Why don’t schools have stronger policies about redshirting?

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:If you redshirt your kids, the other kids will figure out what age your child is (most likely your child will simply tell them) and therefore their parents will too. It's less that people are cataloguing the ages and birthdays of every child and more that when you encounter an 8 year old in 1st or a 10 yr old in 3rd, it is notable, and kids and adults alike will share that info.

The fact that people discover this does not make them creepy stalkers. Again, usually this information is learned from the child themselves when they tell other kids what their age is, which is a very normal thing for kids to share with one another.

You can't control other people finding out and you can't control how they will feel about it when they do. Proceed accordingly.

+1, most talk about it and are proud to be old

Exactly. It's often a point of pride for kids in younger grades to be the oldest, so the redshirted kids get revealed very quickly. This can also be where the resentment starts, if you've got a redshirted kid in the classroom boasting about being the oldest. It's meaningless but it draws attention to it in a negative way.

If you redshirt, talk to your kids about how being a year older or younger isn't important. Make sure they understand that being older doesn't make them better, and find a way to explain why you redshirted that doesn't put other kids down. You don't want your redshirted kid lording it over other children.

TBH it's more likely that they will be uncomfortable and self conscious about being older than everyone else, like they're too old to be in the grade they're in.

Let us know how it goes when the other children make fun of your kid for being too old to be in his or her grade.

Because it will never happen.

said the person who has literally never met a child

How would the kids know what “too old” was unless psycho mom had a sit down and talked about it? Real kids only care about who’s birthday is next and if they are going to the party.

This is a strange world you live in where the moms know the ages of literally hundreds of children at their kids' schools, but the kids have no idea how old anyone is or what grade you're supposed to be in each grade.

There is no correct age per grade since school year isn’t the calendar year. Kids have birthdays all year round.

Have fun explaining that to all the kids at school.

Do you have any kids in school? It’s a non issue.

Pfft. If you have a kid who is older than some children in the grade ahead of them, the other kids will sniff that out in about three seconds and the entire grade will know within days. Some will think it's cool. Some won't care. Some will ask what is wrong with you.

The redshirted kid with be a year older than their peers forever. Elementary school. Middle school. High school. College. It will always be an issue, to varying degrees.

You do realize that college students vary wildly in age, right? Kids take a gap year between HS and college. Kids transfer colleges and their credits might not always transfer exactly. They take a year off for health reasons, or they join the military and have to take time off for training or because they actually get deployed. Or they have a kid! Allll kinds of stuff happens. Even throughout K-12 school, different areas have different cutoffs. The places that start school early in early-mid August in the Midwest and the South often have 7/30 cutoffs. The August and September birthday kids (and there are a lot, these are some of the most common birthdays of the year) didn’t meet the cutoff where they started school.

Ok, Spock, but were you never a child? It's easy to say "'don't sweat it" when you're a middle aged parent with the benefit of experience and hindsight and you don't actually have to do it. Not sweating it though is an altogether different matter when you're young and in the thick of it. If you can't see why a child would be self conscious about being older than all of their peers, then I don't know what to tell you other than you're just being willfully blind.

Hey Ashley, this is a you problem and nothing else.

I know it's probably hard, if you're a parent redshirting a child, to acknowledge that you're causing a lot more problems for your kid than you're solving (and so unnecessarily!), but don't say no one warned you.

Redshirting has been a thing in affluent areas at least since I was in elementary school in the 90s. Show any data about its “problems” please.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:If you redshirt your kids, the other kids will figure out what age your child is (most likely your child will simply tell them) and therefore their parents will too. It's less that people are cataloguing the ages and birthdays of every child and more that when you encounter an 8 year old in 1st or a 10 yr old in 3rd, it is notable, and kids and adults alike will share that info.

The fact that people discover this does not make them creepy stalkers. Again, usually this information is learned from the child themselves when they tell other kids what their age is, which is a very normal thing for kids to share with one another.

You can't control other people finding out and you can't control how they will feel about it when they do. Proceed accordingly.

