<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/magazine/03kindergarten-t.html[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/magazine/03kindergarten-t.html</a> </p>
<p>“Andersens kindergartners sat down on a blue rug. Two, one boy and one girl, had been redshirted the term, borrowed from sports, describes students held out for a year by their parents so that they will be older, or larger, or more mature, and thus better prepared to handle the increased pressures of kindergarten today.”</p>
<p>I just read this article. It seems that the author had already decided that redshirting is beneficial. Couldn’t she have found any success stories of kids who are the youngest in their class? In my area, redshirting is extremely common. Some parents even have their kid do kindergarten twice, once in a private school and again in public school. When will redshirting end? Parents seem so intent on having their kid be the oldest, that I suspect no matter what the cutoff date, parents will redshirt. Kindergarten will be so easy for 8 year olds! My bias: My kids are the youngest in their class and have always been among the smartest based on test scores, grades, etc. I don’t think being the biggest/oldest automatically makes one a better student.</p>
<p>I guess it’s all kind of relative. As prefect notes, its brains and determination (not to mention parental income) that make top students, not chronogical age. However, cc has had numerous thread about girls maturing faster than boys, so perhaps boys should be redshirted, not girls?</p>
<p>btw: Calif has a Dec 1 birthdate rule, so some kids are REALLY young, or, if redshirted, can be nearly 2 years older than other kids in the same class. The author is incorrect that Calif has ‘active’ legislation to change the Dec 1 date. When the issue was raised a couple of years ago, it was shot down big time since it was considered a hardship on the poor. While a Legislator may toss a bill in the hopper to make the date earlier than Dec 1, it ain’t going anywhere.</p>
<p>We found, many years ago, that holding kids back was closely tied to incomce. Middle class families who could afford paying for another year of very expensive day care (upward of $8k per year 20 years ago, more now) were more likely to keep their kids back. Low-income families, on the other hand, were eager to send their kids to public school as early as possible in order to avoid paying for daycare. So some schools had a kindergarten 1 and kindergarten 2, and kindergarten 1 seemed to be filled with low SES kids. And those that had only one level of kindergarten made some students repeat.</p>
<p>Some boys are held back for sports purposes. When they get into junior high/high school, those that have matured into young men (height, muscle mass) tend to get a jump start on getting selected for teams. Once a kid gets “behind” it’s hard to catch up.
Sad but true, especially in helmet sports.</p>
<p>This is a topic that actively engaged me when it was time for my on to go to kindergarten. I live in New York where the cut-off date is Dec. 31. This often creates unusual situations because the cut-off date of ost NYC private schools is Aug. 1st. My son and a colleague’s child were born 9/25 and 9/24/89. A third friend has a son also born 9/25/89, but he lives in the Bay area. My sister-in-law gave both her children “the gift of time,” and was a strong advocate for this approach; in fact this was the stated policy of her school district. </p>
<p>Adding to my confusion were the very contradictory clues from my son. He had been in part-time day care and then nursery school since he was 2, an argument in favor of sending him to kindergarten. However, he was extremely shy and small for his age, an argument for holding him back. Many people focussed on his size (sexism?), and I noticed that the Times article did this as well (section on dangling feet etc). </p>
<p>My sister-in-law was adamant that the should be held back. So were other non-professionals. No one wants to imagine her child the smallesr and shiest in the class (especially a boy). However, he talked at nine months and learned to read at three when I was teaching his five-year-old sister. </p>
<p>How did I decide? First, I eliminated the size issue. My husband and I are both short; so is his sister. I reasoned that he would always be short, so if "i held him back for this reason I would be sending the message that there is something wrong with being short. The shyness was more complicated. Here’s where advice of professions (not public school personnel) was useful. His pre-school teacher made a special plea that he be put into kindergarten. She reported that he was only engaged when the class was doing academic tasks and was shyest during “play activities.” Next, a friend’s husband, a develpmental psychologist, made the same plea. His point was that shyness, like height, is not a develpmental trait. Would it be any better to be the shiest kid with kids younger than he was instead of older? His argument was that academic readiness sould be the only criterion in making this decision.</p>
