"All kinds of factors affect whether your kid will go to a top college, but here’s one you may not have counted on: The month of their birthday. …
… September-born children were 2.1% more likely to go to college than August-born kids, and 3.3% more likely to graduate, according to the study. They were 7.2% more likely to graduate from a competitive college and 15% less likely to be incarcerated by their 16th birthday, found the researchers from Northwestern, the University of Florida and the University of Toronto." …
It doesn’t help that in the last ten years or so the Kindergarten curriculum in many states is no longer appropriate for kindergartners. My older son was not only very bright, but had a March birthday in a state with a December cut-off. He was bored for years and I don’t think it was particularly good for him to be known as “the smartest kid in the grade”. I was there to hear a fellow third grader say this about him when he explained a science experiment to a guest scientist. Luckily he had parents who helped him learn things that were hard like chess and computer programming outside of the school day.
And the opposite. I had a kid with a late fall birthday…and we did hold,that kid from starting K when he wasn’t yet five years old…our state also has a December 31 deadline. Best decision ever…and he agrees.
By the way…folks here should go into a kindergarten classroom NOW and see what’s what. Most are full day programs now primarily because it was impossible to cram the increasing academic demands into a 1/2 day program.
K students are now doing what many of us did in first grade…or even second. Heck…we still had a rest time when I was in K. That is no longer the case.
Kids are expected to write in journals the very first week of K…oh but no one actuallynteaches them how to write…the mechanics of holding a pencil and letter formation. It’s just not part of,the curriculum. The. The teachers complain because the writing is not legible. End of K here…kids have to demonstrate they can write three paragraphs on the same topic by the end of the year…in response to a prompt. Remember…some don’t turn five until December of their K year.
The OP article really doesn’t cover it all…and there are too many other variables to even consider just what is posed in the title of this thread.
This is just another version of describing the “Relative Age Effect”, which has also been explained in Outliers (Malcom Gladwell) and Freakonomics (Steven Levitt).
For some kids who are not ready for K developmentally, though meet the date cut-off for entrance, an extra year is a wonderful gift and appropriate. This is true more often for boys, than girls. My nephew with a July birthday did this and it was right for him. What I am not into is parents who “red shirt” their child so that they can be the oldest in their class, thinking that will be an advantage. The article mentions this too near the end. In my community, it was VERY common for parents of boys to give their sons an extra year before K. And it wasn’t necessarily because the kid wasn’t ready for K. I recall for one of my Ds that about a third of her class was made up for boys who spent an extra year before K.
I am not into these kind of generalizations about K placement, because each child is different. Imagine in my community where lots of people were giving their kids an extra year before K as a “leg up” type of thing, that we bucked that trend and one of my Ds had an early entrance into K! For her, this was the right placement. Some couldn’t imagine our doing this. And a lot of the class who was red shirted were 1 1/2 years older than my D (plus we had multi-age grades 1/2/3 classrooms. But this was right for my child. She was still at the top of the class. She later also skipped senior year of high school and graduated at 16. My other D was the youngest in her class too (she JUST made the K cut-off) and was valedictorian.
I think parents should weigh what is the right placement for their kid, rather than gaming that being oldest in class is going to have a better result in their education.
My kid has very late August b’day in a state with Nov. 30th cut off. He was one of two youngest boys in whole grade. There were lots of girls younger than he was.
He got into all nine colleges he applied to and went to top 20 LAC.
Doesn’t seem to hold in my extended family as in several families, the younger/youngest kid got into the same level(In one family all kids got into the same Ivy 3 years apart with one still attending) as the older sibling or did far better academically and in terms of college admissions/post-college life than the older sibling.
It also didn’t hold in my parents’ generation on my father’s side of the family.
Oldest uncle was expelled from college in the 1920’s for prioritizing partying/drinking/romance too much and after being disowned by my grandfather, attended Whampoa military academy which in the '20s accepted students with as little as a middle-school level education*. In contrast, my father and several younger siblings all were admitted to and graduated from elite universities with high honors.
In short, gaining admission to the military academy was much easier and thus, not considered as high of an achievement academically, especially for someone with a couple of years of college under his belt.
It didn’t seem to be the case for my kids’ grade school cohorts. We had 6 boys who were ‘redshirted’ and turned 6 before K started. They were not the class leaders, the best readers, or in any way advanced. In fact, they were quite shy and remained that way for the 6 years my kids were in school with them. The was a large group of boys who had fall birthdays (cut off for K was Sept 15) and those were the Alpha Boys - the athletes, the fighters, the ones who wanted to be first for anything and everything. For the girls, the fall birthdays didn’t seem to have a big advantage (we really had a lot of them too; more than half the class turned 6 before Christmas so on the whole the class was skewed ‘older’). The bossy pants girls had late birthdays, turned 5 just before K started, and were in fact the younger kids in the class. For my own two, one had a Jan birthday but she was a preemie so it was as if she had a May (or really July) birthday. Not a leader. The other had a Dec birthday but started early so she was the youngest in the class, and was 18+ months younger than some. She did have a hard time and I wish she’d been in the class behind, been middle of the class age wise.