+1, most talk about it and are proud to be old

Exactly. It's often a point of pride for kids in younger grades to be the oldest, so the redshirted kids get revealed very quickly. This can also be where the resentment starts, if you've got a redshirted kid in the classroom boasting about being the oldest. It's meaningless but it draws attention to it in a negative way.

If you redshirt, talk to your kids about how being a year older or younger isn't important. Make sure they understand that being older doesn't make them better, and find a way to explain why you redshirted that doesn't put other kids down. You don't want your redshirted kid lording it over other children.

TBH it's more likely that they will be uncomfortable and self conscious about being older than everyone else, like they're too old to be in the grade they're in.

Let us know how it goes when the other children make fun of your kid for being too old to be in his or her grade.

Because it will never happen.

said the person who has literally never met a child

How would the kids know what “too old” was unless psycho mom had a sit down and talked about it? Real kids only care about who’s birthday is next and if they are going to the party.

This is a strange world you live in where the moms know the ages of literally hundreds of children at their kids' schools, but the kids have no idea how old anyone is or what grade you're supposed to be in each grade.

There is no correct age per grade since school year isn’t the calendar year. Kids have birthdays all year round.

Have fun explaining that to all the kids at school.

Do you have any kids in school? It’s a non issue.

Pfft. If you have a kid who is older than some children in the grade ahead of them, the other kids will sniff that out in about three seconds and the entire grade will know within days. Some will think it's cool. Some won't care. Some will ask what is wrong with you.

The redshirted kid with be a year older than their peers forever. Elementary school. Middle school. High school. College. It will always be an issue, to varying degrees.

You do realize that college students vary wildly in age, right? Kids take a gap year between HS and college. Kids transfer colleges and their credits might not always transfer exactly. They take a year off for health reasons, or they join the military and have to take time off for training or because they actually get deployed. Or they have a kid! Allll kinds of stuff happens. Even throughout K-12 school, different areas have different cutoffs. The places that start school early in early-mid August in the Midwest and the South often have 7/30 cutoffs. The August and September birthday kids (and there are a lot, these are some of the most common birthdays of the year) didn’t meet the cutoff where they started school.

Ok, Spock, but were you never a child? It's easy to say "'don't sweat it" when you're a middle aged parent with the benefit of experience and hindsight and you don't actually have to do it. Not sweating it though is an altogether different matter when you're young and in the thick of it. If you can't see why a child would be self conscious about being older than all of their peers, then I don't know what to tell you other than you're just being willfully blind.

But they aren’t self-conscious about it, that’s the thing. There’s always been redshirting but in the 80s and 90s, it was more for sports. I have a summer birthday and went on time and I had friends a full year older in my same grade, and friends my exact age in the grade below. Honestly it’s more socially annoying and a problem being the youngest in a grade. You’re the last to get a drivers license (probably not as big of a deal these days since fewer kids drive), the last to have those milestone birthdays, you feel immature and behind compared to the held-back summer birthday kids and the fall kids from right after the cutoff. My friend group always skewed young too. The less mature/younger kids find each other early on and then it just compounds on itself.

That's not been my experience at all, as a parent of a kid with a summer birthday. Yes there were challenges, but meeting those challenges resulted in growth. By 3rd grade, I really didn't see a difference in maturity, and at that point kids were no longer self-segregating by youngest and oldest in the grade. I view issues like a child "feeling immature or behind" or watching peers hit milestones first as learning exercises that have helped her develop resilience, determination, patience, and the ability to stop focusing so much on peers and instead just focus on her own growth and progress.

I don't think my kid feels self-conscious about being the youngest. She may have at some point, but she worked through it. Everyone is going to have moments like this in life, times when it feels like you are an outlier in an uncomfortable way. You have to learn how to handle that.

To be clear, I don't have an issue with parents redshirting their kids if they think it's best. But this fear of being the youngest just feels overblown to me. My kid is mature, confident, has plenty of friends (of varying ages), and doesn't feel behind. I don't view being younger on its own as a problem. It's among the less significant challenges you might need to help your child through, IMO. There are other reasons to redshirt but if the main concern is "I don't want my kid to be the youngest," I personally think that's not a particularly compelling reason. It's fine.

