Both my kids have summer birthdays and neither was held back. DD has an August Bday and was always the smartest girl in her class. DS is a June B-day and many private schools in our area won’t even consider letting a boy start on time. I wish he had gone to a more rigorous elementary school but I was not willing to hold him back. I think it is important for kids to be challenged from day one in school and learn to work hard. My niece was held back and this masked the fact that she needed academic support for many years. I wish schools enforced a strict cutoff date.
I have two kids, both early fall birthdays, both qualified for gifted. In our district there was a firm 8/31 cutoff so we had no choice to make. Our district also had reasonable gifted accommodations, so it ended up not being a big deal academically once both kids were evaluated.
They are very different in temperament and inclination towards leadership and social interaction. One absolutely would have been ready socially to start KG just short of 5 years old. The other, I’m not so sure, but she was bored to tears until the gifted paperwork went through.
Being older for their grade does not seem to have hurt them in the long run. Neither goes for conventional team sports, so that piece was irrelevant and would not have been on my radar.
My advice - by the time your kid is 4, you will have a clearer idea of what is best. Now is too soon. Also, at a young age, it’s relatively easy to shift gears if the decision you make about when she starts school ends up being less than optimal.
I’m not really buying the sports argument. In our area, the best athletes play club sports, and you play by your birth certificate. Grade in school doesn’t matter. If these parents are thinking of school sports, maybe a girl would have a small advantage in 7th-8th grade due to growth spurts, but only if she already has the natural athleticism and loves the right sport. By sophomore year of high school, most girls have stopped growing. 10th-12th graders are playing on the same school team anyway, so where’s your advantage? It’s possible that this is different for boys who grow later and have more muscle-mass potential, but my son likes running and I don’t see an age advantage there.
We did hold two of our children back–or rather, we gave them extra time to get ready for the very academic nature of Kindergarten in our area. Their preschool teachers flagged them to be tested for special ed needs. Testing showed they were unusually low in phonemic awareness for their ages (plus behind in speech and motor control). We chose an extra year of pre-K for each of them and during those years, the school district provided speech therapy, OT and PT. It turns out they are both dyslexic and also needed years of outside, individual help to learn to read.
For kids with delays in reading, writing and speech, I think an extra year can be key for competence and confidence. Ours eventually became avid readers, and they love school, thank goodness. The 6th grader still needs academic support, but the 9th grader is thriving on her own. It’s sometimes awkward when acquaintances realize how old they are and make a big deal, but they know they’re in the right grade for them.
An extra year of pre-K means students who are 18 or possibly 19 when they graduate from high school. If there are seniors who are 20, something else may be going on besides one year of “red shirting”. In any case, if kids are good citizens and compassionate members of their community, why would being a year older make them more likely to cause trouble?
With a Sept 1 cutoff, students who are “on time” in our area are almost always 18 during senior year, those held for kindergarten are 19, and if those kids had any issues or delays along the way causing additional holding, then they are close to 20. Behaviors that I accept in college (flying to Vegas for a party weekend, or spending the summer travelling thru Europe with a romantic partner) seemed surprising to me in high school, but less so when I considered the age.
I haven’t read the whole thread, but I was a July baby and was not held back. I have mixed feelings about it. I excelled academically, but socially I always felt a little out of it. I always wondered if I would have done better if I had waited a year to start kindergarten. High school was a miserable experience for me, but I did fine in college.
I am a May baby and was educated in NYC where there is a December 31 cutoff. I went to religious school and skipped 5th grade. After that, I was always one of the youngest and I loved it. I begged my parents to let me graduate HS in 3 years but they refused. I went to college intending to graduate in 3 years but I became very ill the first year and had to take the full four years. I was very depressed about that for a long time. I am happy to have been in the work force for an extra year, earning money, putting it away, etc.
My 2 oldest kids (S - late July, D - late October, 1 year apart) began in NYC as well. At their pre-school, many moms were talking about holding their sons back and urged me to do the same thing with S. I refused because it would have put him and his sister in the same grade. While my son turned out to have other issues (he is mildly Asperger’s), it turned out that he was able to read before K and would have been bored if held back. When I was in HS, I had friends who were sisters. One was in the correct grade and the other, who was a couple of months older than me, was a grade ahead like I was. We were all in the same grade. The older sister was so resentful she was always commenting on how her parents didn’t think SHE was smart enough to be a year ahead. That was one thing that really stuck in my mind when considering holding my son back as well. He’s turning 28 and although he dropped out of college, I don’t think I would have had a different result had I held him back. I think it would have been worse, because of my D.
D tested into the gifted K and was third youngest in her class of 28. There were some issues - the younger kids actually slept during nap time as compared to the ones almost a year older. The following year, we moved to a suburb where the cutoff is 12/1. She was still one of the youngest, but now even younger because this district does a lot of redshirting. She’s 26 now and earned her masters in special ed at 22.
