<p>Oh, I’m grateful to see this. Red-shirting has been a real problem in our district and we aren’t even a wealthy area… I can only imagine what those areas in our county are like. It’s no longer 1 or 2 kids who are born close to the cut-off and truly not ready. It’s now droves of developmentally on target kids who are born up to a full year prior to the cut-off. I notice parents start complaining about second grade when their child “is too smart” and needs higher level material (like one year higher which they’d have had if they started on schedule.) They get upset when their “A” students aren’t accepted into the gifted programs because they don’t score high enough on the tests. They can’t seem to understand that in elementary, their kids are advanced because they are older… not because they are developmentally accelerated. It’s begun a rash of “grade corrections” in middle school when it’s clear that these kids don’t fit socially at all. That causes all sorts of other problems academically. It’s a big mess.</p>
<p>Both mine are young for grade. My eldest skipped a grade and has continued to be far ahead but she doesn’t really count. My youngest started on schedule at 4. He was the only 4-year-old in his kindie class (he made the cut-off by over a month.) Half the class was already 6 and 2 boys turned seven during the school year. Seven… in kindergarten. The results are, my 12-year-old is in 8th grade, top of his class but sitting alongside 15-year-olds doing the same work.</p>
<p>We’ve watched the problems it causes in high school too. Yeah, it was never great when seniors hit on the freshman… especially icky when you are talking the difference between a 13-year-old and a 19-year-old. We’ve watched parents struggling to keep their 19-year-olds focused on high school when they are legal adults and just ready to be gone. You know, the drop-out rate for these older kids is pretty high too. Many turn 18, get their GED and leave school.</p>
<p>I absolutely believe that there is a tiny percentage of kids who just aren’t read to start when scheduled. By all means, talk to teachers, observe your child, hold them back if necessary. This rash of developmentally appropriate kids being held back is ridiculous.</p>
<p>I skipped first grade and with a September birthday was always the youngest in my class, sometimes by a lot. It never bothered me. I was not a sports type, but I did well in school and had lots of friends. I think some kids are ready to be skipped and others aren’t. I wish we could have skipped our oldest - he ended up working ahead in math, but it was a nightmare until he got to high school and they suddenly didn’t care how old he was compared to the other students in class. My nephew missed the cutoff by one day, he’d started reading at three and having to wait an extra year IMO was cruel and unusual punishment.</p>
<p>I skipped a grade and I wish I hadn’t. I was at the top of my class academically but emotionally I lagged behind and was somewhat ostracized socially. It took me until I was an adult to figure out why I always related best to the kids a grade below me. It wasn’t that I was immature. Duh. They were my age.</p>
<p>And because of redshirting (though not called that back then), some of the kids in my class were two years ahead of me.</p>
<p>What Turtletime said. I think there are very few kids who aren’t ready. The problem is that too many kindergarteners are starting at 6 1/2 so the 5 year olds seem young. When one of my kids was in 4th grade, half of the class should have been in 5th, but had been redshirted in K. 8 year old first graders are not out of the norm. I don’t think it matters what the cutoff is, people will redshirt because of the perceived advantage. If the age for K changed to 6, I bet within a few years it would be filled with 7- 71/2 year olds.</p>
<p>The other thing no one has mentioned directly is how a child’s size can make a difference in teachers’ perceptions–especially in boys. I have friends with boys who were big for their age (some were held back, others weren’t) and they found that teachers were often less tolerant because they assumed they were older and thus expected more from them.</p>
<p>My son was the opposite–late spring birthday (in a district with a Sept. 1 cutoff), small for his age (he was a preemie), late bloomer genetically anyway. I don’t think he lost his first tooth till second grade. But he excelled in school and was more than competitive with the many older, bigger kids he had in class. A lot of parents would have held a kid like him back but he would have been really bored with an extra year of preschool.</p>
<p>Our school cut-off is September 1st so all my boys with late summer birthdays were one of the youngest ones in their classes. I believe unless there is some development delay, that all children should begin kindergarten “on time” and not be redshirted. By holding kids back, my kids were not only the youngest by 12 months but in one case 19 months. This made it harder for the teachers than I think for my children. Most of the children who were redshirted were boys, and talking to their parents I think many were held back so they would be the oldest/biggest in the class so they might have an advantage in sports and/or end up being the “leaders” in their class. I think that those children who are gifted academically, physically or are charismatic will end up being the sport stars or leaders despite their age.</p>
<p>We questioned whether my second son was ready for kindergarten for social reasons. We then looked at him as objectively as we could and decided it wasn’t because of lack of maturity but because of personality and he started school a few days before he turned 5 and did wonderfully academically (val, 4.0) etc. He is still not really outgoing, but he was part of a circle of friends who I believe will be friends throughout his lifetime. Choosing for him to start on time, and choosing this for my other 2 boys, was a very good decision for us and them.</p>
