It’s not feeling bad, it is feeling left out or left behind. If all your friends get invited to a party and you don’t, there is nothing you did wrong, you just feel left out. If all the sophomores in high school can drive and you can’t, you feel left out.
It happens all the time at different stages of life. I graduated from college at 20. I couldn’t go for celebratory drinks with my friends. Nothing they did, nothing I did wrong. I wasn’t ashamed, but did feel left out.
It is not the only factor in the decision of when to start a 4-5 year old in school, but it is ONE factor.
S19 is a May birthday and the cut off here is Sept 1. Plenty of spring birthday boys were held back but we sent him. He was sporty even as a young child and bright. Was reading at four. Continued to do well in school and is rocking it at Bowdoin. For the right student, I think it’s ok to send them into kindergarten on the young side. I couldn’t imagine him being a grade lower once he got to third grade. He was already being accelerated two years in math and reading at that point. I’m not saying this to toot his horn but just as an example that it would have been a disservice to hold him back.
Socially he probably didn’t come into his own until late in high school. He’s the oldest in our family, though, so that’s part of it too. Oldest children don’t have older siblings to show them the ropes. He was also very small as a freshman. Five foot one. But grew a ton junior year and was 5’10” by graduation and has grown another two inches in college. So the naïveté and his size were sometimes issues but he’s caught up in both departments.
Lastly? It wouldn’t have been the case with S19 but some boys who are held back are really mature physically compared to their grade and that’s not always great being the one with the facial hair first. Being too old sometimes means it’s harder to make friends in your grade too. It’s one thing to miss the cut off by a month or so but more than that can make the kid feel out of place. The cut offs are there for a reason. It’s hard to teachers in grade school to teach a wide range of ages in one grade.
Ok this is a good point. We know boys who were held back and still aren’t good students and that is NOT good for their self esteem. Everyone knows they are a year older and many would expect them to be some of the better students. When they are not, that does not feel very good.
I like everything about donuts. You might want to consider that not everyone lives in the same environment you do. A while back, you suggested that someone socially behind her grade peers could go to a different playground where younger kids play and find a new peer group at her social level. Not every town has a playground, let alone multiple playgrounds. And not every kid has transportation to any playground, let alone a preferred playground.
In the town where I grew up (one with no playgrounds) you were with the same kids from preschool to high school. There was no escaping your grade level peers. You were stuck with them for 12+ years. So yeah it made a difference whether you were “redshirted” or not.
This was 60 years ago so things may have changed (and will likely change again.)
Humans are social animals. Social development is as important as academic development. While some lucky kids might be able to make some non-school community their primary community, they will still have to endure their school community. The kid who finds a way to fit in will have an easier time.
Some kids won’t fit in and it may not have anything to do with age. And they may have a tough time as a result. They will be more likely to not want to go to school, to be bullied, to be excluded, etc. And yes, it won’t help that all their peers can do things they can’t. I think what folks are saying is that there’s no reason to set a kid up for that.
My personal thought on this is that parents do what they think is best and almost always think the decision they made was the better one. In reality, in most cases , they’ll never know because they won’t experience the other path. Maybe the decision turned out fine for a reason that had nothing to do with age. Maybe it was a friend they made, a teacher they had, the classroom dynamics.
In most cases, my hunch is it will be fine either way. In a few, there may be a clear choice and often in these cases, a school will work with you to help you get it right.
I think most parents are just doing the best they can with this decision which is what I did. For us it has worked out - because my son is happy and had a good attitude about school when he started, not because it made him an academic or athletic superstar (he is neither). I suppose there are parents who hold back their kids because they think it will give them a leg up in some way, but that was’t what I was thinking.
LOL. Because I skipped a grade and how my birthday fall, I was barely (I mean less than a week) 21 when I graduated from college. I did not feel “more educated” than most others my age. Most of my close friends in college had just finished junior year and TBH I was kind of sad I wasn’t going to be in school with them the next year. I know I had another 40 years to work so why rush that?
I too graduated HS at 16 and college at 20 (skipped a year and had a late December birthday when the cutoff was Jan 1). Yes, I was always so proud of being the youngest and I did great in school (HS salutatorian and almost a 4.0 in college.)
I am not sure how much it is still relevant to the youngsters today, but I was always the youngest in my class, as was my brother who skipped a grade. I hated it as did he - other people hitting milestones first, being bullied for being the smartest in the class, all those tropes.
I did love being seen as young and accomplished when I started my career. That all ended when I chucked my first career in my late twenties and went to law school. Then I was one of the ancient people no big law firm would hire (cough exploit cough). But being young did give me a chance to blow my first career choice and still have plenty of time to start fresh.