Middle son is a 9/1 birthday. He had a lot of speech issues and when he was in K, the teacher suggested that we have him repeat when we had our first conference in the fall. She was a very experienced teacher and we were considering her advice seriously when we got together for our spring meeting. She was the teacher who had all of the repeaters in her class, so my son was one of the youngest. At the spring meeting, she said that even though he still had speech issues, he was head and shoulders ahead of the other kids in math skills and should NOT be held back. The next year, we put him into Cub Scouts, which he loved and he became a natural leader, even of kids older than him.
Third boy is a June birthday. I enrolled him in free district pre-k, only to find out a week before school began that he was being bumped for a lower income child. His former nursery school didn’t have space in its (paying) pre-k, but they did have a spot in the K program, which was also paying. With no other choice, we sent him to K at age 4. He is very social and as a kid with older siblings, had no issues interacting with older kids. His teacher constantly told us how bright he was, how much of a leader and how engaging he was. My MIL would pick him up and take him to her house to do his hw. About midway through the school year, my MIL said that she noticed that my son had issues with his handwriting and reading that reminded her of H’s issues. H struggled through school and was finally diagnosed with dyslexia in law school! In the 60’s and 70’s, people just weren’t aware of LDs. Anyway, the upshot was that although his teacher said he could advance to grade 1, we decided to have him repeat K in our home district. Although the district fought us, we were finally able to get him started on special reading training for dyslexics towards the end of grade 1. His sibs tease him about repeating K but he says that he was just so good at it that he decided to do it again. The redshirting in my district is so bad that he has friends less than 6 months younger than him who were a grade behind (one was held back to give him an edge playing an instrument). He is also a natural leader and comfortable in mixed age groups.
S17 is a March birthday and with all of the redshirting, he is actually on the younger side of his cohort! There is a kid in his graduating class who was born in June of 1998. I never considered holding S17 back.
The only one of my kids who played any kind of sports were oldest son and D, who played Little League but stank at it, however, he had so much fun. I tried to get him into the younger group for that one but he was literally 2 hours and 20 minutes too old! I think sports wise, he would have done better with younger kids but not academically. D had no issues ever.
I am opposed to holding back but recognize that it’s an individual choice. It’s not one to be made lightly.
Oh please. My introvert that made the cut off by 10 days was not given the message that there was something wrong with her being an introvert. The message she got was that I saw her and recognized her specific needs and made the best choice I could with that personal information. That’s such an insulting statement to make. Not every kid who is an introvert with a late fall birthday needs to wait, but mine did and that aspect of her personality played a big part.
She was hardly likely to be more bored in school than a kid with a birthdate 10 days later who didn’t have the choice.
Kids who are born in March, where the birthdate is nowhere near cut offs, can be bored to death and become lazy underachievers as well. There is no evidence to support that kids who were born close to the cut off dates but waited to start are any more likely to struggle with those issues.
And if a kid is 19-20 and still a high schooler then they either started late and got held back once or they were held back to repeat grades at least twice. Let’s not exaggerate waiting to start a child born close to a cut off day and equate it with other issues unrelated.
Not exaggerating at all, momto2girls. I said I would hold back (If it had been an issue) only because so many people seem to feel their child needs to be held back that it skews the average age of the class. No one claimed 10 days more or less will matter. But when more than half the class is “old” for their grade, it does change the class dynamic. If a large part of the population believes their child needs additional time (whether valid or not), it changes the decision process for everyone.
It isn’t often about 10 days. I’ve noticed a creep to get this perceived advantage at the schools my kids have attended. First it was kids right near the cutoff. Now it is kids months before the cutoff. 19 year olds at high school graduation time aren’t that rare especially among the males.
That’s the rule in the state where we raised our kids, but our daughter’s pre-pre K teacher reported that DD was bored by the pre-pre K work and recommended she be promoted to pre K, which advice was followed, meaning that she was ready for kindergarten when she was four, and wouldn’t turn five until late September, almost a month past the public school cutoff date. Rather than have her repeat pre K, we enrolled her in a private school that was satisfied that she was mature enough to jump into kindergarten at the tender age of four.
It worked out fine. She was always the youngest in her class, but it didn’t hinder her academically, socially, or athletically, as she went on to compete in college as an NCAA athlete (and team captain) at a great school.
As I write this I’m feeling sad. I’m on the west coast and she’s in Boston. I miss my daughter. Sad dad 
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Back in the day when Californa’s cutoff date for kindergarten was 12/2, the son missed it by 6 hours. Our neighborhood grade school was very low achieving test score wise, even though the eventual high school progression was a top 25 high school in California. Son was sent to a private school before going back to the public school system for middle/high school.
He never felt self conscious about being younger than his peers. At times he actually felt a sense of pride in realizing that he would graduate from high school at 17 and college at 21. He has encountered a lot of freshmen who are already 19 and 20 though.
