<p>We live in NYC where current Dept. of Education policy is pretty rigid about Kindergarten start date. For a while individual principals had some discretion either way, but no more. If a family declines to register a kid for Kindergarten when s/he is eligible, the kid will be placed in first grade the following year.</p>
<p>What’s more, the deadline has always been and remains December 31, so a third of kids start Kindergarten in September before their 5th birthday.</p>
<p>I sort of think that this is only fair. Poorer families don’t have the resources to let their kids spend another year in private pre-k or another program, or they would never even think of holding their kid back. Of course that’s easy for me to say with a kid whose birthday is in March.</p>
<p>The local schools have a “Young-K” or “Begindergarten” class for children who might not be ready to start regular kindergarten in the fall. After the Young-K year, the students can go to first grade or to a regular kindergarten. Having the additional year to see how well the child is adjusting to school seems to work quite well.</p>
<p>Our area also had a December cut-off for starting kindergarten (although I think it might have been earlier than December 31). So QMP, born in June, should have been about in the mid-point of class ages–but instead was one of the youngest. Maybe only two of the 25 or so students in her class were younger. The only point where I felt that this made a difference was in second grade, where the 8-year-olds had more social maturity, and that helped them. </p>
<p>I was a big fan of the “Your 7 Year Old,” “Your 8 Year Old,” . . . series, and they had quite a lot to say about the 7 year olds having aspirations and skills that were out-of-whack, with some equilibrium being restored at age 8.</p>
<p>I was told to “delay K” for both of my July boys. I refused. They had been reading for over 2 years when they started K. They were always the youngest boys in their classes, and sometimes the youngest students. They had male classmates that were as much as 16 months older! They graduated from high school as Val and Sal. </p>
<p>I do think that many parents “delay K” due to sports.</p>
<p>Back when I was a kid in NYC the cut-off was the calendar year - so my late December birthday made me the youngest. Then I skipped a grade and really became the youngest. I did great academically and always enjoyed being younger than my classmates and most of my friends. However, I also commuted to college in the city and so the last one getting a driver’s licence or being able to vote or drink etc. was not an issue. Today I would worry about a 16 year old away at college where most kids are two years older and can already drive, don’t require parent’s signature on paperwork etc. </p>
<p>But I am also dead set against red-shirting. I think all schools should stick to the cut-offs so that all the kids in a grade are within a year of each other in age. I feel this makes for the best social situation in a classroom - with all the kids being basically the same age.</p>
<p>To the other parents here who skipped a grade, where were you? I skipped first grade and until I went to college I didn’t know anyone else who did. On the outside, I was fine. Always had friends, well liked, socialized, etc. Inside I hated it. I always felt “different”. Adults in my small town frequently made comments about me being “that girl who is so smart…”. They were well intentioned but I felt like a freak. Hated being the last of my friends to drive, date, etc.</p>
<p>It was better in college. There were others who skipped or started kindergarten early, had lots of credits coming in, etc. There were also others who had taken gap years(not called that though), transferred, changed majors so the age thing didn’t matter anymore. I have noticed that most of my closest friends in college were people who are my actual age rather than the ones who graduated with me.</p>
<p>OTOH. I will be the youngest member of my HS class at our reunion next year!</p>
<p>I wasn’t skipped, but because there was no parent support for it. In high school, my friends were always the kids one or two grades up - I fit with them better. </p>
<p>My D skipped second, and it was clearly the right decision for her, both academically and socially. She’s tall and has good executive function and is academically pretty “even,” with no areas that are way ahead or behind. She plays a sport that’s leveled by age, not grade, though.</p>
<p>Please, NO! I personally disagree with hard and fast cutoff dates for ANY kid. All boys are not the same: why treat them that way?</p>
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<p>Yes, exactly. Moreover, academics should be individualized to a much greater degree. It is better for most kids if they can stay with their age cohort but work at their own level. Actually, I think that a multiage situation is the best, because it allows for more social flexibility, too.</p>
<p>My S missed our state cutoff by six weeks. He was ready to go to K, and in CT he would have. I was horrified when I found out about the cutoff date while we were in the moving process, and it did not help to have well-meaning idiots give me the “he’ll be bigger for sports” and “boys are less mature” lines, neither of which was true of him. We thought about skipping him almost every year in elementary school, but it probably would have had to be a double skip academically–at least, according to his 1st grade teacher–which would not have helped him socially.</p>
<p>I think that there is a general problem with age-inappropriate content and behavioral expectations being pushed down into kindergarten. It seems that preschool is the new kindergarten in many cases. The irony is that then many schools fail to accommodate the kids who are able to soak up the content and move faster.</p>
<p>We were advised by the head of my D1’s preschool to redshirt her (almost a full year before kindergarten started!) based on her poor fine motor coordination. (She’s a late-December baby.) She had a developmental screen by the public school a few months later, and the screener spoke with me afterward (this was unusual since the screening was done by the district for their purposes, not to advise parents.) The screener also asked if we were considering holding her back, based mostly on her motor skills as well as her age. We ultimately decided not to. Socially, she was on target, and academically she was ahead - there would have been no perfect time to send her. And then, 3 months after the screen, the fine motor skills just appeared. She had a rocky time socially in middle school, although I doubt that was due solely to her age. And she thrived in high school. If she had not been ready socially at age 4, though, I would have held her back.</p>
