I recently went to an 8th grade basketball ID camp, where the age range was 13-16. All 8th graders. Parents have been “redshirting” to gain advantage in sports for a long time.
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Absolutely. I skipped two years in school (one in elementary and one in high school) and was hugely appreciative of the extra time it created later on (for example I felt much better about staying on to do a PhD for fun even though I didn’t want to be an academic).
My kids have so many things they want to do and if for example they want to go and spend a year or two abroad after college, either to study or just to travel, they now have more time to do that.
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@murray93 : Athletes get a second and third chance to “redshirt”. Many athletes attend private prep schools for one year as a PG (post graduate) after high school graduation and many athletes are “redshirted” during their freshman year of college.
@Publisher I have tried so hard to get him to consider PG. He wants another year at his public high school, where he’s not performing to his potential. Ugh. I said you have to fail out to get another year… I hope he doesn’t get any ideas.
We don’t hold back kids anymore because we want to keep them with their peers. So, why redshirt or accelerate. If you follow the rules, all the kids in the same grade will be within a year of each other and true peers. Schools should adjust instruction to meet the varied developmental level of all the kids within this 12 month age group.
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No one can predict the circumstances that this decision might (or might not) affect in 10 or 15 years down the road. Please make the main focus of your decision your 5 year old - the current time and place - not sports or a driver’s license or whatever down the road. This is his time to be 5. More in his life at 6,7,8 and on can and will play into his future. Make the decision about 5 or 6 and kindergarten/1st grade.
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@murray93 : I do not want to sidetrack / derail this thread so I will send you a PM.
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If you look at the research, the oldest kids in a class are more likely to excel athletically and are more likely to take leadership roles (and the boys do better with the opposite gender) but the youngest kids in the class actually are more likely to excel academically and do better later in life (probably because they have to compete harder and make up for being younger/smaller in other ways). In other words, redshirting isn’t an absolute benefit.
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I always find this topic interesting since we moved states after my kids started school. Both of my kids have fall birthdays and started school in a state where the kindergarten cut off was September 1. Many kids turned 6 soon after starting kindergarten - all kids with fall/early winter birthdays. Then, we moved to a state with a January 1 cut off where those fall/winter birthday kids start kindergarten at 4 years old and my kids became one of the oldest in their grades.
Academically and athletically, both would have been fine if they had started the year earlier (if they’d started school in this state). I think my son did benefit both socially and emotionally from having that extra year…he was a very bright, but shy and anxious little kid. (Now, he is an over-confident 18 year old who is beyond ready to leave the nest!) My daughter was the opposite - she would have been socially and emotionally ready to start school the year earlier but she became more of a late bloomer once she reached the middle school years. In the end, both ended up right where they belong but I think they would have been fine either way.
My 17 yr old DD22 has a late Nov birthday. I believe the cutoff here is August. I can’t imagine holding this kid back. I think she would have exploded if I kept her back a year. She’s already one of the oldest in her class and will be 18 in the fall of her senior year. I have often wondered what it would have been like for her if I had accelerated her by a year. She is sooooo done with high school at this point. I would not recommend dragging that out unless you just think your kid can’t deal with kindergarten. They will be likely to resent you for holding them back IMO.
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Growing up, I used to imagine how good it would be to have a constant choice of having classes with kids of ages of one of 4 12 month age groupings with birthdays that fall:
September - August ( current standard in most places)
December- November
March- February
June- May
As someone with an April birthday I was on the Young side of the class but didn’t have the opportunity to be redshirted. It seemed stupid that I was closer in age to many kids in the year “below” me than some in my own.
There only needs to be about 20 people in a class so just let everybody choose who they want to be with within some boundaries and the numbers should work out since everyone has their own preferences.
That would reduce the well documented “ realative age affect” and would allow older teenagers to alter decisions their parents made when they where 6 should they want to. Every kid could also then have the option of being the oldest ( or youngest) ones in the room, not just the ones near the current fixed, arbitrary cut offs.
