<p>My son has a late birthday and we didn’t hold him back. Biggest mistake ever. He is bright but immature. He is the youngest child in our family by a lot, with two super-achieving older sisters. The practical reality is that he has three mothers who have pampered, babied and in some ways stunted him. It was not good for him to be the youngest in his class, too, and he had a speech impediment that resolved about a year after he started school. He is just now, getting ready for high school finally coming into his own but it’s a two steps forward, one step back process. Chronological cut-off dates are so arbitrary and unhelpful. Each kid is unique and should start school when benchmarks are met. Boys are NOT big and stupid, but they are different from girls and it does nothing but hurt boys and grow the gender gap to pretend otherwise.</p>
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If they need that long to be truly successful and ready, then that is a GOOD thing. Pushing them out before they are ready, when they could have been just fine with a little patience, to meet someone else’s timetable is outrageous.</p>
<p>One of the frustrating aspects of this issue is the domino effect. It matters less if your child is “on track” to compete with his actual age cohort, but whether the deck is stacked against him with a classroom full of redshirted kids. When we were deciding whether to hold back our son with a late June birthday (school cutoff Sept 30), we asked the school to provide us with the age range in the current kindergarten class, so that we could determine whether he was likely to be among the youngest in the class, even though his birthday fell more than three months before the cutoff. The principal refused on privacy grounds, which was nonsense since we weren’t seeking names. So we had to make this decision based on guesses and anecdotal information. We decided to send him, and though he was among the youngest in the class, there were several kids who were WAY younger (they had started school overseas) so it was not really an issue. Interestingly, because our Fairfax County public school had so many students coming in and out from overseas postings, there was a 2-year age range in some of our kids’ classes. </p>
<p>And research demonstrates that being the youngest in the class greatly increases the chance of being diagnosed (or, more likely, MISdiagnosed) with ADHD. <a href=“Melinda Morrill”>Melinda Morrill;
<p>I can understand if a child or set of multiples was born early, and has developmental concerns that would warrant catching up, but this kind of thing has been going on here, in the NE, for years - for boys, more than for girls.</p>
<p>What I am also seeing a LOT of lately, is kids repeating 8th grade, before going off to private high school… AND/OR transferring to a prep school AFTER agreeing to repeat 11th grade as a reclassified Junior. This is all done to get kids bigger and stronger for athletics, and do bulk up their academic resumes for recruiting purposes at top colleges. It’s NUTS! </p>
<p>If you look at the college hockey rosters for any top academic program… the average age of freshmen players is 20. Some of it is due to the holding back in lower grades, and reclassification in 11th grade… but it s also due to Junior hockey, as a vehicle for getting less gifted students a D1 scholarship. IMO… It’s most evident to see this trend with hockey, because their lower levels of play are based on birth year. It’s nuts!</p>
<p>Look at the birthdates and current teams (Prep School or Junior Hockey) of these NESCAC Freshmen recruits! Most incoming FY college students for the fall of 2012 were born in 1994, yet most of these freshmen hockey players have birth years ranging from 1989 to 1993! Granted, a couple are college transfers, but…</p>
<p>The thing is, that SOMEONE is always going to have to be the youngest. Or the smallest. Or even the least mature. </p>
<p>I wonder, in those districts where they are moving the cutoff dates back, doesn’t that just shift the decision from those with post September-ish birthdays, to those with post June-ish birthdays?</p>
True, but the question is whether the student is successfully meeting the standards of that grade. If the answer is no, then some consideration should be made. There are also plenty of kids who are younger but plenty mature, just as there are kids who are older but less mature. Women of a certain age say that age is just a number, and it should hold true for education, as well.</p>
<p>We have four kids who fell into this situation. All were very small in size for their age and three of them just made the cut off. My daughter who was born in November would have started school the year later but she was reading at three and her verbal skills were amazing. The school district tested her and she started kindergarten at age 4 and turned 5 early that year. She was fine all through K to grade 2 and than it all hit the fan. She had a teacher who realized she was up to 26 months younger than the other kids and before you knew it the calls were coming home. There were no academic problems but the teacher found there to be maturity issues. She could not be held back because she was doing well academically. THIS IS WHERE WE WENT WRONG. We should have pulled her out of school immediately as soon as those phone calls started. My daughter went from a confident star student to a kid who hated to go to school and see this teacher. If I had to do over again I would have never put her in K at age 4. </p>