<p>I took their advice, even though because he was a boy a social pressure to hold him back was even greater. My sister-in-law argued that he couldn’t be hurt by holding him back; the pre-school teacher and psychologist contested this assertion. The otheR two children I mentioned are rising seniors. My son will graduate high school in three weeks.</p>
<p>How did he fare? He did very well. This was obviously the right decision for him. For the past two years he has been a member of a four man varsity academic team (as juniors they competed with other teams that were all seniors). Three of the boys on the team have birthdays after September 1st. One’s birthday is the last week in December. They are all too young for their grade in some states, and yes, they did have classmates a year younger. They will be attending Williams, Princeton and Haverford.</p>
<p>My son is no longer shy though he is on the quiet side. He is short (5’7", and maybe he’ll sqeeze out 5’8" before he’s done), but he’s one of a handful of boys who can grow a beard (which he has done to the envy of his older classmates. One of the other boys with a beard is the boy with the December birthday who is quite tall. My sister-in-law is still angry that I didn’t take her advice; my son was quite annoyed when his college required parental consent forms for orientation trips since we won’t yet be 18. These have been the only two downsides.</p>
<p>The article discusses the impact of class on these issues. I think a good solution for kids who are judged not ready for kindergarten on an individual basis would be to be put into a two year pre-K/K program in which each child could progress at his/her own pace. Then at the end of two years there would be a placement evaluation to determine if the child should be placed in first or second grade (some kids do catch up). This approach works very well for our remedial writing students in community college. I do agree that the worst 6utcome is to leave kids at home another year without any educational input.</p>
<p>I think one culprit is the push to have all kids reading at the same time. Studies have shown that there’s no lasting advantage to being an early reader, and we know from child development that kids naturally develop at different rates in different areas. But since testing is one size fits all, it makes sense to hold a child back who might not be ready rather than run the risk of his being labelled a failure for a perfectly normal variation. </p>
<p>It’s hard to predict the results 13 years later of something you do when your kid is 4-5, and I don’t think parents should hold their kids back for the general arms race. </p>
<p>Personally, I’ve seen mixed results from kids with birthdays close to the cutoff. Some kids who didn’t get held back probably should have and it has long term effects (my brother was definitely in this category); some kids could even have gone up another year; some have a hard time early, either academically or socially, but eventually catch up. </p>
<p>My D. is still mysteriously out of sync in some ways. A rising college freshman, she is still excited about the family vacation :). She’s happy she is where she is, and wouldn’t do it over, but sometimes she misses out on opportunities because by the time they feel right to her to pursue, it’s not available anymore because of where she is in her school career. And it was very hard when she was a tiny 5 year old in a class with 9 year olds on their third go round in first grade.</p>
<p>Two things seem to be happening at the same time:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Serious academics are being pushed earlier into the school years, with the result that today’s kindergartens are coming to resemble the first grades of the past.</p></li>
<li><p>People are holding back kids whom they suspect are not “ready,” with the result that many of today’s kindergartners are now the age that first graders were in the past.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Perhaps the people who design school curricula should learn something from this?</p>
<p>Also (and I suppose this is blasphemy), perhaps consideration should be given to setting the cutoff dates for girls and boys separately?</p>
<p>My kids both have late summer birthdays and have always been among the two or three youngest in the grade. For so many reasons, I can’t imagine having held either one, since they both were fluent readers well before kindergarten, and were certainly bored enough in the early grades, even being young as they were. Academically, they have always been way ahead, and that extra year of pre-school would have just widened the gap between them and their peers.</p>
<p>Physically, it’s a mixed bag; my son is tall and needed to shave every day by ninth grade. I can’t imagine an eighth grader dealing with looking so much older. My daughter is very small, and size wise, would fit in better a grade behind. But she is emotionally “old” too, and does just fine with girls who are as much as 14 months older than she is, in the same class.</p>
