60 Minutes piece on Kindergarten "Redshirting" (Merged Threads)

Parent Cafe
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<p>I am against redshirting. When I grew up and the cut-off was the end of December, as a Christmas baby I was the youngest in the class. I always liked being the youngest and it never hurt me academically - I was salutatorian and had a 4.0 average in college. I also skipped a year and ended up graduating HS at 16 and college at 20.</p>

<p>My school district tries to fight this practice - if you attempt to enroll them in kindergarten at 6 they force them into first grade! If you redeshirt then the kids end up more than a year apart within the same grade. In practice they should all be within a year of each other in age and if you enforce this practice it stays that way. With redshirting you end up with kids in the same grade almost 18 months apart in age. Socially this does not make sense.</p>

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<p>I think the issue is an evolving one due to changing expectations and curriculum expansion at the kindergarten level. </p>

<p>I was the youngest in my class, as was my brother, back in the days when kindergarten was a half day that included nap time, free play, snack time, and a daily art project. We sailed through, and the issues of starting early didn’t really appear until puberty and adolescence. Looking back at the arc of his life, my parents regretted sending my brother early. He was smart, but small and quiet, and was led into some, er, “extracurricular activities” as a teenager in the sixties, that a year of maturity might have helped him to avoid in terms of being able to make better decisions. Maybe a year wouldn’t have made any difference, though. Nobody gets a redo.</p>

<p>I have always felt that I would have benefitted by being a year older, as well. No negative outcomes for me, but I do have a gut feeling about it.</p>

<p>Times, and kindergartens, and high schools, have changed since then. Kindergarten where I presently live is teaching concepts that I learned in first or even second grade. And the behavioral expectations have equally changed. Our kindergarteners are at school for a full day of highly academically focused work requiring small motor skills with paper and pencils and the ability to sit still and focus on math and reading. </p>

<p>As kindergartens (and on up through the explosion of AP classes in high schools) have changed their focus, the school district here has changed the cut off start date. 10 years ago (when my daughter started kindergarten) we still had a half day, developmentally appropriate kindergarten program, and the cut off date was sometime in December. Since then, the district has moved to a full day, highly academic kindergarten curriculum, and has dropped thecut off date to September 1.</p>

<p>I wouldn’t dream of subjecting a youngish child to the rigors of my particular school system as it exists now. Too much pressure to perform at too early an age. </p>

<p>It is possible to teach a three year old to tie his shoe, but it will take a very long time, will require a lot of repetition, and he will be prone to forgetting after a two week vacation going barefoot at the beach. OR, you can wait until he is developmentally ready to learn, when it will take an afternoon to teach, and he will be so proud of his accomplishment that he’ll never forget it. OR you can be in too big a hurry to get him to his kindergarten violin lesson to bother with shoelaces at all, and keep him in Velcro closure shoes until he moves on to never tied statement athletic shoes.</p>

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<p>I didn’t hold back my July B-day boys even tho all the experts said I should. Both of my boys were reading chapter books by the time they were 4 years old, so no way was I keeping them back. </p>

<p>They were always the youngest boys in their classes…some of the boys were 15-18 months older than they were…I thought that was ridiculous!</p>

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<p>When Aug. bday DS was in preschool 20 years ago, the teachers there shocked me by suggesting he be held. I was stunned; would never have considered it. They informed me that everyone was holding boys on the cutoff edge. I assumed they were scamming me and wanted another year’s tuition. I called principals in 10 districts around where we lived. To my surprise, every single one of them recommended holding him back. The last principal I spoke to said, “There is nothing better you could do for your child.” Huh! We held him. It was a tough decision and my parents were appalled; I had to go justify this decision to them as it was unheard of in our family where we were all the “youngest and brightest” blah blah blah no child of mine should be held back blah blah blah. </p>

<p>We had no interest in sports whatsoever. </p>

<p>There was one other child I pegged DS development to who was sent, not held. I assumed any problems would come in high school and smooth out in college. To my surprise, the boy who was NOT held did fabulously well in high school while DS did well but not fabulously well. They diverged in college where DS graduated in four years in a STEM program and the other student struggled. Now of course this comparison is ridiculous but having held it for 20 years + it was just interesting to watch play out; I do think being a tiny bit older helped in that college transition but who really knows?</p>