<p>All of my sons have summer birthdays and they started school much younger than their peers. They appeared very average academically until about third grade and then they took off and were each at the top of their grade. Early sports were difficult for them because they were small in stature and to compensate for their inability to be part of sports teams we took them skiing. They also became outdoor enthusiasts and started climbing at a very young age. These experiences gave them alot of self esteem and confidence and they never seemed bothered by their stature. They all did fine and graduated HS at least one year younger than their classmates. We did choose to send our sons to a Magnet HS instead of the local HS because the sports frenzy in our town seemed to take precidence over academics. That was the best thing we ever did. </p>
<p>I do wish we had a crystal ball because my daughter would never had started school early. I think many things could have been different for her had she had the time to grow up a little more. </p>
<p>When we were watching the show last night I realized for every parent that is holding their kid back they are responsible for the changes in the K curriculum which is no longer the center play based programs that we had as kids. Our current K curriculum is much more academic and I believe that is the result of so many kids reading at age 6 when they are enrolling in school. Esentially these red shirted kids are really hurting the others and it is a way of keeping kids insulated and protected. However, I do wish I had just waited that year and put my daughter in on time rather than early.</p>
<p>Someday, the schools will face the reality that boys need different cutoff dates than girls do.</p>
<p>Or they will adjust their curricula so that younger kids in the class will cope.</p>
<p>My son was a March birthday, so we had no decision to face there. He still struggled a bit with the structure of school, but I don’t think waiting a year would have helped. He is naturally absent-minded and has always been one to question authority; people like this do not fit easily into the regimentation of school, no matter how old they are. </p>
<p>My daughter was an August birthday, so theoretically we could have redshirted her. But we never seriously considered it, and her preschool teacher recommended against holding her back. The kindergarten teacher made a fuss about her handwriting being below grade-level expectations, but that problem corrected itself by the end of the year. There were no further issues, ever. </p>
<p>My instinct is not to hold girls back, and to go out of your way not to give birth to a boy in the summer or fall. </p>
<p>I was going through some old family documents a while back, and I saw that my father was almost 19 when he graduated from high school, and his sister was 20. In those days, before antibiotics, when a kid got sick, they tended to miss many weeks, sometimes even months, of school and could not catch up. There was a lot of repeating grades for this reason. The world did not come to an end. In fact, I believe these people were called the greatest generation.</p>
<p>“I wonder, in those districts where they are moving the cutoff dates back, doesn’t that just shift the decision from those with post September-ish birthdays, to those with post June-ish birthdays?”</p>
<p>Pretty soon all the kids in Kindergarten will be 8 and parents will be freaking out their kid will be disadvantaged if they send him/her at 7. </p>
<p>I went to K when I was four, never made it past 5" and was still wearing child size 6x in high school. My parents could have kept me out of school for years and I still would have been the smallest and skinniest. </p>
<p>My late August born son went the week after he turned 5. He went through puberty in 7th grade and his voice had already changed. He was maybe 5’2 then and has managed to make it all the way to 5’6. I could have kept him back but he would still have never been tall. </p>
<p>My mom (who is 83 now) was taken by my grandmother to school on the first day of kindergarten when she was 3 (june b’day). They told her she was too young. My grandmother said, “but she can read” and preceded to make my mother demonstrate. So, they allowed her to enroll and 13 years later she went off to Smith College.</p>
<p>“I am a supporter of redshirting… I wish my mother had done it for me… I am an end of December year birthday.”</p>
<p>If you grew up in New Haven like I did the cut off when we were young was Jan. 31st. I was a Nov baby so went when I was 4 and my cousin was an end of Jan baby and went when she was four. And back then everyone sent there kids in the year they were supposed to.</p>
<p>With the trend toward more children attending preschool (and therefore having more academic readines) I truly thought that the redshirting would stop, rather than increase (in my own naive thinking). To me K is all about socializing, getting kids to play and share together, and to create a safe place for learning. They would then have all the basics necessary for “real school”. So if people can afford to hold their kid back financially, they may be helping to set up another example of economic disparity in the classroom. Another year of preschool can be seen as a luxury, and head Start kids don’t get the option to let them stay back a year. So the poor kids are starting “on-time” while the wealthier families have the option to let their child advance socially (and possibly academically). Then when that child goes to K, they are seen as smarter, more advanced, and treated as such. Standards for K change, and those kids who were considered ready are not considered “behind” and holding back in later grades creates a stigma reagarding intelligence. I can tell you that the redshirting in my old district cut down economic and racial lines. Luckily my poor smart kid excelled.</p>