<p>The only thing I worried would be an issue was driving, since my son would be so much later than all his peers. Actually, it worked out just fine.</p>
<p>I know everyone holds their kids…at least everyone we know. But I wish people would also look at their individual children, and make the decision based on their own personal experience, and not what they think they “should do”. There is a definite bias towards holding kids, and while it is surely right in many situations, it clearly isn’t right in all.</p>
<p>This topic has interested me for years. My undergraduate degree is in Child Study, studying children birth through age 8. My first job after graduate school (Masters in Education), was teaching in a grade called “Transition” which was for students in a public school who needed an extra year after K but before first grade. Many of these children were from a lower socio-economic background. </p>
<p>However, this topic, beyond professional interest, is a personal interest of mine as a parent of two kids where this situation arose. In fact, mythmom, I liked reading your personal anecdote and can relate well, though I have girls. </p>
<p>I also thought it was a good article in the Times.</p>
<p>For me, it all boils down to looking at children as inviduals and not generalizing. For SOME kids, the gift of time is just that…a gift. They are not ready emotionally or socially for school and the extra time benefits them. I have a nephew who is very bright, with well educated parents, who has a July 31 birthday in a school system with a Sept. 1 cut off. He was “young” for his age socially and emotionally and I think my brother and his wife did the right thing to give him the extra year. Knowing him now as a rising junior in high school, I still believe they made the right choice. </p>
<p>However, the mistake is when people generalize that an extra year is a benefit and a manipulation to have their child at the top of the class by being older, as a matter of course, not due to the true needs of their child. I saw this happen here locally (though I have not heard the term “redshirting” used before). I recall in younger D’s preschool, out of 16 kids in the class, six boys were going an extra year before K. Usually they had summer birthdays and also their parents were very well educated. Perhaps one or two truly needed that extra year. But for the majority, it seemed like they did it because it was the thing to do for summer birthday males (and yes, in general, this is often a gender issue but NOT always). But these boys really were not “'youngish” and it seeemd like their parents just wanted to give them a perceived “advantage” of possibly being at the top of the class. One of these boys ended up graduating high school a year early anyway. Another went off to prep boarding school and is now at Brown. It really seems like some parents (usually the more educated or affluent) who automatically are doing an extra year for their kids prior to K as a perceived “advantage” rather than based on their child’s maturity or true readiness. I feel it should be truly individualized and only done for those children who have a social/emotional maturity issue where an extra year will benefit them in the long run (and I don’t mean to be at the top of the class but simply to be appropriate placed developmentally). I am not in support of the automatic reaction to give a summer birthday child, particularly a boy, an extra year as that is the thing to do.</p>
<p>On the flip side of that, I have two daughters with the opposite issue. My oldest D made the K cut off here (which is Sept. 1) by five days. I thanked my lucky stars that she made the cut off because she was advanced (for lack of a better term) across the board and she had gone to preschool for two years with the class that would advance to K when she turned five the first day of school. She was always the youngest child in the class, but you would NEVER know it. Even being the youngest, we had to have plenty of accomodations and acceleration over the years in her case. Luckily, our elementary school individualized a lot and also we had mulit age classrooms which helped in her case. This child didn’t need an extra year. To the contrary we had to keep working to get her learning needs met as she was advanced for her grade. She ended up as val of the senior class. This was the right placement for her. I shudder to think if her birthday had been six days later. She was the only student in the senior class to go to a college of the sort that she now attends. She was a leader and fit in socially andd emotionally and shined in three varsity sports and so was fine physically as well in this grouping, and excelled in the performing arts as well. For someone like her, if I were to go by the current “trend” to wait an extra year, it would have been very developmentally INappropriate. </p>