Same with our November birthday son. If he had gone when initially eligible, he would have been approaching five. He did a post grad year in preschool and was almost 6 when he entered K.
Or go Montessori, which groups several ages together (though kids still form friendships with kids of their own age and gender).
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It isn’t rare at all in my experience. When my son started kindergarten at four turning five in Autumn, he was not just the youngest one there, but the youngest by a year at least among boys. They very definitely nudged us to consider pre-K. When my daughter entered later, they did the same though her “readiness” was fine and the best they could come up with was “she seems so young.” Well, that’s an affluent school district for you. It probably varies a lot by local culture and income level.
Was this a mistake? As with anything else, it depends on what you’re optimizing. I don’t know. Maybe he would have been more confident this year, had better grades, and had more college opportunities. Maybe I have slashed his lifetime earnings potential by hundreds of thousands of dollars. I think about this. On the other hand, I don’t think I would do it differently. Why does the whole thing have to be such a rat race. Both of my kids were absolutely capable of learning the required subject matter and socializing with their peers. Only time will tell how it plays out for them.
I think my son does feel like his friends are smarter or get better grades than he does, and I am somewhat divided on whether the approach I took was too sink-or-swim. However, I have the experience watching both my older siblings and their kids that “it all comes out in the wash.” I cannot predict success, but I cannot predict failure either. I had to take the approach I was most comfortable with, and my son never expressed any interest in being held back. He’s not training for the Olympics. Eventually, the only contest is going to be real life.
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I agree. My son started kindergarten when he was six. We didn’t “hold him back,” we sent him when he was ready.
He was in speech, OT and PT starting at age three. Just getting through the pre-school day was a challenge for him. He would lie on the bench at recess, exhausted. So, he did an extra year of pre-school, moving from three days to five.
Now, he’s a high school freshman and he’s thriving! The only downside has been other parents occasionally remarking that we did this to give him an advantage. Being older would only give him an advantage in sports if he were also gifted athletically, which he’s not. He is dyslexic, and couldn’t read independently until 4th grade, so I don’t think starting late gave him an advantage academically either.
As far as college, we didn’t think about it at all. We thought about the daily life and capabilities of our five year old and my gut told me he wasn’t ready. We’ve never regretted the decision to wait, and he is one of the most consistently happy people I know.
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@3SailAway post should make us ponder…while you have to have a starting point/age, WHY are we so keyed into age for being ready rather than developmental status? Milestones, social/emotional status and communication skills (expressive and receptive language) should be the foundation of K readiness, not a number or a sports strategy!!!
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Exactly! My kiddo wasn’t ready socially & emotionally and I wanted to meet his development needs (he was fine academically). There was no thought of gaining an academic or athletic advantage – and he certainly hasn’t gained anything there that I can tell.
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In some states you would already have held him back if he turned 6 in November of kindergarten. I can’t believe you would hold him back 2 years.
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?
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My daughter asked me about redshirting the other day. In her friend group in Georgia the consensus seems to be to hold kids back–not just if they have a summer birthday, but even spring. Her 3-year-old son has a May birthday, and it blew her mind that he might not start kindergarten until he was close to 6 and a half. When she and her brothers started kindergarten in New York state, the cutoff was December 1, but the school’s strongly encouraged–but unenforceable-- cutoff was September 1. They even had an assembly for the parents of incoming kindergarteners when we got the “gift of time” lecture. (The NYS cutoff is earlier now I think.) We’ll see what she and her husband decide, but as of now her son is doing well in the nursery at the school where she teaches. Her husband is an MD and very well aware of the LONG slog in that path–college, med school, residency–but many other paths are long too.
Probably because historically, many schools and parents did not have the resources to individually evaluate each child for readiness, and such evaluation has some subjectivity and uncertainty built into it anyway, so they historically used age as an approximation that appears to work passably well for most students entering kindergarten.
With sports, kids’ sports leagues probably do not want to get into having divisions by anything that requires subjective judgement.
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