Great, now tell us about your summer birthday son since OP has a son and most people here are talking about boys.

Why wouldn't boys also benefit from working through the challenges that come from being the youngest? It seems really reductive and weirdly misandrist to argue that girls can handle and find growth opportunities from being the youngest in the grade but boys can't possibly. Why would that be the case?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What’s the upside to graduating HS at nearly 19? Not everyone is athletic, so spare me that argument.

I’ll tell you why I did it. My kid has a July birthday and has autism. He only started speaking at age 4 and was very behind his peers socially and academically. The extra year in preschool was fundamental in learning better social skills and even gaining confidence to advocate for himself in doing things like raise his hand to ask to go to the bathroom.

He has currently has friends in school and thrived when we sent him to K despite struggling with overly rigid thinking in the beginning of the school year. He would have been melting down every day if we had sent him on time.

Sometimes kids really do need a chance to mature a little bit. Don’t be so judgmental.

july doesn’t count!

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:If you redshirt your kids, the other kids will figure out what age your child is (most likely your child will simply tell them) and therefore their parents will too. It's less that people are cataloguing the ages and birthdays of every child and more that when you encounter an 8 year old in 1st or a 10 yr old in 3rd, it is notable, and kids and adults alike will share that info.

The fact that people discover this does not make them creepy stalkers. Again, usually this information is learned from the child themselves when they tell other kids what their age is, which is a very normal thing for kids to share with one another.

You can't control other people finding out and you can't control how they will feel about it when they do. Proceed accordingly.

+1, most talk about it and are proud to be old

Exactly. It's often a point of pride for kids in younger grades to be the oldest, so the redshirted kids get revealed very quickly. This can also be where the resentment starts, if you've got a redshirted kid in the classroom boasting about being the oldest. It's meaningless but it draws attention to it in a negative way.

If you redshirt, talk to your kids about how being a year older or younger isn't important. Make sure they understand that being older doesn't make them better, and find a way to explain why you redshirted that doesn't put other kids down. You don't want your redshirted kid lording it over other children.

TBH it's more likely that they will be uncomfortable and self conscious about being older than everyone else, like they're too old to be in the grade they're in.

Let us know how it goes when the other children make fun of your kid for being too old to be in his or her grade.

Because it will never happen.

said the person who has literally never met a child

How would the kids know what “too old” was unless psycho mom had a sit down and talked about it? Real kids only care about who’s birthday is next and if they are going to the party.

This is a strange world you live in where the moms know the ages of literally hundreds of children at their kids' schools, but the kids have no idea how old anyone is or what grade you're supposed to be in each grade.

There is no correct age per grade since school year isn’t the calendar year. Kids have birthdays all year round.

Have fun explaining that to all the kids at school.

Do you have any kids in school? It’s a non issue.

Pfft. If you have a kid who is older than some children in the grade ahead of them, the other kids will sniff that out in about three seconds and the entire grade will know within days. Some will think it's cool. Some won't care. Some will ask what is wrong with you.

The redshirted kid with be a year older than their peers forever. Elementary school. Middle school. High school. College. It will always be an issue, to varying degrees.

You do realize that college students vary wildly in age, right? Kids take a gap year between HS and college. Kids transfer colleges and their credits might not always transfer exactly. They take a year off for health reasons, or they join the military and have to take time off for training or because they actually get deployed. Or they have a kid! Allll kinds of stuff happens. Even throughout K-12 school, different areas have different cutoffs. The places that start school early in early-mid August in the Midwest and the South often have 7/30 cutoffs. The August and September birthday kids (and there are a lot, these are some of the most common birthdays of the year) didn’t meet the cutoff where they started school.