<p>Our son’s birthday is Aug 29 with a Sept. 1 cutoff. We held him back from Kindergarten for a year. The only testing they did was vocabulary, saying a word and having the kids pick from a number of pictures. They said he had the vocabulary of a 12 year old. But he was shy and we didn’t think he was ready socially. It really came down to risk, holding him back just seemed less risky from age, social and general physical development standpoints. Nothing to do with sports though. I don’t know where the cutoff would have been for us but many here hold back boys with June birthdays.</p>
<p>He was always a top student, 4.0 Val, 35 ACT. Senior in college now with a great job offer already accepted for after graduation coming from his internship this summer. So it worked out. No way to know how it would have worked out otherwise, probably very similar but it seemed less risky at the time.</p>
<p>It was still that way in my old NYC neighborhood back in the 1980’s. The prevailing assumption was that if you were the oldest and were born sometime in the previous calender year from the majority in a particular grade, you were left back and thus, weren’t the sharpest tool in the shed. </p>
<p>While I had some issues with being the youngest in my grade till college, they were nothing compared with the oldest kids in my elementary/middle school classes who were assumed to be dim because they were old enough to be one or two classes ahead of my grade. Then again, the ones inclined towards bullying learned quickly that picking on me was a bad bet after one kid 3-4 grades ahead of me tried to do so and ended up getting badly stoned for his trouble by short little 6 year old second grader me. </p>
<p>Incidentally, California effectively redshirts students born after july or august as I heard and observed with one cousin who’s a few months older than me, but who started a year behind me in school because of that policy. Ended up being two years behind me in college because he ended up taking a gap year after finding out he wasn’t admitted to any colleges he wanted.</p>
<p>There’s another NYC policy that I am not sure was or is enforced universally, nor whether it is still in effect. Many, many students immigrate to NYC from other countries, usually arriving without effective English. In my daughter’s elementary school and other schools I know about, they were often routinely enrolled one year back if they arrived after Kindergarten or first grade.</p>
<p>As I said, not sure if this was official policy or just promulgated by some principals and/or if it is still in effect. The NYC public school enrollment system has been centralized a lot more during the past 10 years and I don’t know that principals still have the authority to do this. (My daughter is now a senior in high school.)</p>
<p>D has a late October birthday so she can be over a year younger than some classmates and younger than kids in the grade below. that said, overall she fits in well with her grade - academically, physically, socially and emotionally. Most parents are surprised when they hear her age. The age difference mattered most in first grade but by third grade, it was a nonissue. However she is by no means the smartest child in class although she is often the youngest.</p>
<p>S, with a June birthday, is also young for his grade but again he fits in well. He has a mild learning disability but that’s independent of his age (he needs tutoring and therapy not maturity to deal with the disability). His kindergarten teacher wanted him to stay back, but she recommended that for way too many kids (who had some learning disability diagnosed later). We had S privately evaluated and found a suitable tutor/therapist.</p>
<p>I was a July baby, and my parents didn’t hold me back. I excelled academically, but I wonder if I would have done better socially if I’d started a year later. I always felt kind of left out. That’s probably just my personality, though!</p>
<p>The author describes correlation, not causation. In our neck of the woods there are a lot of boys “redshirting” kindergarten, so they can make the high school sports teams. I se know evidence that their IQs are lower because their parents held them back. It is possible that their IQs are lower (as the study seems to indicate), but there is no evidence presented that it was waiting a year longer for kindergarten that caused any IQ drop.</p>
<p>nYC is very hardcore about enforcing the cutoff, which I have always disagreed with. The date is so arbitrary. Maturity and readiness would be better factors to consider. I had one kid with a very late birthday who was a decade younger than sibling, which made him very young and very young for his age. Completely not ready on time, but we had no choice.</p>
<p>One of the issues with IQ testing is that there is no way (that I know of) to separate the elements of the test that draw on material typically learned in school from the elements that draw solely on “raw” brain-power. Since the score on a typical IQ test given to children depends on the child’s specific age (down to months), if two students are in the same grade, and answer the same items correctly/incorrectly, the younger one will have the higher IQ score.</p>
<p>My spouse’s IQ jumped substantially from testing in 6th grade to testing in 8th grade. I don’t believe he actually got smarter–he thinks he gridded in the wrong birth year in 6th grade, making him appear to be a year older than he was.</p>
<p>The biggest problem I’ve seen with redshirting is at the far end of high school, where the older kids are bored waiting for freedom and independence.</p>
<p>The cutoff when I was headed for K was February. Only a few of us had birthdays past mid-October. At that age, it’s hard to gauge who’s ready academically, socially and emotionally. When my kids were little, we met a new neighbor (1st grader) one Halloween and practically the first thing he told me was how his mom made him repeat K, he was mortified. He’s out of college now and fine, but each child needs careful consideration. When mine were that age, I found each kid in class learns at his own pace anyway. In second, some were still practicing writing their names while others were roaring to go much further. It’s a hard time- one step forward, two steps back. Seemed to me, the real meat doesn’t start til 3rd.</p>
<p>Indiana has a cut off of July 1st and I have a birthday shortly thereafter–the school system said that if I tested into kindergarten academically that I could start, but if they deemed I wasn’t socially ready I’d be kicked out after the year had started. My parents decided that they didn’t want to risk it even though I was more than ready for kindergarten so I was technically ‘redshirted.’ Since I was generally one of the oldest in my class, I tended to associate better with older kids anyways. So the only time it really affected me was 8th and 12th grade and all of my friends had moved on to the next phase of life</p>