It didn’t hold true for my siblings and myself. We were all honor students, all but me were athletes, all ended up in professional careers. Both brothers has late summer/fall birthdays, sister was born early December and I skipped a grade. We were all 17 at HS graduation.
I am not a fan of redshirting. It causes a classroom to have kids over a year apart in age. If people stuck to the rules and only held back in very extreme cases of the child not being ready, then the classroom would be more equal, the kids closer in age, and the teacher able to teach across a more even skill level.
I graduated HS at 16, having skipped a grade and being a December birthday - probably the youngest in the grade (when the calendar year was the cut-off). I was salutatorian and went on to have almost a perfect 4.0 in college.
I remember when my daughter was in kindergarten somebody telling me that in the early grades there is a big difference between things like reading level and writing ability but all the kids basically catch up by 3rd grade (all master their basic skills by then.)
This reminds me of a study done of the national hockey league showing that a large percentage of players who make it to the pros are born in the Winter months. Why? Because of a size bias against kids born the same year, but a few months later is enough to keep the Summer/Fall kids out of the best training opportunities. Fwiw.
One kid in my Catholic elementary school class who was not only born earlier in the year, but also at least 2 years before most of us in our grade was known mainly for petty criminality(theft) and a serious academic laggard(He was left back twice and still struggled academically). He was eventually expelled for being caught red-handed attempting to steal something from a classmate and scratching out classmate’s name on the item to pretend it was his…the last straw in a long string of petty offenses.
One of the topflight HS classmates and the only one who was accepted to Princeton from my year without developmental/legacy status had a late December birthday and it was very apparent she was going places(I wouldn’t be surprised if she becomes President of the US someday…though for her that would be a serious downgrade considering her intellectual bona-fides and the spectrum of intellect among POTUSes in history. And yes, if I communicated that bit to her, guaranteed she’d take that as a serious insult, not a compliment).
On the flipside, one classmate from our year who were nearly two years older than her(January birthdays and born the year before most of us) was known mainly for being a fashion clotheshorse(something which WILL prompt much ribbing from HS classmates) and for turning in a dismal academic performance right alongside yours truly. He ended up attending a low-tiered local private college(Think St. John’s U, Hofstra, Pace) without any sort of scholarship.
I started kindergarten at age 4 (October birthday) and was high school valedictorian. I went to college and then professional school. My ex-h started kindergarten at age 5 and was also valedictorian, went to college but never finished his graduate degree. Our older daughter was born in January and was an upper 25% student. She graduated from college and is trying to establish herself as a writer. My younger daughter was born in April and was one of the top two or three students in her high school graduating class, at the top of her college class, and will be starting in a top-ranked Ph.D. program next week.
Thumper: “Kids are expected to write in journals the very first week of K…oh but no one actuallynteaches them how to write…the mechanics of holding a pencil and letter formation. It’s just not part of,the curriculum. The. The teachers complain because the writing is not legible. End of K here…kids have to demonstrate they can write three paragraphs on the same topic by the end of the year…in response to a prompt. Remember…some don’t turn five until December of their K year”.
That is completely insane. I had girls who could do this easily and boys who couldn’t have done this if their lives depended on it - equally high achieving. Boys typically lag girls in fine motor skills, period. Not always, as there are exceptions. But frequently.
Thank the Lord for home schooling in the early years. It certainly paid off here, as the kids are slogging toward their multiple degrees. When I was a child, I don’t even think Kindergarten existed…my mom taught me everything I needed to know to be well-prepared for First grade,and I acquired multiple degrees as well.
It appears CC parents provide a very poor cross-section of the general population.
The salutatorian of my HS graduating class was 14 and works in IT. The two guys who went to Harvard were both top 5% but not top 2%, combining good academics with strong social success. The lacrosse team captain and student body president is now on the board of a big investment bank, the other has a PhD and started a couple of foundations.
My December birthday kid did better than either the May or June ones. With them it is more personality than capability. He cared about his grades. They were all capable.
I started K as a 5-year-old. I was double promoted in 4th grade, which meant I went to college as a 16 year old (turned 17 in February of freshman year). I was way too immature. It is easy to be a Monday morning quarterback, but I would have been better for me (socially and academically) if I had stayed with my peers.