Ok, Spock, but were you never a child? It's easy to say "'don't sweat it" when you're a middle aged parent with the benefit of experience and hindsight and you don't actually have to do it. Not sweating it though is an altogether different matter when you're young and in the thick of it. If you can't see why a child would be self conscious about being older than all of their peers, then I don't know what to tell you other than you're just being willfully blind.

But they aren’t self-conscious about it, that’s the thing. There’s always been redshirting but in the 80s and 90s, it was more for sports. I have a summer birthday and went on time and I had friends a full year older in my same grade, and friends my exact age in the grade below. Honestly it’s more socially annoying and a problem being the youngest in a grade. You’re the last to get a drivers license (probably not as big of a deal these days since fewer kids drive), the last to have those milestone birthdays, you feel immature and behind compared to the held-back summer birthday kids and the fall kids from right after the cutoff. My friend group always skewed young too. The less mature/younger kids find each other early on and then it just compounds on itself.

That's not been my experience at all, as a parent of a kid with a summer birthday. Yes there were challenges, but meeting those challenges resulted in growth. By 3rd grade, I really didn't see a difference in maturity, and at that point kids were no longer self-segregating by youngest and oldest in the grade. I view issues like a child "feeling immature or behind" or watching peers hit milestones first as learning exercises that have helped her develop resilience, determination, patience, and the ability to stop focusing so much on peers and instead just focus on her own growth and progress.

I don't think my kid feels self-conscious about being the youngest. She may have at some point, but she worked through it. Everyone is going to have moments like this in life, times when it feels like you are an outlier in an uncomfortable way. You have to learn how to handle that.

To be clear, I don't have an issue with parents redshirting their kids if they think it's best. But this fear of being the youngest just feels overblown to me. My kid is mature, confident, has plenty of friends (of varying ages), and doesn't feel behind. I don't view being younger on its own as a problem. It's among the less significant challenges you might need to help your child through, IMO. There are other reasons to redshirt but if the main concern is "I don't want my kid to be the youngest," I personally think that's not a particularly compelling reason. It's fine.

Great, now tell us about your summer birthday son since OP has a son and most people here are talking about boys.

Why wouldn't boys also benefit from working through the challenges that come from being the youngest? It seems really reductive and weirdly misandrist to argue that girls can handle and find growth opportunities from being the youngest in the grade but boys can't possibly. Why would that be the case?

So you’re saying boys and girls are exactly the same?

[Anonymous]

My kid has been fine but he’s huge for his age and already 5’ tall! But sadly a lot of his peers end up dropping back because the gap is too big and they can’t keep up. I just think this wouldn’t happen if people weren’t redshirting outside of the summer months.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:If you redshirt your kids, the other kids will figure out what age your child is (most likely your child will simply tell them) and therefore their parents will too. It's less that people are cataloguing the ages and birthdays of every child and more that when you encounter an 8 year old in 1st or a 10 yr old in 3rd, it is notable, and kids and adults alike will share that info.

The fact that people discover this does not make them creepy stalkers. Again, usually this information is learned from the child themselves when they tell other kids what their age is, which is a very normal thing for kids to share with one another.

You can't control other people finding out and you can't control how they will feel about it when they do. Proceed accordingly.

+1, most talk about it and are proud to be old

Exactly. It's often a point of pride for kids in younger grades to be the oldest, so the redshirted kids get revealed very quickly. This can also be where the resentment starts, if you've got a redshirted kid in the classroom boasting about being the oldest. It's meaningless but it draws attention to it in a negative way.

If you redshirt, talk to your kids about how being a year older or younger isn't important. Make sure they understand that being older doesn't make them better, and find a way to explain why you redshirted that doesn't put other kids down. You don't want your redshirted kid lording it over other children.

TBH it's more likely that they will be uncomfortable and self conscious about being older than everyone else, like they're too old to be in the grade they're in.

Let us know how it goes when the other children make fun of your kid for being too old to be in his or her grade.

Because it will never happen.

said the person who has literally never met a child

How would the kids know what “too old” was unless psycho mom had a sit down and talked about it? Real kids only care about who’s birthday is next and if they are going to the party.