<p>My son was just not ready. Maybe if kindergarten had been a half day it would have been ok, but he still needed a nap, so full day kindergarten was too much for him. However, this is one out of my three kids, so I don’t think it is representative, but I do think there are kids who aren’t ready and the different cutoff dates would mean different grades anyway, depending on where you live.</p>
<p>D’s nursery school teacher suggested the “gift of time” which I thought was a transparent way to make money by getting her to go to nursery school another year, but I did agree with their assessment that she was a little immature so she did another year there before entering Kindergarten. A friend and neighbor was told the same thing about her son; she let him go to Kindergarten. After the year was over, the public school told her he should repeat Kindergarten, which he did.</p>
<p>He is very smart – honor roll every year – and they both ended up at good colleges.</p>
<p>I had the gift of time as a gap year before starting college. I think I spent it more productively at 17 learning French than at 5 doing another year of kindergarten.</p>
<p>Several have mentioned grade skipping but I don’t think we can really count that in this scenario. The article is about more typically developing young kids and how they end up coming out ahead in college. It’s because they’ve been allowed an education with challenge. A little struggle (not the sort that drowns you but the sort that makes you focus and grow) is a good thing. Kids who are 7 in kindergarten aren’t getting that struggle and so aren’t learning how to become efficient learners. Many have top grades but little to no study skills. The kids who are naturally the youngest (sometimes by 1.5 years) have been actively challenged from the beginning know how to master the truly difficult and so do have an edge in college.</p>
<p>Kids who skip are generally gifted and gifted kids are a different scenario. Lots of gifted kids who skip still aren’t getting challenged in the classroom. It can be better but in most cases, they are just younger. Youngest and still not having to try very hard is a different scenario than what is being discussed in this article.</p>
<p>I do have one that skipped and she’s always thrived but we knew in advance that the skip would not be enough. We worked hard to keep her challenged and as a result, she’s a highly efficient learner whose been thriving in college classes since she was 15 (I suspect many of you with thriving skippers have done the same.) But again, I don’t think if fair to count her in this sort of situation because we are talking about the negatives of normal developing kids being held back and the benefit of naturally young kids being the youngest.</p>
<p>I wonder how many kids who are held back for “advantage” reasons are then pushed by their parents into TAG programs once they start school? It would not surprise me in the least if there was a significant overlap.</p>
<p>I don’t think parents were able to “push” their kids into TAG programs here. I knew one person who nominated her kid and she didn’t get in, but she was philosophical about it. I’m sure there were others who were more upset about it, but I never heard about it and I was an active volunteer in the school. Generally, the school did a great job of not proclaiming that THIS child was gifted and THIS child was getting reading services. When they did the assessments in first grade, they did not use the word “gifted” in front of the kids.</p>
<p>For the family that’s considering redshirting, isn’t it one more year of daycare (or staying at home as a five-year-old) versus one more year of retirement?</p>
<p>Unless something unusual happens, the redshirted child spends the same 13 years in school as everyone else does.</p>
<p>I wished I could have started by oldest who had a birthday 3 days after the state cutoff. He was ready and already reading, but could find no school public or private that would take him in our area as they all strictly honored the state date. Looking back now twenty years I don’t think it made any difference at all to have an ‘extra’ year of pre-school but at the time I thought it all rather arbitrary. To me, red-shirting is when you purposefully decide not to start a kid who tests kindergarten ready and is born before the cut-off. There were parents in our are who did just that. And yes, that one was so very ready to leave home for college and chomping at the bit for freedom so in that respect I had no qualms about sending him off to college. He really didn’t need much more “mothering.”</p>
<p>The next generation? What about us? I don’t know people who “retire.” I know people who are forced out of the workforce in their 50s and 60s – without pensions and health insurance.</p>
<p>I have seen kids turning 7 in the middle of kindergarten. I think it is a very bad idea. And I heard long ago that the older the child is at graduation, the less likely they are to graduate. 19 yr olds do not want to be sitting in a high school classroom. They do not even belong there in my opinion.</p>
<p>When DS started school in CA it was 5 before 12/1. He was a September birthday so he started at 4 turning 5. Unlike most CC parents, we couldn’t justify the extra year in preschool due to economic reasons. When we moved to Indiana not only was the cutoff earlier but parents in our area regularly held them back. 1/3 of DS class were 19 when they graduated but he was one of just a couple that were 17. Academically he excelled, and his love life did not suffer once he started dating people in in classes below him. If he had been an athlete, it would have been disastrous as he was a physical late bloomer. Anecdotally, the redshirted boys (both in CA and IN) did tend to get in trouble for behavior issues in junior high school. I always wondered if they weren’t just bored and hormonal.</p>