<p>This is such an individual decision. I looked at this issue for my older S who has a September birthday (school district cutoff was Dec 31 but many fall boys were held back). When he was in nursery school I attended several panels by experts in early education. I was inclined to send him on to kindergarten, he was reading and was a happy and mature little boy who was eager to go to kindergarten, but the “experts” got me all worried. When I brought it up with his nursery school teacher, she told me that my gut instinct was right: he was ready and should go to kindergarten. It was the right choice for him. I guess it was a slight disadvantage in junior high sports (but who cares about that?!) but he was always very tall and once he matured in late junior high/early high school, this wasn’t an issue either as he played 3 varsity sports in high school. </p>
<p>While I was worrying about this issue, we considered moving to another city. I toured a private school there, and was asked when my son’s birthday was. When I answered “September”, the director immediately asked: “how tall is he?”. My answer kept him in the running for kindergarten at this school - which I always thought was a little strange.</p>
<p>We still talk about social and intellectual maturity at school as if those are separate concerns, but I think they merge more than when we attended schools. Modern teaching methods use small groupings of students for many academic tasks that were individual when we grew up. Modern grade schools seat children in hexagons or groups of four desks, use learning centers, teach Reading in leveled smallgroups, conference in Writing Workshops. Secondary schools include many more group projects. </p>
<p>Impact: bright students who lack social maturity can’t get their bright ideas across to persuade others in their working groups. It’s intellectually frustrating for them. This is about more than dating.</p>
<p>ETA: great life training for work, however; “Meetings – because nobody is as dumb as all of us together.”</p>
<p>They should eliminate all cut off dates and just let the parents decide!
S attended kindergarten for two years - first year at a private school followed by the second year at our public school. He did not notice.
Today, he is a junior at the top engineering undergraduate school in the country and gets terrific grades. Someone recently asked why he was already 21 and when I explained, they said, “Wow, that extra year of kindergarten really paid off.”</p>
<p>MissBee, it’s a fact that it breaks down on economic disparity. </p>
<p>In my opinion (and I am sure I will get raked over the coals for it) that elementary school is where a child should be learning how to be a student and the basic foundations necessary (3R’s) so they can be successful in high school and college, not about who can master quadratic equations by 5th grade.</p>
<p>Because of this “red shirting” school districts like mine are allowing parents to run the show and as a result kinder is no longer the kinder that we attended. When you can step into a kinder class and see children able to complete tasks that kids in 2cd grade are doing you know that things are getting out of control. Parents want an edge because we live in such a “ME” centered world where everyone wants their kid to be number one. The entrance to kindergarden should be determined by readiness at age 5 and nothing else. I remember how many parents said to me your kids will not be driving until they are seniors in HS. Since when is driving the reason to consider holding a kid back. Everyone of my kids would have been bored to death had they stayed back including my daughter. Unfortunately she had a teacher who did’nt have any of her own children and she needed to go back to school to learn about child development and how not to kill a kids spirit. When my daughter graduated HS she was 17. I too was 17 when I graduated and so was half of my class. Two of my sons just turned 18 when they walked onto their college campus and our oldest just before he started college. </p>
<p>Where we came from kids either started school at age 5 or they were enrolled in 1st grade when mom or dad decided to bring them to school. It was also made clear that if you didn’t register your child when you were supposed to than the district would report you to child services. That is the way it should be.</p>
<p>Parents just don’t realize that the world does not revolve around your little one. If a child needs extra help than help should be provided but for the most part if evey kid were about the same age (5) than many of these early problems with maturity would not exist.</p>
<p>Warbrain, when I think about it, maybe it’s the tall kids who should be held back. I find that when young kids are tall for their age people expect them to be more “mature”, when in fact, most are as immature as the kids who are short or average for their ages. And I think teachers expect the tall kids to be more mature simply because the look older!</p>
<p>Could someone explain why it is so important that a kid be of driving age when he/she is a soph in HS? Also, what is the issue with being the tallest kid in the class? Do parents actually worry about such stupid things as their kids height? Boy, I am glad I missed the boat on that one because not one of my average sized sons see themselves as short probably because we never paid attention to their height.</p>
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