This is a strange world you live in where the moms know the ages of literally hundreds of children at their kids' schools, but the kids have no idea how old anyone is or what grade you're supposed to be in each grade.

There is no correct age per grade since school year isn’t the calendar year. Kids have birthdays all year round.

Have fun explaining that to all the kids at school.

Do you have any kids in school? It’s a non issue.

Pfft. If you have a kid who is older than some children in the grade ahead of them, the other kids will sniff that out in about three seconds and the entire grade will know within days. Some will think it's cool. Some won't care. Some will ask what is wrong with you.

The redshirted kid with be a year older than their peers forever. Elementary school. Middle school. High school. College. It will always be an issue, to varying degrees.

You do realize that college students vary wildly in age, right? Kids take a gap year between HS and college. Kids transfer colleges and their credits might not always transfer exactly. They take a year off for health reasons, or they join the military and have to take time off for training or because they actually get deployed. Or they have a kid! Allll kinds of stuff happens. Even throughout K-12 school, different areas have different cutoffs. The places that start school early in early-mid August in the Midwest and the South often have 7/30 cutoffs. The August and September birthday kids (and there are a lot, these are some of the most common birthdays of the year) didn’t meet the cutoff where they started school.

Ok, Spock, but were you never a child? It's easy to say "'don't sweat it" when you're a middle aged parent with the benefit of experience and hindsight and you don't actually have to do it. Not sweating it though is an altogether different matter when you're young and in the thick of it. If you can't see why a child would be self conscious about being older than all of their peers, then I don't know what to tell you other than you're just being willfully blind.

Hey Ashley, this is a you problem and nothing else.

I know it's probably hard, if you're a parent redshirting a child, to acknowledge that you're causing a lot more problems for your kid than you're solving (and so unnecessarily!), but don't say no one warned you.

Redshirting has been a thing in affluent areas at least since I was in elementary school in the 90s. Show any data about its “problems” please.

DP but the biggest problem with redshirting is reflected in the continuing debate and controversy over it.

If redshirting were really just about helping a few kids who are on the bubble gain a bit more maturity, I don't think it would be a big issue. It becomes debated because of what people are talking about on the thread now -- this idea that being the youngest, in itself, is a major disadvantage. If this is the reason for redshirting, it's just a snake eating its own tail. For every kid that is redshirted, it creates another kid who needs to be redshirted to avoid being the youngest. We can't redshirt all the kids.

Someone HAS to be the youngest. If that's your reason for redshirting, then it should be banned because there's no way to implement it fairly and it just creates controversy and resentment.

However, if redshirting exists because some kids have social delays or need extra time in PK, then redshirting is fine, since that's not really about age so much as it's about maturity, which can vary by age. But to implement this kind of redshirting, we should probably have some kind of assessment done by the school. Because there are enough people who are just genuinely afraid of their kids being the youngest that they will simply claim their child has maturity issues to avoid it.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If you redshirt your kids, the other kids will figure out what age your child is (most likely your child will simply tell them) and therefore their parents will too. It's less that people are cataloguing the ages and birthdays of every child and more that when you encounter an 8 year old in 1st or a 10 yr old in 3rd, it is notable, and kids and adults alike will share that info.

The fact that people discover this does not make them creepy stalkers. Again, usually this information is learned from the child themselves when they tell other kids what their age is, which is a very normal thing for kids to share with one another.

You can't control other people finding out and you can't control how they will feel about it when they do. Proceed accordingly.

+1, most talk about it and are proud to be old

Exactly. It's often a point of pride for kids in younger grades to be the oldest, so the redshirted kids get revealed very quickly. This can also be where the resentment starts, if you've got a redshirted kid in the classroom boasting about being the oldest. It's meaningless but it draws attention to it in a negative way.

If you redshirt, talk to your kids about how being a year older or younger isn't important. Make sure they understand that being older doesn't make them better, and find a way to explain why you redshirted that doesn't put other kids down. You don't want your redshirted kid lording it over other children.

