Thanks for the further explanation. I thought school-sponsored activities were more closely monitored. But of course whatever was done outside of practice/games/competitions wouldn’t be under the watchful eyes of a school sponsor/coach. I’d thought you were referring to a school-sponsored activity in your previous post.
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Why didn’t you just take a gap year between high school and college?
@coffeefeet - A “gap year” was not even a term or an idea back when I graduated from HS in 1974.
I am 64 years old. My parents later regretted skipping me, but again I was a kid who was academically ahead of my kindergarten classmates and that was what the school recommended. Yes, my school SHOULD have had resources for kids like me (I was not the only one but was the only one in my grade), but it was a different time and place. It was in the early 1960’s in a small, middle class town. The school and my family made what they felt was the best decision at the time…
One thing I know at my age is that there are a few things I might have done differently if I could magically go back in time. I also know that due to what was available to me at the time, there are things that I could not have changed.
In any case, I came here to give my opinion on what it was like for me personally to be younger than my classmates. It did not ruin my life, but it was not ideal. I am allowed to express my feelings about it.
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I have 2 kids with summer birthdays and never considered redshirting either one. They have both always been some of the younger ones in their classes, both have giep’s, in gifted, straight A’s. Can’t imagine redshirting. My daughter was adding double digit numbers with carrying in her head before Kindergarten. That said, after a year of Covid-online school she will be attending a boarding school in the fall and repeating Jr. year to get the full experience and because they rarely accept seniors and encourage repeats. So I am especially glad not to have considered redshirting, she will probably still be one of the youngers. I generally don’t agree with the whole concept of holding kids back. If everyone just put their kids in K when the birthdates dictated then it would even the playing field. Or just make the age 6 instead of 5.
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Repeating junior year for the full experience is redshirting. 
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Maybe so, but I am not sure, can you redshirt yourself? It is her choice, not mine 
It’s definitely redshirting, but I think that yours is a story of why not doing it in K worked to your advantage.
I have known kids who did redshirt in K then added a PG year for sports and felt wildly out of sync with their frosh classmates in college.
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Most people I know wouldn’t have been able to afford to take a “crooked messy path”. If they dropped out of college, they wouldn’t have been able to go back; that would’ve been it for them. So instead of feeling sorry for yourself for having to drop out, you should be grateful that you had the resources to be able to go back. S/O and I certainly won’t be able to afford to send our son back to college if he drops out, redshirted or no.
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What I care about is the quality of my son’s education, not the quantity. When he learns a certain isn’t nearly as important to me as how well he learns it. If being a year behind in school means he’ll have a better quality education in the long-run, it’s totally worth-it IMO. Would you really say that a 21-year-old who’s just graduated from an unknown state college is more educated than a 21-year-old who’s just finished their junior year at Harvard?
This is almost never going to be the comparison in the real world. I don’t think there is any data out there, one way or the other. But it sounds like your question is “does anyone out there who red-shirted their child and had that child attend Harvard attribute their child’s admission to red-shirting?”
Not saying that red-shirting can’t make a difference in academic performance, but it isn’t going to turn a typical kid into a superstar.
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Our son’s birthday is in June, so this was never an issue for us. However, I feel confident in saying that even if he had a fall birthday, we would not have redshirted him. This is because I was redshirted due to having a September birthday and, contrary to what the studies say, developed a massive inferiority complex because of it. Usually, when a classmate found out my age, they would ask me why I was in their grade and not in the grade above, and what grade I repeated, causing me to sink into shame and depression. One example that I remember well is when I turned 12 a week into 6th grade. One of my teachers had a habit wishing their students a happy birthday in front of the class, and when they wished me a happy birthday, someone next to me asked how old I was, and when I said I was 12 they said, “Why are you in 6th grade? You should be in 7th grade. Were you held back?” I felt my face grow red-hot with embarrassment and I spent the rest of my birthday feeling ashamed and depressed. None of my classmates seemed to understand me when I explained that starting school a year late wasn’t my choice, and many of them seemed to think there was something wrong with me, like I was slow and dumb.
After 6th grade, I stopped having birthday parties, because I didn’t want to keep giving other kids a chance to shame me. In high school, I even put off getting my driver’s permit, and subsequently my driver’s license, by several months to avoid drawing attention to my age. When I turned 21 in September of my junior year of college, I knew I might be able to get popular by offering to buy beer for my classmates, but I didn’t, because I didn’t want them to asking me why I wasn’t a senior. I wouldn’t have wanted to put my son through this.
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Red shirting was super popular in my area. My D with a June birthday was always the youngest by a lot.
IMO the red shirting decision should be based on a child’s readiness, both academically and emotionally.
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“Will these kids thank us when they have to work 1 or 2 more years before they can retire? Or when they are a year or two older before they meet their spouse and experience infertility problems?”