I am in the camp most others are in - choose the path for your kid based on what they need, not to get an advantage. You can’t predict the future, but certain truths should guide your decision: kids do better when they feel like they fit. Early success lays the groundwork for future success, so long as the kid learns success takes work (if things come to easy they don’t develop grit). One year here or there probably doesn’t matter much - everyone’s development follows a different pace, but we all basically end up in the same place.
ps I can’t stop thinking about the donut analogy. What about jelly-filled donuts? And what about donut holes, which are basically all just the outside part? And I an not really a fan of sprinkles, and much prefer the old-fashioned cake-like donuts. The insides of those are more dense and more to my liking. All to say, donuts aren’t all the same, just like kids.
Well, if you had dropped out of college due to anxiety like I did, came back later, and finished later, you wouldn’t have had to experience that “sadness”, now would you have. Is that what you would’ve rather had happen to you? I know that I would’ve much rather been the last of my friends to turn 21 if it meant I could’ve had a straight clean path, as opposed to the crooked messy path I had; a path that being the first of my friends to turn 21 wasn’t worth.
@coffeefeet I am sorry that you had the experience that you did.
However, I am merely telling you what I felt. Everyone’s experience is different and I do have the right to share my experiences and how they impacted me.
That had to be hard @coffeefeet. Good for you for going back and finishing. Says a lot about your character that you could do that.
This world is full of sadness and setbacks. I have to think that the struggle to overcome them is the best practical education one can have, at any age. You seem to have made a positive out of a negative. Your story is one of success, not sadness, in my way of thinking. I hope you can see it that way.
I graduated from college a few weeks after turning 21 (would have graduated at 20 if I had gone to a college with graduation in early May or earlier) and honestly, no. I didn’t feel some sense of pride about that.
So we started our kid a year early in kindergarten because she was already reading and daycare was becoming boring. Also, Kindergarten was part of the school system, while pre-K was private, so I’ll admit that cost was a consideration.
Our daughter fit in academically, physically, and socially at least as well as had she waited a year. She got a kick out of being the youngest (since she is short anyways), and she was emotionally advanced for her age.
However, starting college at 17 was a bit of a pain, since we had to push through a bunch of paperwork that was required when she turned 18 while she was away at college. Finishing college at 21 instead of 22 is not something that she cares about at all. Since she wants to go to grad school, that year will likely be swallowed up in the normal variation in time it takes to finish grad school.
I was started early in 1st grade, and finished high school at 17. All that it meant was that I bummed around for half a year until I turned 18 and joined the military, and then bummed around another half a year when I finished my service, waiting for the school year to start. Well, I also worked in a few odd jobs (with an emphasis on the “odd”).
The main advantage in skipping a kid ahead is if they are not being challenged by their regular school work, and this really only works if they are still in elementary school. After that, skipping grades just temporarily increases the amount of schoolwork that a students will need to deal with, without providing additional depth and breadth. Once they catch up to the kids in their new grade, they’ll be bored again.
One annoying thing for my DD, who graduated at 21 (fall birthday) was being the youngest intern during her summer internships (even the remote one), which included a lot of happy hours and open bar events. At one firm event, she had to wear an underage bracelet, which she did not like. Otherwise no one realized she was as young as she was and they just assumed since they were the same year, they were the same age.
“One annoying thing for my DD, who graduated at 21 (fall birthday) was being the youngest intern during her summer internships (even the remote one), which included a lot of happy hours and open bar events.”
Well, if she had dropped out of college due to anxiety like I did, came back later, and finished later, she wouldn’t have had to experience that “annoyance”, now would she have? Is that what she would’ve rather had happened to her. I know that I would’ve much rather been the last of my friends to turn 21, if it meant I could’ve had a straight clean path as opposed to the crooked messy path I had; a path that being the first of my friends to turn 21 wasn’t worth.
@coffeefeet you are really missing what we are all saying. There may be good reasons to start early, there may be good reasons to redshirt, but there is no one right answer. There isn’t a crystal ball to know if the child will do better as the oldest or the youngest. People are pointing out some of the issues with redshirting or skipping, which is what the OP asked.
I went to school with a guy who was super smart. He was the ONLY one in our class of 550+ kids who was a year ahead in math all through school and as a high school junior and senior had to take math at the college (just a few blocks from the high school). Our math classes were pretty hard and just fine for most of us. He could easily have skipped ahead in any grade, he was very tall too, but socially he was where he should be, with his same aged classmates (he wasn’t very social at all, not athletic, not ‘cool’). He went to college, he became a doctor.
Most kid who are red-shirted (typically those with spring or summer birthdays) don’t turn 19 until the end of their senior year or (like with my son) after graduation. I’ve never heard of it as an issue.