If I recall my Freakonomics correctly, I believe the studies of sports may show that older kids get more attention from coaches and therefore develop their talents more quickly than teammates and this is self-reinforcing.
The Oxford data could show something similar with regard to simply having had more cumulative teaching if they start kindergarten in September instead of January or April.
It may or may not be the same for redshirted kids in the US. It’s unclear to me whether teachers would generally view them as more mature and knowledgeable from the get-go, especially if it’s boys who were held back because they couldn’t sit still and pay attention all day (which seems to be a bigger reason than sports in our community - far more boys than girls are held back).
I think some assume that parents redshirt to gain an advantage for their kid over other kids. I’ve been chiming into this thread to speak up for the parents who do it so that their kid won’t be as glaringly behind.
In order to feel good about school and get positive feedback from teachers and peers, kids have to have a minimum of social, physical and academic skills. For example, most kids in our district are reading beginning chapter books in first or second grade. If you had a child like my son, would you rather he hit that milestone in third grade or fourth grade? He still doesn’t read as fast or as fluently as the average 10th grader, but he never felt hopelessly behind and he loves to read (audiobooks).
No, I’m saying that in one age group, one group of 13 year olds who qualify for this tournament, there is a HUGE range of size. Some are 80 pounds and 5 feet tall but others are 6’2" and weigh 200 pounds. There are kids entering 7th, 8th, and 9th grades, so some were redshirted and some may have skipped a grade or entered school very young. At 5, I don’t think their parents could know what they’d be like at 13. I have two brothers who are less than 1 year apart. When they were 13, one was the 80 pound weakling and one the 170 pound monster sized guy. Same genetics. Now the older one is still bigger but they are closer in size than they were in 7th/8th grade. They both would have been better off starting K a year later because of late Aug birthdays and had more maturity, but academically they were fine in the grades they were in. My kids are 10 months apart and were always about the same size (and smallest in their class). They were in the same grade and would have been better off academically if they’d been redshirted (for different reasons).
Saying students are redshirted because they’ll have a sports advantage doesn’t always work. These ‘World Series’ kids do have a sports advantage because their parents pay for a very elite experience, but even the 80 pound kid has to be very very good to make this team.
All you can do is find the best situation for your kids.
We now have free pre-school for 4 year olds and some 3 year olds. Holding your kids out is no longer a cost driven decision based on daycare. And they can repeat PreK4 or K and it is still free.
Kids grow physically and intellectually, but not indefinitely. They reach their full physical and/or cognitive potentials at some points when they’re still relatively young, even though they will continue to gain experience as they grow older still. I don’t know about the physical aspect, but I’ve argued in a prior post that they’ll develop better and faster intellectually if they’re with their intellectual peers.
It certainly does make sense in your situation, but I don’t think it was the intention of the original question. Most parents who decide to redshirt have the intention (or hope), I believe, to give their kids some advantage.
@Twoin18, you raise an interesting question. Some kids are getting held back because they have issues that make learning harder (whether it is boys who can’t sit still or cognitive issues or just slow development). Others are being redshirted (held back) because their parents think they will be advantaged. If the purpose is to stand out as strong and get attention and coaching and confidence, this will only be of primary benefit to the second group. Averaging those two groups performance would probably make it harder to tease out the benefits of redshirting for the purpose of advantaging your kid.
That may make the Oxford study better for assessing the effect of age on outcomes because no redshirting was possible.
I red-shirted my son, who was born 2 months prematurely at 31 weeks of age, on the recommendation of his pre-school teacher, and for no other reason. He just wasn’t ready and that was my only consideration. Of course there are folks who red-shirt for perceived advantage, but in my experience that is a small number. Most who choose it agonize as I did.
Thanks. I’ve looked at some of these papers. From what I can see, the literature is mixed on the effects of redshirting. Some papers find positive effects and others find no effect and you provided one that shows a negative effect in 8th grade.
But, reading these (somewhat quickly), it is hard to see if they have solved the problem that @Twoin18 identified, which is that the the redshirted group is a mix between those with learning issues of some kind and those who are redshirted because their parents think they will gain academic advantage. So, several of the studies note that redshirted kids have a higher proportion of special needs kids or are on an IEP. I thought the dissertation might have been able to sort that out, as they talk about academically and non-academically redshirted kids, but I don’t think their distinction solves addresses this issue as far as I can tell.
The flip side of redshirting not seeming to affect kids long term is that kids who are held back because they’re not ready yet for kindergarten will generally do as well as other kids in their class. On the other hand, without being held back, there could be a chance that they would not do as well.
Basically, if the “advantage” that a parent seeks is that their kid will keeps up with their class versus falling behind, redshirting is a good solution. However, if a parent is redshirting an “average” kid under the impression that redshirting the kid would make them a star, they will likely be disappointed.
@shawbridge - do you know where the Oxford study which Wikipedia cites with their graph is? They do not have a link or citation. The only link there is to a Dutch study of kids in K-8.
“Everyone is different. but I would be reluctant to send a 17 year old to live in a college dorm.”
That’s a pretty vague thing to say. There’s a big difference between a 17-year-old who just had their birthday and a 17-year-old who’s about to turn 18. If that friend of yours didn’t turn 18 until after the new year of her freshman year, then I can understand why she felt so out of place, as most people turn 18 the year start college. But I can’t understand why some people make such a big deal of being 17 for the first few weeks.
As for your comment about it being hard to fit in due to being younger, I can see that being true for kids who are accelerated, but not for kids with fall birthdays who are sent on time. The best way for a child to be able fit in in terms of age is to make sure they’re as close to the middle as possible. Since July 2nd is the middle day of a non-leap year, a kid with a fall birthday will be younger than average if sent on time, but older than average by a greater margin if they are redshirted. Even a kid born on December 31st would fit in better starting on time than being redshirt, as they’re 182 to 182.5 days younger than the average in their year, but 183 to 183.5 days older than the average in the next year.
