makes perfect sense in that context.
I agree. A couple of friends without much direct contact with the Firebug suggested starting him in kindergarten a year late, since his birthday is at the end of July. But he’s a smart kid, and he’d have been bored shitless by another year in pre-K. It seemed like more of a setup for behavior problems than a potential benefit. We didn’t redshirt him, and it hasn’t hurt him academically, he always gets more A’s than B’s. Being at the younger end of his grade may have meant that he wasn’t as far along socially as his peers, but like I said, if we’d gone the other way, we may well have wound up with other behavioral issues.
One just-turned-five year old wont make a difference and no individual child will be less capable in an absolute sense. On the other hand, if most of the just turned five year olds are held back, you have effectively changed the cut off date and a different group will be relatively disadvantaged. For example, lets say the cut off date is Dec 1( as I believe it is in my area) , that is, a child must be five by Dec 1 to start K in September. If one or two parents hold their kids back, it’s not really going to have an effect. If most or all of the parents of kids with Sept - November birthdays hold them back it’s going to make a difference. The youngest in the class will be those with the August birthdays and the oldest will be those with September birthdays. And the September birthdays will be relatively advantaged while the August birthdays are relatively disadvantaged , exactly the same as if the cutoff date were September 1st. Sure, the kid who turned 5 in August is not less capable in absolute terms, just because he’s now the youngest kid in the class. He’s less capable than his *classmates *- in exactly the same way that the kid with the November 30 birthday was.
But if the class expectations stay the same, it shouldn’t matter. Which is why I posited a class of 6 and 7 year old kindergartenerss–in that scenario, I think it’s pretty clear that the 7 year olds don’t have an advantage over the 6 year olds: every single kid is as developmentally ready for the work as any other child, and other factors are going to determine who is the most successful or gets the most teacher attention–in fact, as DSeid pointed out, the younger kids might even be advantaged in that situation.
The relative advantage of being older hits diminishing returns pretty quickly.
The class expectations not changing only doesn’t matter if most of those kids held back were objectively not ready. It’s not going to be the case for all of them and probably not even for most of them. You’re looking at it one way and a lot of parents ( not all) are looking at it another way. You’re talking about whether a kid is developmentally able to handle the expectations of kindergarten while a lot of parents are looking at not wanting their child to be in the bottom 10% of their class. And they wouldn’t want their child to be in the bottom 10% of the class even if the bottom 10% was objectively doing fine. It’s the kindergarten version of “My fourth grader reads at a fourth grade level, but I’m not happy with that because other kids in the class read at a fifth or sixth grade level”
But if the youngest kid in the kindergarten class is 5 and a half, he’s not more likely to be at the bottom, provided the class is still covering what it was always covering.
I like to have my kids graduate from high school as adults instead of as minors.
Works for me and my family !
I’ve never heard the term “Redshirt” mean anything other than either literally or metaphorically “disposable and inevitably doomed crew member, a la Star Trek” - I’m gathering the meaning you intend is an Americanism, from your explanation.
I understand what you are saying but I think the concept of the relative age effect argues against you. Take it to the extreme: if everyone within 1 month of the cut-off holds back to the next year what you have done is shift the 12 month window one month is all with a new cohort being the youngest 1/12th.
I do not read anyone arguing for no flexibility or for no right to decide on the cusp. But as someone who is asked for advice on these issues sometimes I maintain my belief that the Gladstone advised knee-jerk default to hold back in order to give your child the competitive advantage of being the oldest in the grade is wrong. The default IMHO is to go with the age cut-off and going against it only with very good individual circumstance reasons.
Like most of, the vast majority of, the rest of us, I was not gifted. (one of the few of the SDMB who wasn’t it sometimes seems like! :)) Again, my parents were actually pretty sure I was slow at KG entry (they were clueless that I was reading already … mostly my brother’s comic books … they can be excused as I was the youngest of five with an overwhelmed mom and a dad who worked long hours). I was smart enough that I did fine and outcomes-wise I’ve done well enough. Good habits of mind not giftedness though. Smart enough though that being older than everyone else would likely have had me bored. By definition there are more who are like I was than who were gifted like you.
And I am strongly suspecting that starting the first grade curriculum a year earlier is NOT helping get kids better educated at the end of the run. Maybe the solution there is something other than expecting Kindergarteners to come in ready for first grade classwork and holding back those who are not?
Does anyone know if the higher incidences of premature births are contributing to the red-shirting trend?
Not with solid data but the circumstance we are talking about is in general not premies, who not infrequently are already getting support services and have been being assessed closely by professional teams. In general we are not talking even about parents who are concerned that their child is not “ready” somehow … they are just wanting to do what they can that they think might maximize their child’s chance to be at the very top of their class throughout their school years. Get labelled as the brighter higher achieving kid in KG and first and it tends to track with you is the concept as much as anything else.
The way it works is that if a kid will be 5 BY Sept 1, they are eligible to enroll in kindergarten for that fall.
But… they aren’t required to. You can enroll them up to some other later date- 6 or 7, I think. So in the case of my son, he turned 5 on July 30, so he was literally a month earlier than the deadline.
I guess our decision is a combination of seeing our peers at various points above/below the cut-off date, and our own experiences (my wife’s birthday is actually in August), and how it affected us, with her always being the youngest, and me always being the oldest.
It’s not so much to give him a competitive advantage so to speak, but rather to keep him from having a potential disadvantage, in that his behavior, maturity and attention span are kind of lacking relative to his peers, and that’s the kind of thing that gets him picked on and made to be unhappy.