That reminds me a lot of my school district. My son had a fall birthday and the first boy in his grade that was less than a year older came as a transfer in first grade. He had (I think) an April birthday.
I have heard the “gift of time” theory. I wonder if it’s really a gift to the child or a gift to the parents who are so busy competing with other parents. I admit my son has had lapses of confidence that might have been less of a problem with that extra year. But I am just unclear on what the goal is supposed to be. He’s taking Calculus BC in his senior year, not acing it but not failing either. He has always been able to socialize with his peers who may be a year older. He might have been more “college ready” with that extra year. But I feel that this whole discussion is a lot less about what is good for the kids becoming independent than it is about their parents keeping score.
While that may be true for some parents, most people I know who held their kids back did it because they felt their child wasn’t ready, not because they felt it would give their kid some potential advantage. In my case, the only advantage my son realized was being able to enjoy school instead of hate it. He had an extra year to play and gain the self confidence he needed. He’s only a casual athlete and while he is a good student, he’s not an academic super achiever. What he is, though, is happy and that’s good enough for me.
There is also the challenge of accelerating, which goes in and out of fashion as well. Ime that tends to be fine until adolescence, when it can go really wrong.
Somebody mentioned Montessori upthread, which is especially great up through MS: being in classrooms with a 3 year age spread recognizes that kids (& their brains) mature unevenly. Our lot had a very happy 4 years in a Montessori- leaving that school was our biggest regret about that move!
I agree that it’s up to the kids. I don’t think I was pushing my son intentionally, though I may have built up his feelings that it would be like failing not to start kindergarten. Eventually, he dropped out of the most advanced math track, which I think was appropriate. I remember it was hard for him though. He definitely wanted to achieve (but never really wanted to put enough work into it, and he reminds me of myself that way).
Well, never, actually, as nobody gets to relive their life slightly differently (except in an alternate universe, but I am unaware of communications between universes).
@Twoin18 I am not the least bit concerned about lifetime earnings. Not being mature enough to handle college when he graduates at 18 and getting derailed for a year or more could have even more of an impact on his earning potential. And possibly expensive for us, too. Infertility? I don’t understand how that’s even related to the age at which you graduate high school.
I think maturity leaving home is a very reasonable concern. On the other hand, I wonder if we’re infantilizing our kids too much. I mean, I’m not shipping him out “before the mast” at age 15. And yet, in past generations that might have seemed like a legitimate option. His parents are a phone call away. I plan to be prudent, but I want him to be independent.
I can see redshirting if the kid is not yet ready to start school. This is much more likely to happen with boys, as @Cathmark pointed out, their brains mature more slowly than girl’s do.
Forcing a child to behave in a class room as they are expected before this kid is ready can set up a kid for failure. Demanding that somebody behave in a manner that they are uncapable of doing, and then disciplining them when they fail to do so does not set up that kid for success in school or in life.
Redshirting is far more common among more affluent parents, since, for such families, supporting a kid for another year and providing childcare for a kid at home for another year are not heavy financial burdens. So redshirting is common at wealthy private schools and at public schools which serve affluent school districts.
However, redshirting is pretty uncommon at schools which serve more than half of the students in the USA.
In fact, one of the factors which predict redshirting is the SES of the parents:
we held back our oldest, early summer birthday. He was 19 when he graduated.
we sent early our youngest at 4, the year before our state changed the cutoff date to July 31. She’s a sept. birthday and will always be the youngest.
guess what –
it really didnt matter either way! they are both fine. you will chose what’s best.
if i had to chose ONE way, I’d 51% chose to redshirt. that extra year gave my son - who had speech and eye issues - another year to be ready. It was very helpful in 8th grade. But for my D23, it’s good too. She’s challenged and holds her own. good luck!
My mom (born 1938) grew up in an East Coast city that had a version of this for its public schools. They offered a half year of kindergarten (probably considered very progressive for the time), with children starting in September or January, depending on their birthdays. With a June birthday, my mom started kindergarten in September, then went to first grade in January, had summer break, then finished first grade in the fall term. This grouping of kids into six-month age brackets continued through 8th grade. The two cohorts mixed in high school, but there was still an opportunity for the January - June birthday kids to graduate high school in January, which my mother did, allowing her get a full time clerical job to earn money for college in the fall!