At the other extreme, there was a kid in his freshman class who did not turn 18 until January of this year-I’m assuming the kid must have skipped 2 grades in school.
Although in retrospect he might have been better off being held back. There was someone in his Boy Scout troop a full year older than him in the same grade who ended up going to Penn last year and I felt he was emotionally more mature at times than my son.
An elite private school in our area had a interesting solution after noting many kids were being held to gain an advantage in admission. Now they will allow applicants within 3 months of the cutoff date to apply, and they are tested earliest. Those outside that date range must apply for and be placed in the age appropriate grade. The teachers seem to like it as it minimizes the disparities in the class.
This is such an individual decision and it can be hard to make because no one can predict the future. I can share our experiences to add to your qualitative data here.
Kiddo #1 started K at 4, but was within the cutoff by 4 weeks. Her preschool teacher said she was too introverted to start, but I knew an extra year of school wouldn’t change anything about her being an introvert. Making this decision was not hard; Kiddo was (still is!) very mature for her age, hard working, and was reading a little at the time. We went into it with the attitude that “someone has to be the youngest” and later had to add “someone has to be the shortest” to which Kiddo was very accepting. All ended well and she is flourishing in college.
Kiddo #2 made me - and his preschool teacher - pull my hair out. He made the cutoff by over 2 months, but every boy with a birthday around his was/is held back from starting K. He was reading at a 4th grade level at age 4. And he absolutely could not sit still or demonstrate the maturity needed for K. Basically, we needed to buy him time until the academics would be more interesting/challenging to him. So I started homeschooling him. By the time he entered junior high, all went well. Fortunately he has always been a bit tall for his age, so he never looked small even among boys mostly a year older. He has a great group of friends and is doing well in high school. But I will admit that as we get close to him going away to college, I worry about his maturity level (he doesn’t!).
Kiddo #3 has the most unusual story. Her birthday is only 11 days before the cutoff. She honestly didn’t seem to care about school when she was younger, and I decided I would hold her back. Since I was homeschooling Kiddo #2, I decided to do a PK year at home for her. As we got into it, I started to think I should consider it her K year instead. As luck would have it, we moved to an area with a later cutoff date and so I enrolled her in 1st grade. Three years later I homeschooled 4th grade part 2 when we moved back to the original school district. In other words, we felt the need to re-adjust her down. She wasn’t ready to go to the intermediate school. When she entered junior high, she was still playing with dolls. She seems younger (even looks younger than her age) and it’s a much better fit for her at her current grade than it would have been at the higher one.
I haven’t read every post on this thread. Don’t know if anyone has mentioned the financial implications. You’ll get one more year to save for college when a child is “held back,” but you’ll also face higher tuition costs with every year you delay entering college. A child who starts K at 4/newly 5 will have to enter the adult world earlier, but will have one more year of saving/social security earnings when they reach retirement age.
I disagree with the idea that nobody ever regrets holding a kid back. If a kid is sent, and has some challenges, the first thing that gets the blame is not holding them back a year. That may or may be the reason.
I have two that had birthdays around the cutoff. We held the one whose birthday was 10 days before the cutoff and sent the one that was just over a month before. There were challenges for both. However, both did fine. In some ways the one that waited did not learn to learn as well in school because the early academics came easily to him.
One kid in my son’s grade had a June birthday and was held back, which meant he had to “play up” in town sports leagues.
My youngest was pretty much the youngest boy in his grade. But I didn’t see a universal boost to the boys that were a year older than him. Some did better, others not as well.
You can only make the best decision you can with the information at hand. Very bright kids often do better when academically challenged (not always, but often). And then embrace whichever decision you make. She will be who she will be either way.
About the sports advantage - true that being older than peers might be an advantage on school teams but in many sports outside of school the student’s age is still the determinant. As a result, the redshirted child ends up on teams with kids a grade ahead rather than his classmate buddies. Hockey and club soccer are some examples.
In my kids elementary school, they knew who was “overage for grade.” In the summer after K there was a big combined party for three kids who had birthdays on the same day. Two cakes said Happy 6th birthday while the third said Happy 7th and the kids all thought that was very interesting.
I’m in CA and my kids all started school back when the cutoff was 12/2 (it’s now been moved up to 9/1). My oldest has a summer birthday and so it wasn’t an issue (and btw, she did have plenty of friends with fall birthdays who were not held back). My middle kid was born a week after the cutoff. He was reading at 3 and I actually tried to find a school that would take him early but no luck. I thought maybe he’d end up getting grade-skipped at some point but it never happened. Anyway, my youngest was born a month before the cutoff (early November birthday). As a third child he was always used to playing with older kids, tall for his age, and gifted academically like my other 2, so I went ahead and sent him. He was still mostly ahead of his grade-level peers (or at least, keeping up with the ‘smart’ cohort in class) until he went to a GATE middle school program. There he kind of hit the wall for organization, although it seems like a lot of the other boys did, too, even the ones who were older for the grade. Socially middle school has been a bit of a bust, but again, not sure how much is his age vs his personality (he’s introverted and doesn’t tolerate the roughhousing and crude humor that is popular with his classmates). He’s totally ready to be done with middle school (finishing 8th grade soon) and I can’t imagine if he were a grade lower.