TBH it's more likely that they will be uncomfortable and self conscious about being older than everyone else, like they're too old to be in the grade they're in.

Let us know how it goes when the other children make fun of your kid for being too old to be in his or her grade.

Because it will never happen.

said the person who has literally never met a child

How would the kids know what “too old” was unless psycho mom had a sit down and talked about it? Real kids only care about who’s birthday is next and if they are going to the party.

This is a strange world you live in where the moms know the ages of literally hundreds of children at their kids' schools, but the kids have no idea how old anyone is or what grade you're supposed to be in each grade.

There is no correct age per grade since school year isn’t the calendar year. Kids have birthdays all year round.

Have fun explaining that to all the kids at school.

Do you have any kids in school? It’s a non issue.

Pfft. If you have a kid who is older than some children in the grade ahead of them, the other kids will sniff that out in about three seconds and the entire grade will know within days. Some will think it's cool. Some won't care. Some will ask what is wrong with you.

The redshirted kid with be a year older than their peers forever. Elementary school. Middle school. High school. College. It will always be an issue, to varying degrees.

You do realize that college students vary wildly in age, right? Kids take a gap year between HS and college. Kids transfer colleges and their credits might not always transfer exactly. They take a year off for health reasons, or they join the military and have to take time off for training or because they actually get deployed. Or they have a kid! Allll kinds of stuff happens. Even throughout K-12 school, different areas have different cutoffs. The places that start school early in early-mid August in the Midwest and the South often have 7/30 cutoffs. The August and September birthday kids (and there are a lot, these are some of the most common birthdays of the year) didn’t meet the cutoff where they started school.

Ok, Spock, but were you never a child? It's easy to say "'don't sweat it" when you're a middle aged parent with the benefit of experience and hindsight and you don't actually have to do it. Not sweating it though is an altogether different matter when you're young and in the thick of it. If you can't see why a child would be self conscious about being older than all of their peers, then I don't know what to tell you other than you're just being willfully blind.

But they aren’t self-conscious about it, that’s the thing. There’s always been redshirting but in the 80s and 90s, it was more for sports. I have a summer birthday and went on time and I had friends a full year older in my same grade, and friends my exact age in the grade below. Honestly it’s more socially annoying and a problem being the youngest in a grade. You’re the last to get a drivers license (probably not as big of a deal these days since fewer kids drive), the last to have those milestone birthdays, you feel immature and behind compared to the held-back summer birthday kids and the fall kids from right after the cutoff. My friend group always skewed young too. The less mature/younger kids find each other early on and then it just compounds on itself.

That's not been my experience at all, as a parent of a kid with a summer birthday. Yes there were challenges, but meeting those challenges resulted in growth. By 3rd grade, I really didn't see a difference in maturity, and at that point kids were no longer self-segregating by youngest and oldest in the grade. I view issues like a child "feeling immature or behind" or watching peers hit milestones first as learning exercises that have helped her develop resilience, determination, patience, and the ability to stop focusing so much on peers and instead just focus on her own growth and progress.

I don't think my kid feels self-conscious about being the youngest. She may have at some point, but she worked through it. Everyone is going to have moments like this in life, times when it feels like you are an outlier in an uncomfortable way. You have to learn how to handle that.

To be clear, I don't have an issue with parents redshirting their kids if they think it's best. But this fear of being the youngest just feels overblown to me. My kid is mature, confident, has plenty of friends (of varying ages), and doesn't feel behind. I don't view being younger on its own as a problem. It's among the less significant challenges you might need to help your child through, IMO. There are other reasons to redshirt but if the main concern is "I don't want my kid to be the youngest," I personally think that's not a particularly compelling reason. It's fine.

Great, now tell us about your summer birthday son since OP has a son and most people here are talking about boys.

Why wouldn't boys also benefit from working through the challenges that come from being the youngest? It seems really reductive and weirdly misandrist to argue that girls can handle and find growth opportunities from being the youngest in the grade but boys can't possibly. Why would that be the case?