<p>DS2 was a Nov. bday so we didn’t have to decide and I was glad of that.</p>

<p>It has all worked out well for both kiddos.</p>

<p>I will add that both DH and I looked back during this decision process and realized we had both been young in our grades and that had colored our middle and high school adolescent experiences tho we did not realize it at the time. But as another poster here noted, adolescence is tough for everyone so good luck trying to make it easy for any kid!</p>

<p>Agree more than anything with the above poster who says “part of the issue is that segregation strictly by age doesn’t work in any case, because kids come in all sizes & a wide range of intellectual abilities and developmental readiness.”</p>

<p>Oh one more thing: it’s important to know what’s in fashion in your district; if the trend is to hold kids, then unless you want your kid to be very young in the grade I suppose it’s better to hold a kid; if it’s not in fashion then perhaps there’s less reason to hold a child back.</p>

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<p>We “redshirted” our son who has a December birthday. He was ready for kindergarten in everyway except for using scissors (which seems to be a really big deal to pre-school teachers). My H and I were both late into puberty, so we figured a year delay would catch him up to normal physical development by the time he got to high school. Best decision ever. Several of his buddies are within a month or two of his age, and they are all successful and happy in school.</p>

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<p>Of the top kids in D’s class (2012), SO many are ‘redshirts’ (never heard the term before, but…) So it’s clearly helped them compete, academically as well as in athletics. In middle school particularly they were so far ahead of the pack-- and swaggered around so convinced of their supremacy-- that it was detrimental to the group. It will help them get into better colleges and feel more confident, (in a more mature way now)… I don’t think their parents were hoping to get them ahead in some race, but to allow them some extra time to mature socially. But it did work against the interests of the group, as kiddie says.</p>

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<p>We did not redshirt our son, but we were the only parents of boys that didn’t in our community in CA.We just couldn’t justify paying for another year of a preschool that cost more than our rent-controlled apartment, especially when he could already read, write and knew his numbers. He was not a big sports guy, and I wonder if he would have been if we had helpd him back. He would have been bored to tears at the preschool for another year. I seem to recall that many of the boys that were held back had discipline problems in late elementray/ early junior high. They were aggressive, labeled bullies, etc, and many of them have not succeeded academically like my own child. They are more like the typical slacker smart kid often discussed here on CC. DS may have always felt he needed to compete academically.
When we moved DS to Indiana, with an earlier cutoff, he is often a year younger than his classmates, which has made dating a bit more difficult.
It hasn’t hurt him academically and the minor social issues were solved by dating girls in the grades below him.</p>

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<p>My birthday barely made the cut off for kindergarten. I wasn’t held back so for years and years I was one of the youngest and one of the shortest boys and that’s how I always thought of myself until I was in college. My son, whose December birthday is one day before mine, was held back because of my experience. That worked out fine for him. I recommend it in general although it might be different for any specific child.</p>

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<p>Redshirting is very common in my school district. We “redshirted” our child who made the cut off by 3 weeks. We think it was definitely beneficial for our child.</p>

<p>In our district if parents are unsure as to what to do, they can bring their child to the school for some type of evaluation for K readiness and the school will make a recommendation. Also, every future student who registers for K is screened for readiness in late spring/early summer.</p>

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<p>The problem is when people GENERALIZE for all children. It has to be an individual decision based on the child’s maturity. Decisions need to be made based on how the child will function in the early grades but also in high school. In some ways, academic readiness is NOT as important as social maturity. </p>

<p>We held our son back. I am so glad that we did. Everyone who knew him recommended that we hold him back due to his maturity. He is STILL not as socially mature as his peers. We have worked out ways to negotiate with the school to address his academic needs through subject acceleration and college level classes. </p>

<p>You have to base it on the needs of your child and not come up with generalizations about all children. An extra year for children who would be the youngest in the class AND who are socially immature is a gift.</p>

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<p>I really don’t understand why this is news. Parents have been holding kids back or pushing them on ahead for a very long time. This is not a trend, either, but an individual decision. And with only a few esceptions, everyone concludes that what he or she did “worked out fine”.</p>

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<p>I worked in a primary school for many years. I never heard a parent who regretted delaying admission, but I heard some who wished they had.</p>