<p>Then comes my D2. We wanted to have kids two years apart. Knowing that D1 made the K cut off by five days with a late Aug. birthday, we tried to have a summer baby two years apart both chronologically and in school grade. I lost that baby to a miscarriage and by then, the second child was not going to make the K cut off while being two years apart in age and would be three years apart in grade. At that point, we just went ahead and had a baby and I got pregnant right away after the miscarriage. Second child was born Oct. 6 and missed the K cut off by five weeks and we just figured we’d cross that bridge when the time came. </p>
<p>Lo and behold, this child was very advanced intellectually, socially, and emotionally. She went to preschool just before turning 3, for two years and then her class was going to graduate into K, but she was the one who would not make the K cut off and supposedly have to spend a third year in preschool. She was at the head of her current preschool grouping in every developmental area. It was NOT just an academic issue. Her preschool felt she needed to go onto K with the others, and that is saying a bunch considering that over a third of her class were these boys who had waited an extra year and so were 15 months older than her. We didn’t know what we could do. Well in advance, we asked our elem school the policy for kids who missed the cut off. They already had D1 in their K, the youngest child, but who had just made the cut off. Without even discussing our child specifically, we learned that it was cut and dried and they would not look at D2. But the school in the next town (same community) looked at children as individuals and while they also had a Sept. 1 cut off, they were willing to evaluate students who missed the cut off by one to two months and had accepted some in the past IF the child was evaluated to be at the top of the class of the class one year ahead of them (so my preschooler had to be ahead of the current K’s). We decided to build a home in the next town knowing the possibility that our child would be looked at and most likely, if so, would get to go to K which was the appropriate placement for her, even if going EARLY bucks the trend today! This was what SHE needed. While our house was under construction, we even paid tuition to the public school in our new town so that D1 could enter first grade in her multi-age 1/2/3 with her future classmates and not switch schools during the school year. A community member on the school board who had a son who she had given an extra year to with a summer birthday, decided that our new elem school would hold hearings and re-examine its policy to evaluate individuals who had missed the cut off (once she learned that our family was moving there so that our D could likely go to K). So, we already were building the house at that point. This policy was revisited with many school board hearings and the principal and teachers were in support of the current/original policy to look at individuals who missed the cut off. At this point, we were under stress that after moving there, that they could change the policy. But they did not change the policy because the educators believed in what they were doing to look at individuals and had had some kids who entered early who were successful and stand out types of kids. The only change was they were going to add some more stringent testing to the process. My D went through all the testing and observations and was admitted early to K. </p>
<p>Even though she had an early entrance, which didn’t seem like a big deal to us because she basically entered K at the same age as our older D (just five weeks younger), she ended up needing many many individualized accommodations over the years in her public schooling. This was because even with the early entrance, she was advanced compared to her grade peers intellectually, socially, and emotionally. She was even a leader among all these older kids. She was put in multi age classrooms where there were children two to three years older than her and that helped. But she had many accomodations made for academics…independent studies and so forth, along with acceleration with academics. There was talk of her skipping sixth grade, as in our K-6 school, and in her grade 5/6 class, she no longer would be a grade below other grades but be in the highest grade and all her friends were going onto middle school. But we didn’t skip her because we thought at the time that she already had an early entrance and so we couldn’t keep skipping and skipping and would have to meet her needs another way. She had accomodations in middle school and high school, though it took advocating there (our elem school WANTED to address this but that wasn’t the case of the MS and HS as much without advocating). As it turned out, our D asked us in tenth grade to graduate HS a year early (I guess we could have skipped her back in sixth after all) and developmentally, this has been the right thing for HER.</p>
<p>It is NOT for all people. I think it is a very individual case by case basis. When I think that chronologically speaking, she should be graduating this month with the HS seniors, but instead she just finished her soph year of college, I can’t imagine her ever being in that group back in HS. That just is not the right placement for her and anyone who knows her would say the same. Sometimes I want to go back to our first elem school (the one she never attended but her sister went to K at) and show them that while they were not willing to even look at a child who missed the cut off and evaluate her for early entrance, she succeeded with early entrance and even graduated another year early after that. </p>