Other helicopter parent behaviors (and social enforcement of such behavior on other parents) like not letting the kids walk to a nearby school themselves probably contribute more to that.
Would it be safe to summarize many answers as “It’s not all that rare, and it’s not necessarily advantageous either.” That is my take. I suspect it’s rare in some places and extremely common in others. Whether it’s advantageous or not depends on the child and the circumstances.
My kids have mostly walked or biked since early grade school, and their high school is about 2.5 miles away. It’s nice to live in a safe area though. Not everyone has that advantage.
Can you provide links to the many studies that show the benefit? I’ve never looked at this aspect, but am very familiar with the research on the benefits of acceleration in gifted education. Which is pretty much the opposite, but with a specific type of student.
My only experience is our neighbor who held their son back to be in the same grade with my daughter. He graduated as a very average student, though there’s obviously no way to know how he would have done a year earlier.
However, crime has gone down considerably since a generation or two ago in most areas. It may be that the perception that crime is increasing when it is not that is part of what is driving helicopter parenting.
One problem is that many childhood activities have cut offs based on birth date, not year in school. My daughter was the youngest in her K. It happened to be a group of about 45 kids with very early birthdays so she was anywhere from 4 to 20 months younger than the others. She was 4 going into K and almost half the class was 6 before Christmas. Come June, she couldn’t go to the girl scout camp because she wasn’t 6. She couldn’t go to the church camp the next summer because she wasn’t 7. For some sports, she was an entire age group behind her classmates but in others she was expected to compete against kids who were 2 years older. Her school had basketball for third graders but the league was for 3rd and 4th graders. She’d line up for one-on-one against 4th graders who were 2 to 3 years older, 50 or more pounds and 5" taller. She could hold her own, but no college scouts were pounding on our door.
Hockey has always divided kids by birth date, so a 5th grader may be playing with mostly 7th graders. Lacrosse is starting to do this more and more, so a kid who is redshirted my not be able to be on the same team as his classmates.
I wouldn’t let the sports or driver’s license issue or going to college at 17 drive the decision of when to go to Kindergarten, but if it is a close call, I might let those things be the tie breaker. Where are most August birthday 5 year olds going, K or another year of pre-school? How close is the child to the cutoff? I think all of the six redshirted kids in our K class had summer birthdays, and they were not the Alpha males in the class. They were a little bigger overall, but all tended to be shy and the ones I can think of were the younger kids in their families, so had been babied a little. Also, all had gone to the preschool at this school so the very experienced preschool teacher recommended they redshirt; she’d seen them not only interact with other 4/5 year olds, but with the very students they’d be with for the next 9 years so she was in a good position to advise they not go to K at 5 years old.
My daughter with the Dec birthday was very friendly with a family she met through lacrosse. The family had 3 boys, the oldest with a fall birthday so he was a year behind in school, but the grade daughter should have been in. The mom asked my daughter to babysit and daughter said “You know Jack is older than me, right?”
I don’t have boys but I would only redshirt if they needed an extra year to mature before K.
My dd22 was 5 when she started K and turned 6 in November. I can’t imagine holding her back a year and starting her when she was 6 and she would have turned 7 in Nov. I think, really, she would have done all right if she started K at 4 and turned 5 in Nov. I think it would have been very very detrimental to hold her back and redshirt her. She was already one of the oldest kids in her cohort with the fall birthday and was reading at a higher level than many of her classmates (and we are in a high achieving area). She found second grad in particular to be frustrating with the teacher assigning her books below her level and now at 17 she will still tell you about it.
If your child has a fall birthday I’d encourage you to start them when they are 5 unless they just need another year to achieve some skills like with speech or they need to mature.
Right now as a junior in high school she would be sooooo pissed off with me if I had redshirted her. I think we would have ended up having to skip her ahead if we had gone that route.
I say start em on time unless they have specific issues that need another year.
Thank you for all of your responses so far. These are some excellent answers. I just want clear a confusion I seem to have created. Some people seem to think that I’m considering sending my son to K at 6, almost 7, instead of at 5, almost 6. Our state has a calendar cut-off, which means that kids with fall birthdays are supposed to start at 4, which means that a redshirted kid with a fall birthday would start at 5. I’m sorry if I gave the impression that our state had an earlier cut-off or if by saying my son “will be eligible for Kindergarten the fall after next”, you took it to mean that I was referring to the fall of 2023 instead of the fall of 2022.