There are a lot of studies both ways about redshirting. One of them showed that for gifted kids, it’s better to be one of the youngest in the class than one of the oldest so you have people to learn from. But then of course you’ll be competing for college placement against the people in your grade, not the people your same age.
I personally feel like there should be limits on how far back you can redshirt… like say the cutoff is 9/1… parents can have the option of redshirting if their kids are within one or 2 months of that, but not more than that. And in my ideal world, parents on the other end would have some flexibility as well (if your kid just misses the cutoff by a couple of weeks but you feel they are ready to go, you can send them). At some point you are turning K into first grade.
My parents did this with my born-in-July brother, but not for sports reasons. While his intellectual development was well above average (numbers, letters, colors, shapes, could read, etc.) he was behind the curve in two areas.
One was fine motor skills - using scissors, drawing or writing, crafty projects such as cutting out a simple shape and using paste to glue it to something.
The other area was social / emotional. He was a sensitive kid who cried easily, and my parents didn’t think he was emotionally mature enough to go straight to first.
He did a post-grad year (love the term!) between kindergarten and first, and it was absolutely the right choice.
When my DD was in third grade, there was a boy in her class who was physically small, socially immature, and both extremely bright and academically advanced. About halfway through the year, his mom approached me, because she thought our kids might be in the same situation.
He was not young for grade plus skipped. He was old for grade plus held back. Rather than being bigger, more mature, and at the top of the class, he was still small, still immature, and now acting out due to boredom.
Our S was the older of our two. He was extremely bright (taught himself to read by age 4, trying to improve the preschool placement test) but easily upset—crying about 3 billy goats gruff and other violence in books and movies he was exposed to in preschool. He took time to “warm up” in social situations.
I agreed with the pediatrician and his preschool teachers that he would benefit from an extra (paid) year of preschool.
It turned out that he developed a chronic health condition at age 10 and ended up learning a lot on his own anyway. For high school, he switched from public to private school and was again with the kids he had been with in Jr K in the private preschool. Because he and we were able to enrich his learning, we didn’t worry about how much academic stimulation he got in school.
D was 2 years and 5 days younger and always trying to keep up with her brother. We wanted them to remain 2 years apart in school, so kept her back as well. It was a good thing because she didn’t start reading until she was in 1st grade and she was concerned because she felt she SHOULD be reading earlier. She was a very social kid. She also developed a chronic health condition at age 10 or so and did a lot of self study and study at home. She also transferred to a private HS where she was once again withbthe Jr K kids.
Both kids were the same age as many of their peers but up to a year older than some of their other peers. It worked fine for them and us. It was easier for all of us that they had an enjoyable Jr K year than worrying about whether to have them repeat a grade later. Both are gifted and talented (but sadly our state’s GT program is NOT good).
There are many factors to consider in deciding when to have a child begin K. The important thing is to make the choice as best you and your spouse can, knowing your kid and not second guess yourselves.
This is a very individual decision, and yes, be careful about pressure from other parents and comparisons with other kids.
You can see age and maturity-related differences between kids all the way through high school. Just like some kids learn to walk at 9 months and others at 15 or even 18 months, there’s all kinds of social, academic, physical and emotional milestones that kids pass at different rates all through childhood and adolescence. There’s no rule or right answer for how to handle the start of kindergarten. Observe your kid, listen to those who also know and observe your kid, and make the best decision you can.
I will second @calmom on considering Montessori. My kids did not attend Montessori preschool (only my youngest went to preschool at all) but they did attend a district magnet Montessori K-6. Looking back it gave them the opportunity to move ahead at their own pace academically and put them in a wider spread socially as well. It was less apparent in kindergarten but in 2nd grade in a classroom with kids in 1st through 3rd, there was just more space socially for all the different maturity levels. No one was always at the bottom or always at the top.
Two of my kids were summer babies, both very very intelligent but maybe a bit slower to develop in other areas. My son has a late June birthday and started K at 5 with an early August start. Now a junior, it’s a challenge to keep him motivated academically. He’s bored even in higher level classes. But he doesn’t do homework or quite have a handle on time management (his sister who was also a summer baby was fine with this stuff); socially seems about like all the other kids. I wish I could send him straight to college for the intellectual challenge but even he knows he’s not quite ready otherwise. Starting later would have made this worse, not better. There’s no one perfect answer.