Summer b-day - Is it better to be the youngest child in the class or the oldest?

[Anonymous]

Does Sidwell do a lot of redshirting?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Does Sidwell do a lot of redshirting?

Info from Sidwell website below. Seems pretty clear and strict.

What are the age requirements for applicants?

We have an age requirement at our Lower School and use September 1 as our birthday cutoff. Your child must meet the age requirement for the grade to which he/she is applying. For applicants for the 2010-2011 academic year, please refer to the dates below for guidance.
Grade Age Born Before
PK 4 9/1/2006
K 5 9/1/2005
1 6 9/1/2004
2 7 9/1/2003
3 8 9/1/2002
4 9 9/1/2001

[Anonymous]

Thank you.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:A lot of the available literature suggest it's good to hold a boy back and let the girl move forward. For a boy -- it always helps to be taller/bigger. Check out the book "Outliers".

I would never use the book the "Outliers" to suggest anything regarding redshirting. It simply doens't stand up to scientific scrutiny. The book has been criticized over and over again for its small sample size (which lacks reliability) and for what many believe to be a thinly veiled autobiographical attempt to explain his own successes.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:A lot of the available literature suggest it's good to hold a boy back and let the girl move forward. For a boy -- it always helps to be taller/bigger. Check out the book "Outliers".

I would never use the book the "Outliers" to suggest anything regarding redshirting. It simply doens't stand up to scientific scrutiny. The book has been criticized over and over again for its small sample size (which lacks reliability) and for what many believe to be a thinly veiled autobiographical attempt to explain his own successes.

Not to go too off-topic, but I think that criticism sort of misses the point of Gladwell's books. He's not trying to do independent research or scientific study -- instead, he weaves together discussions of several fairly dense and difficult research studies, points to possible links between different studies, and then tries to draw "life lessons" from those interconnections. I'm not sure how anyone could criticize his entire book (or all his books?) for "small sample size" because the sample size of every underlying study was probably different (some big and some small). And of course it's autobiographical -- I think he explicitly says that in either the intro or the conclusion (or both). I guess my point is that Gladwell's books are not meant to be "hard science," but rather more thematic and philosophic (sort of like Thomas Friedman's books).

I wasn't going to chime in on the Gladwell point, but I just happened to run across the item below this morning. I think it's the underlying study on hockey players that Gladwell used to form the basis of that chapter in Outliers. (I'm not certain it's the right study, and I don't have a copy of Gladwell's book to confirm, but how many studies on of age effects on minor-league Canadian hockey can there be?)

Barnsley, R. H., and A. H. Thompson. 1988. Birthdate and Success in Minor Hockey: The Key to the NHL. Canadian Journal of Behavioral Science, 20(2): 167–76. (http://www.socialproblemindex.ualberta.ca/RelAgeMinorHockeyCJBS.pdf)

By the way, to be clear, I'm not trying to express an opinion on whether OP should push her child to school early or hold the child back. That's OP's decision. Maybe she'll find some useful guidance in the hockey article.

[Anonymous]

I really have no idea how the hockey research study pertains to the average child. If athletics are uber important to you and you think your child may eventually play professional athletics, maybe redshirting makes sense. But for the other 99.99% of the population, I don't really see how it applies.

[Anonymous]

My sort of hazy recollection of Outliers is that Gladwell used the hockey research as part of a larger discussion about why some people happen to find more success in life than others. If I recall correctly, his point was that success often is not merely luck-of-the-draw, and can sometimes stem from systemic advantages that certain people enjoy. One example he used was that the most successful hockey players in Canada consistently happen to be the kids that were fortunate enough to be born right before the age cut-off for competitive hockey leagues, and thus enjoyed the inherent advantage of being more physically mature than other younger players. Since they were more physically mature, those players were more confident, got more playing/practice time, developed skills faster, and so forth in a domino-effect.

What does this hockey research have to do with redshirting in schools grade school? I think the parallel thinking is that if kids are older than most of their classmates, they may get certain advantages, such as being more socially adept, more confident, getting more/better attention from teachers, more attention from classmates, understanding the academic material easier, etc.

To be clear, I have no idea whether redshirting is a successful strategy for giving kids a competitive advantage, and I think the research is all over the map on that question. It also seems to me that most parents considering redshirting are not doing it to give their kids some unfair advantage, but rather to avoid the feared disadvantages associated with being the youngest/smallest in the class.

There are about 6000 pages of debate on DCUM about redshirting, so there's no need to repeat it all here.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for your comments. I still think it's a bad idea, but at least I understand why some people are doing it.

[Anonymous]

I am surprised that no one has already said this -- the schools will make your decision for you. There are many that won't take a summer birthday, regardless of what their official pamphlet says (9/1), UNLESS that kid is a sibling or, I suppose, amazingly bright and poised for a just-turned-5-year-old.

I have a summer birthday boy and was told the above info rather explicitly, yet off-the-record, by Sidwell and Maret and GDS admissions staff. I had to ask pointed questions to get there, though -- at an open house, they'll say differently in front of a crowd.

Now that DS is enrolled somewhere, and you can see the "Who Has a Birthday?" chart on the wall, you can see very easily that there are 1. very few summer birthdays, period, and 2. those that are summer birthdays are older, not younger EXCEPT 3. two younger siblings and one non-sibling female who is like a little Chelsea Clinton, what with her poise and smarts.

(check while you're on tours this fall, you'll see the same thing at multiple schools).

I think OP acknowledged this when she said they would try for preK (young) and if that was a non-starter, then try again for K (eldest). You'll get good feedback after that preK admissions season!