So you’re saying boys and girls are exactly the same?

No, they are different in some ways. But you didn't answer my question. Why, specifically, can't boys benefit from working through the challenge of being the youngest? Why can only girls benefit from that but not boys? How do the differences between boys and girls impact this specific issue?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If you redshirt your kids, the other kids will figure out what age your child is (most likely your child will simply tell them) and therefore their parents will too. It's less that people are cataloguing the ages and birthdays of every child and more that when you encounter an 8 year old in 1st or a 10 yr old in 3rd, it is notable, and kids and adults alike will share that info.

The fact that people discover this does not make them creepy stalkers. Again, usually this information is learned from the child themselves when they tell other kids what their age is, which is a very normal thing for kids to share with one another.

You can't control other people finding out and you can't control how they will feel about it when they do. Proceed accordingly.

+1, most talk about it and are proud to be old

Exactly. It's often a point of pride for kids in younger grades to be the oldest, so the redshirted kids get revealed very quickly. This can also be where the resentment starts, if you've got a redshirted kid in the classroom boasting about being the oldest. It's meaningless but it draws attention to it in a negative way.

If you redshirt, talk to your kids about how being a year older or younger isn't important. Make sure they understand that being older doesn't make them better, and find a way to explain why you redshirted that doesn't put other kids down. You don't want your redshirted kid lording it over other children.

TBH it's more likely that they will be uncomfortable and self conscious about being older than everyone else, like they're too old to be in the grade they're in.

Let us know how it goes when the other children make fun of your kid for being too old to be in his or her grade.

Because it will never happen.

said the person who has literally never met a child

How would the kids know what “too old” was unless psycho mom had a sit down and talked about it? Real kids only care about who’s birthday is next and if they are going to the party.

This is a strange world you live in where the moms know the ages of literally hundreds of children at their kids' schools, but the kids have no idea how old anyone is or what grade you're supposed to be in each grade.

There is no correct age per grade since school year isn’t the calendar year. Kids have birthdays all year round.

Have fun explaining that to all the kids at school.

Do you have any kids in school? It’s a non issue.

Pfft. If you have a kid who is older than some children in the grade ahead of them, the other kids will sniff that out in about three seconds and the entire grade will know within days. Some will think it's cool. Some won't care. Some will ask what is wrong with you.

The redshirted kid with be a year older than their peers forever. Elementary school. Middle school. High school. College. It will always be an issue, to varying degrees.

You do realize that college students vary wildly in age, right? Kids take a gap year between HS and college. Kids transfer colleges and their credits might not always transfer exactly. They take a year off for health reasons, or they join the military and have to take time off for training or because they actually get deployed. Or they have a kid! Allll kinds of stuff happens. Even throughout K-12 school, different areas have different cutoffs. The places that start school early in early-mid August in the Midwest and the South often have 7/30 cutoffs. The August and September birthday kids (and there are a lot, these are some of the most common birthdays of the year) didn’t meet the cutoff where they started school.

Ok, Spock, but were you never a child? It's easy to say "'don't sweat it" when you're a middle aged parent with the benefit of experience and hindsight and you don't actually have to do it. Not sweating it though is an altogether different matter when you're young and in the thick of it. If you can't see why a child would be self conscious about being older than all of their peers, then I don't know what to tell you other than you're just being willfully blind.

But they aren’t self-conscious about it, that’s the thing. There’s always been redshirting but in the 80s and 90s, it was more for sports. I have a summer birthday and went on time and I had friends a full year older in my same grade, and friends my exact age in the grade below. Honestly it’s more socially annoying and a problem being the youngest in a grade. You’re the last to get a drivers license (probably not as big of a deal these days since fewer kids drive), the last to have those milestone birthdays, you feel immature and behind compared to the held-back summer birthday kids and the fall kids from right after the cutoff. My friend group always skewed young too. The less mature/younger kids find each other early on and then it just compounds on itself.