This premise is wrong. Kids who are redshirted are more likely to graduate college earlier than those who weren’t. These days, it’s not uncommon to graduate college in 3 years. This is because an increasing number of students are graduating high school with AP credits and community college credits. Since older students generally do better academically, it only follows logically that they’re more likely to be able to handle college work while in high school, and thus, graduate high school with enough college credits to graduate college in 3 years.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are some students who drop out of college or take longer than 4 years to graduate. Most of these students probably weren’t quite ready for college when they started and didn’t have that good an idea of what they wanted to major in. And who do you think most of these students are; students who started college at 18, or students who started college at 17 and could’ve used another year to mature? I bet if you looked at all the people who ever dropped out of college, you’d find that the vast majority started college before they turned 18.
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That’s demonstrably false. Less than 10% of college students are under 18, the vast majority being dual enrollment students at community college (see https://www.hamiltonproject.org/charts/age_distribution_of_undergraduate_students_by_type_of_institution).
Since 40% of students drop out overall, and 30% of freshmen each year (see College Dropout Rate [2023]: by Year + Demographics) then even if every single under 18 non-dual enrollment student dropped out, there would still be more dropouts amongst freshmen who are over 18.
Those students with “community college credits” are starting college before 18. So it doesn’t “follow logically” that starting college before 18 is a problem, let alone that they are more likely to drop out.
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I don’t accept the premise that redshirting is rare. My kids were in a grade (2 classrooms) with about 45 kids. There was an age range of about 18 months, with one of my daughter’s being the youngest. There were 6 boys who had been redshirted as they had summer birthdays and could have started K the year before but mostly for maturity reasons it was suggested (usually by the preschool teacher) that they do another year of preschool. We also had an unusual number of kids with birthdays just past the Sept 15 cut off, so the class skewed older anyway. The 6 summer boys were NOT the class leaders but those with the fall birthdays, who were in the ‘right’ class, were. Also the girls with the summer birthdays so they were the youngest in the class but just naturally bossy.
All seemed to do just fine, most went straight to college and graduated on time, but I think that says more about the SES than the birthday.
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Just anecdotes not data, but almost every kid I know who dropped out of college or took extra time to graduate had health issues, often mental health issues. I knew several who were young (ages ranging from 15 to 17 who all did fine.) I turned 18 the first week of college after a gap year. No issues with graduating on time either.
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Redshirting is not rare - about 3.5%in 2012, though it may be higher.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2332858415590800
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0885200620300788
Word of advice: when you make such a statement, you really should first do a search on Google and Google Scholar. That way you could actually see whether you are making a correct statement or not.
In fact, there were people who looked at the largest group of kids who start college early because they started kindergarten early, namely kids who are academically gifted. Starting early definitely benefits these kids, from K-12 through college.
Furthermore, I can tell you that, as a rule, kids who do not demonstrate enough maturity will not be accelerated in most school districts. School districts are reluctant to accelerate students, even of they are extremely advanced, academically, if the school district thinks that the kid will not be able to deal with the non-academic aspects of school. They will, generally, test whether a kid is mature enough to be in a class with older children.
By the way, my kid started college before she was 18, and while she is still just a rising junior, she is doing pretty well in college. In fact, I know a fairly large number of kids who started college under 18, and none ended up dropping out.
As other have pointed out, repeatedly, the main reason that students drop out of college is financial. The majority of kids who are accelerated in K-12 are the kids of parents who can, at very least, afford college.
Furthermore, these kids tend to do well enough in high school that they are far more likely than other kids to receive merit scholarships or have colleges offer them additional tuition discounts. Every one of the kids in my daughter’s high school who started college early, including a couple who finished high school early by taking more classes, etc, received pretty good merit funding.
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“As others have pointed out, repeatedly, the main reason that students drop out of college is financial.”
But that comes down to the same thing. If a kid’s family can’t afford to send them to college, that student will need scholarships in order to go to college. The most common way to win scholarships for college is by excelling athletically and academically, and since older kids generally do better in both departments, older kids will an easier time winning those scholarships and be less likely to drop out of college for financial reasons.
“The majority of kids who are accelerated in K-12 are the kids of parents who can, at very least, afford college.”
This brings us to another factor for dropping out of college or taking extra time; immaturity. Money can buy a lot of things, but it can’t buy maturity. These parents can pay for their kids’ classes, living expenses, and meals, but they still need to be able to master the material in their classes on their own. You can do a lot of things for your child, but you cannot learn anything for them or take exams for them. If a kid is immature upon entering college, no amount of money will be able to make them more mature.
This is what I don’t understand about the argument for delaying a child’s schooling for a year:
If a one-year delay were good, wouldn’t a two-year delay be even better? That child would be more mature, wouldn’t s/he?
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I believe that redshirting is more common in high socio- economic families since they can afford to skip a year of free childcare.
So wouldn’t it make sense that the students who had to drop out of college due to financial reasons are also the once’s who couldn’t afford to have been redshirted as 5 year olds hence have been “ young” relatively to classmates?
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