<p>Just like some children benefit from an extra year (and SOME do), there are SOME who are more appropriately placed by being granted an early entrance into K. It is just very individual. I do not like to generalize about giving kids an extra year before K and think it is only appropriate for those who are developmentally immature, and not as a manipulation (particularly by more educated or well heeled parents) to put their child supposedly at the top of the class. I also think early entrance would not be wise for many kids, but it is definitely appropriate for some, and I don’t mean it as solely based on academic readiness but with regard to the social/emotional piece as well. Of course, these same issues arose once again in talking about our child entering college early. But all who know her, would support that this was right for her, but it is not something I would suggest generally for all kids. </p>
<p>I also agree with Marite (and this was mentioned in the Times) that often the ones giving their kids an extra year are more affluent than the ones who don’t. And also the ones who are of a lower socio-economic background, often would benefit from getting into the school system earlier, vs. the lack of an early childhood education.</p>
<p>As you can see, LOL, this is a topic I have thought a lot about as an educator but also as a parent with kids who were very young for their grades.</p>
<p>What about holding back for speech problems? </p>
<p>I was evaluated by my private school for K, planning to enter when I was four. I would turn five part way through the year. They asked me to wait a year while I went to speech therapy, which I had already been in for a year or so. I was tall for my age, smart, talkative, enthusiastic, and had attended full day, 5 day a week daycare and preschool with no problems. I was ready for kindergraten. Was it right decision to have me wait?</p>
<p>What ended up happening? I entered the next year when I was five and turned six during the year, which is probably a normal age. I excelled academically, developed early, and ended up skipping a grade later on (and was told by the learning specialist that I could have skipped more and would still still be fine academically and developmentally). I went to speech therapy for five years after I actually did start K, so it’s good the school didn’t hold out until I could speak perfectly! I’m assuming my speech improved significantly during my year off, but I’m not really sure. Even after skipping, I remained academically, socially, and developmentally ahead of my grade-peers.</p>
<p>(Cute tidbit: My parents never explained why I wasn’t going to kindergarten the first year, probably because they didn’t want to make me self-conscious about my speech. Of course, the result was that I thought I had failed the screening the first year. The next year I did it I had remembered all of the little things that I was corrected on or asked about the first year, such as skipping the neck when asked to draw a picture of a person, and concentrated hard to make sure I did it right the next time!)</p>
<p>One thing with girls. There was a girl in D’s grade who had been given the extra year, and it was very uncomfortable for her in 5th grade, because she developed so much earlier that it was a high visibility situation for the other children. It was just a lot of added pressure at a difficult time.</p>
<p>my parent’s had the same problem as mythmom did-- I have a november birthday and we lived in the city so they weren’t sure what to do with me because I would have had to spend an extra year in preschool in order to go to a private school. They ended up putting me into kindergarten in the public school and tried to figure out what to do after that year. We ended up moving to a suburban town with a small, highly ranked high school, which solved the problem. I never really had a problem being one of the youngest in my class. The only time that it kinda mattered was when people got licenses, but I didn’t have a car anyway. I ended up graduating second in the class and going to an ivy league university, so it obviously didn’t negatively impact my preparedness.</p>
<p>It’s not always the case with every family. My family is not considered low income and both of our kids are very close to the cut off date for CA, but they both went to Kindergarten the earliest chance they could, why, I don’t see a real reason to hold any one back. One is very mature and the other one isn’t.The one who was not as prepared for kindergarden do eventually caught up academically by 3rd grade. I was pretty laid back and not worried at all. I’m glad CA decided to leave this kind of decision to the parent of each child instead of have some law that dictates when a kid should start Kindegarten.</p>