I can tell you from personal experience that being too much older than your classmates can also make one feel out of place. My birthday’s in September, and while my parents may have thought they were trying to help me fit in by redshirting me, the fact is that I was an average of 10 months older than the kids in my grade, but only an average of 2 months younger the the kids in the grade above me, meaning I would have fit in better starting on time.
Your explanation about birth dates only makes sense if the cutoff for school is in the late fall or early winter. Here, the cutoff for kindergarten is August 31. Kids with fall birthdays are always the oldest, not on the younger side. The son that I red shirted has a July birthday, but is only a couple of months older than many of his classmates who started on time. While he is the oldest in his friend group, it is not by much.
Why does red shirting imply the wish for an “advantage” of some kind. Most people I know who decided to do it (all parents of boys) were trying to respond to their child’s needs not because they were seeking some elusive academic or athletic advantage. For what it is worth, I held my son because emotionally and behaviorally he wasn’t ready for what passes as kindergarten these days. It wasn’t because I was worried he couldn’t keep up academically.
@chardonMN, I had a different experience than your kids. My father took a sabbatical when I was in 2nd grade and I went to a private school in Oxford for a year. I loved it as the school was way ahead intellectually and followed the British approach of teaching to the level of the student rather than the US approach of teaching to the grade level. I was challenged in school for the only time until I went to college. I remember reading the Iliad and the Odyssey (not clear if this was in the original or in a watered down version). When I got back to the US, the school skipped me essentially immediately (I think they listened to my vocabulary, did an IQ test, and said, “Fourth grade for you”). Academically, it was still not challenging – the kids were not any smarter, just one year older. No disaster academically. I just kept moving on. Later, I was skipped a second time.
While I don’t recommend this socially as I never fit in until I went to college (I think I commented on this in an earlier post), I entered college at 16. I was scared that I would not do well as I assumed everyone was a valedictorian (two of my three roommates were) and were super-smart (not true) and spent the six weeks doing the entire work for the semester (I think I took linear algebra, freshman physics, a required literature course, statistics and maybe another course) and realized at midterms that I was doing well in every course and could relax a little. I also got a job as a research assistant writing software on a project that was fascinating and joined a club team that became varsity. It was a minor sport but had practices every day and matches/tournaments on weekends in season. I tried drinking as that was clearly part of the culture and quickly realized that too much made me sick and from then on drank only on weekends when I was going to parties. I think I ended the year with all A-s and As or maybe one B. Anyway, one data point, but no reason to assume that a) going to college early leads one to drink or bad decisions; and b) going to college at the normal age makes one less likely to drink/make bad decisions.
Socially, skipping grades is terrible and I would not recommend it. But, for kids who are intellectually advanced, I think some kind of home-schooling or going to a more student-centered as opposed to a curriculum-centered school would be much better options. When it was time for my kids to go to high school, I found a charter school a few towns away that was an “essential school” that had student as worker and teacher as coach, where the students worked on projects and had to get mastery in subjects but did so at their own pace and with projects that would motivate them. Students were asked to learn how to learn. That kind of school would have been fantastic. Alas, my oldest child did not get selected in the lottery as it would have been great for him.
@MWolf, I did not see a link and did a quick search. I don’t see a journal article, but may not have used the right search terms. But I did find the following BBC article: Month of birth affects chance of attending Oxbridge - BBC News. This looks at a large sample and finds relative age effects as relatively strong. It also references an Institute for Fiscal Studies report. I found the following: https://ifs.org.uk/wps/wp201307.pdf. This looks not only at academics but life outcomes. they seem to find that a) the relative age effect persists through degree completion. They then look at life outcomes through age 64 (unemployment, professional career or not, etc.). The headline is that there are no relative age effects on life outcomes, but then they walk it back because there are some. There are relative age effects for females – e.g., on outcomes like whether they have a professional career. And, there appear to be effects on the probability of unemployment because kids with lower relative ages are less likely to graduate from university and those who do not graduate from university are more likely to be unemployed.
I think the UK studies on this are going to give a better sense of age effects than the US studies if red-shirting. The UK apparently doesn’t allow for volitional red-shirting. The US studies don’t seem to have a way of distinguishing between the kids who are red-shirted because they aren’t ready (special needs/behavioral issues/maturity etc.) and the kids whose parents think redshirting will give them an advantage.
Yes, although ironically it is relatively easy for top students to grade skip in the UK if you have a fall birthday. I skipped two grades (Sept birthday), my wife and her sister (Nov & Dec birthdays) both skipped one grade, the smartest guy I knew in college (Oct birthday) skipped a grade. Conversely kids with spring birthdays are rarely if ever skipped (many skips happen in early elementary grades around the age of 8). The study cited for the UK is about birth month, not the age at which they attended Oxford.
That may point to the hot housing effect seen in sports (older players stand out initially and are given more attention) being a more important factor than absolute age in the class, because there’s an incentive for teachers to prove they were right in a decision to skip (and it gives a confidence boost to the kid that they’ve been singled out as talented).
That math works for districts that have a cut off of Dec 31, but the majority of schools across the US have a Sept 1 or 30. Even California that had a Dec 1 cut off has moved it up in most districts to Sept.
When we started school, the cut off was Dec 31 and my brother’s birthday is Dec 6, so he went. We moved to another state and the cut off was Sept 1, so my two brothers with Aug 15 and Aug 24 birthdays started. This meant all of us were the youngest in our classes, or very close to it. In this new state, many kids repeated a grade, so that made us 2 years younger than several in our classes. It made a difference for driver’s licenses and buying beer, but not for many other purposes.