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<p>And we wonder why girls (typically NOT redshirted) are more successful academically than boys. By high school they’ve gotten the message that they’re big and stupid, and it’s certainly confirmed by not graduating from high school until age 19.</p>

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<p>One of my best friends is the pricipal of a middle school in a district known for redshirting. She sincerely wishes that many of those kids redshirted had not been. For the last 8 years she has nticed the trend of those boys most often in her office for discipline are those same redshirted kids. In the parents defense, I think it is impossible to know how this decision will affect your child 10 years later.</p>

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<p>I also see this as part of our coddling of our children today. Let’s keep them in high school until they are 20 and then in college until they are in their late twenties and then they don’t get real jobs until they are 30 and then we wonder why our youth is unfocused and unambitious!</p>

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<p>When our children were young, this was extremely common in the local private schools, especially for boys. In theory, they had a September 1 cut-off date; in practice, you had to fight if you wanted a boy with a June birthday to start 1st grade at 6. (They would accept the children to kindergarten, but then effectively offer a three-year K-1.) My daughter, with a late October birthday, was probably around the median of her private school class in terms of birth date, and more than a year older than many of her classmates when she moved to public school.</p>

<p>I had a late August birthday, and my parents did not hold me back, and that was clearly the right decision. Yes, I was always a little behind socially and physically, but I would have been bored out of my skull if I had waited. My high-school best friend had an October birthday, so he was one of the youngest in our class, and he was the school’s top scholar-athlete combo, hugely charismatic and popular. It really does depend.</p>

<p>My wife’s birthday is in late November, and she was a public school kid all the way, and she wound up graduating from high school early, at 16-1/2. She reports that she never noticed being young. (I believe her. When I met her, at 18, she came across like a 30 year-old, and every indication is that she came across that way when she was 12, too.)</p>

<p>My sister, with an early March birthday, was way out ahead of her class intellectually when she started school, and she ultimately skipped from 2nd to 3rd grade mid-year. She hated it, and never got her bearings socially; she always felt young and not with-it.</p>

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<p>I second maggiedog (that it’s very much a matter of the specific kid) and thumper1. </p>

<p>In our area which is very achievement oriented academically (no one cares about sports), redshirting is common practice - nearly all the boys born at the end of the year get held back which means that unless your boy is chomping at the bit (younger siblings sometimes are), then holding a kid back is the gift of time. We have friends who changed schools so their son could repeat 7th grade because, by puberty, being the youngest in the class made a huge difference. At his old school, he was the class clown. In the new school, with kids a year younger, he morphed into one of the top students. Friends are currently regretting they didn’t do the same with their oldest who also had a late birthday.</p>

<p>This isn’t ‘coddling’ - this is customizing the public educational system to work in your kids’ favor rather than against them. Private schools do it all the time.</p>

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<p>I “skipped” more than one grade, back in the day, and as a teen and young adult was proud of my academic prowess. In retrospect, I think I completely missed out on normal and desirable teen socialization. On the one hand, I think the “redshirting” idea of trying to create an advantage for one’s child is stupid and it becomes annoying when so many people start doing it that the norm gets moved. On the other hand, based on my own experience, I’m not at all a fan of pushing children ahead. They’ll have decades to be adults. Why shorten their childhood and set them up for a difficult time in middle or high school, when their physical development lags their classmates’?</p>

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<p>I held my son with a late September birthday and it was very much the right decision for him. It’s not the academics but the social readiness. D skipped first grade, and that was the right decision for her. In retrospect, we made the right decisions for both of them. DS being the oldest and DD being the youngest seemed to work out perfect. There is no “rule” but in general, you cannot make a mistake by holding them back.</p>

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<p>My S has an early August birthday with a September 1 cutoff date. He started at a private school and they put him in an all day Pre K when he was 5. We weren’t thrilled but they were firm on it. We ended up moving and rather than put him in 1/2 day K we chose to put him directly into 1st grade. I think his behavior in class would have sufffered if he’d done K, he’s naturally talkative and if he’s bored that can be a problem.</p>

<p>He’s now a HS soph. Academically and socially, he’s been fine if a little on the immature side. Most of his friends are close to a year older than him and there are several stellar athletes older than him but a year behind in school. We find that a little irritating. Athletically, he will always be behind the 19 year old seniors. I don’t know if that would have been a good enough reason to hold him back all those years ago, however.</p>