<p>My son was born in September and was one of the youngest in his class. Many boys his age or even a few months older were held back in our school district. He is highly gifted academically and also a very good athlete. He graduated first in his class of over 800 and has since graduated from Stanford. It definitely would not have been appropriate to hold him back, especially since our school does not have math enrichment or acceleration in elementary school, and he is very good at math. The only problem was in grades 7-9 when he was smaller than most of the other boys, and was also not interested in girls and other teenage topics yet. He actually got a D in sex-ed (health) in 8th grade, maybe he was not mature enough to complete the assignments which involved discussing topics with one’s parents. He did not socialize much outside his neighborhood gang and sport teammates during those years. By grade 10 or 11, this developmental difference disappeared and he was the same size as the others and became very social, and in college he definitely was not “younger” than his classmates. </p>
<p>My daughter was born at the end of October and our school had a November 1 cutoff. All of her preschool teachers and the kindergarten screening at the public school recommended her going to kindergarten and not being held back. Again, it was the right decision for her. She did struggle with learning her math facts in the younger grades (not the concepts) and math may have come easier to her if she was one year older, but she excelled in all other areas and was fine socially, etc. Also, as a child, she was quite meticulous about her work. She happened to get extremely demanding teachers in grades 2, 3, and 4, and also had to make up all of the work she missed for a “pull-out” gifted program one-half day each week. For these reasons, she ended up spending an inordinate amount of time on her schoolwork and homework in these younger grades, although she had no problem learning the material and got excellent grades. Perhaps if she had been a year older, she would have been able to complete her work more quickly. She graduated 11 out of about 800 in h.s., and has just completed her sophomore year at Swarthmore. I never noticed any differences in maturity at all between my daughter and her classmates.</p>
<p>Both my sons-one born in August and one in September had an extra year of preschool before kindergarten. Both were little for their age , slow to talk, and had some issues with fine motor skills. They have done great-both at the top of their classes with leadershp roles etc. (one is graduating next week and off to an Ivy). Both are grateful for the extra year. Interestingly, most of their friends-also “overachievers” are also older (late summer or fall birthdays). Both are grateful for the extra year!</p>
<p>It is interesting that several of you have similar experiences as ours with respect to your children who either entered K early or were the youngest child in the class just making the cut off and where your children have excelled in their grade placement and even come out on the “top” so to speak in that placement and have gone on to do well in college admissions, etc. I know I felt at times I had to defend such a choice as early entrance into K or even for the other child who JUST made the cut off and not holding her back because we were bucking the current trends of giving kids an extra year. But some kids really need extra time but just like them, some need to go ahead. It is about the proper developmental placement on an individual basis. Generalizing doesn’t work because what is appropriate for one child is not necessarily for the next.</p>
<p>My son was born 10/17/89</p>
<p>I started him in kindergarten at still 4 years old. I have no regrets. Academically he was ready. Holding him back a year would have been agony for him and preschool. He learned to read by xmas and never looked back. Sure, emotionally he was a bit younger, but if I had waited until he was ‘emotionally mature’, he might still not have started school yet :-)</p>
<p>He will be attending NYU this fall</p>
<p>Well said Soozievt! Unfortunately, most parents I’ve known have done this as a manipulation and not because their child was not socially/academically ready. These are probably the parents who will hold back their kids no matter what the cut off date is, just for a perceived advantage. For some kids like yours (and mine), waiting an extra year would have made no sense. Both of mine are close to cut off dates. One skipped K so was a very young 5 in 1st grade(stayed in K about a week, then school said they would evaluate for a skip) Through the years, most people could never tell. Like you, I can’t imagine him a year or two behing. When D was in 5th grade, approx. half her class should have been in 6th by age. Maybe kids ARE ready for K, but it seems like they aren’t because too many kids have been held back just to get an advantage.</p>
<p>Mathson could easily have gone to K when he was four, his younger brother would probably have been better off starting at six. I wish schools would look at the kids instead of setting arbitrary dates.</p>