That's not been my experience at all, as a parent of a kid with a summer birthday. Yes there were challenges, but meeting those challenges resulted in growth. By 3rd grade, I really didn't see a difference in maturity, and at that point kids were no longer self-segregating by youngest and oldest in the grade. I view issues like a child "feeling immature or behind" or watching peers hit milestones first as learning exercises that have helped her develop resilience, determination, patience, and the ability to stop focusing so much on peers and instead just focus on her own growth and progress.

I don't think my kid feels self-conscious about being the youngest. She may have at some point, but she worked through it. Everyone is going to have moments like this in life, times when it feels like you are an outlier in an uncomfortable way. You have to learn how to handle that.

To be clear, I don't have an issue with parents redshirting their kids if they think it's best. But this fear of being the youngest just feels overblown to me. My kid is mature, confident, has plenty of friends (of varying ages), and doesn't feel behind. I don't view being younger on its own as a problem. It's among the less significant challenges you might need to help your child through, IMO. There are other reasons to redshirt but if the main concern is "I don't want my kid to be the youngest," I personally think that's not a particularly compelling reason. It's fine.

Great, now tell us about your summer birthday son since OP has a son and most people here are talking about boys.

Why wouldn't boys also benefit from working through the challenges that come from being the youngest? It seems really reductive and weirdly misandrist to argue that girls can handle and find growth opportunities from being the youngest in the grade but boys can't possibly. Why would that be the case?

So you’re saying boys and girls are exactly the same?

No, they are different in some ways. But you didn't answer my question. Why, specifically, can't boys benefit from working through the challenge of being the youngest? Why can only girls benefit from that but not boys? How do the differences between boys and girls impact this specific issue?

Who said boys can’t? You said that, nobody else did.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If you redshirt your kids, the other kids will figure out what age your child is (most likely your child will simply tell them) and therefore their parents will too. It's less that people are cataloguing the ages and birthdays of every child and more that when you encounter an 8 year old in 1st or a 10 yr old in 3rd, it is notable, and kids and adults alike will share that info.

The fact that people discover this does not make them creepy stalkers. Again, usually this information is learned from the child themselves when they tell other kids what their age is, which is a very normal thing for kids to share with one another.

You can't control other people finding out and you can't control how they will feel about it when they do. Proceed accordingly.

+1, most talk about it and are proud to be old

Exactly. It's often a point of pride for kids in younger grades to be the oldest, so the redshirted kids get revealed very quickly. This can also be where the resentment starts, if you've got a redshirted kid in the classroom boasting about being the oldest. It's meaningless but it draws attention to it in a negative way.

If you redshirt, talk to your kids about how being a year older or younger isn't important. Make sure they understand that being older doesn't make them better, and find a way to explain why you redshirted that doesn't put other kids down. You don't want your redshirted kid lording it over other children.

TBH it's more likely that they will be uncomfortable and self conscious about being older than everyone else, like they're too old to be in the grade they're in.

Let us know how it goes when the other children make fun of your kid for being too old to be in his or her grade.

Because it will never happen.

said the person who has literally never met a child

How would the kids know what “too old” was unless psycho mom had a sit down and talked about it? Real kids only care about who’s birthday is next and if they are going to the party.

This is a strange world you live in where the moms know the ages of literally hundreds of children at their kids' schools, but the kids have no idea how old anyone is or what grade you're supposed to be in each grade.

There is no correct age per grade since school year isn’t the calendar year. Kids have birthdays all year round.

Have fun explaining that to all the kids at school.

Do you have any kids in school? It’s a non issue.

Pfft. If you have a kid who is older than some children in the grade ahead of them, the other kids will sniff that out in about three seconds and the entire grade will know within days. Some will think it's cool. Some won't care. Some will ask what is wrong with you.

The redshirted kid with be a year older than their peers forever. Elementary school. Middle school. High school. College. It will always be an issue, to varying degrees.

You do realize that college students vary wildly in age, right? Kids take a gap year between HS and college. Kids transfer colleges and their credits might not always transfer exactly. They take a year off for health reasons, or they join the military and have to take time off for training or because they actually get deployed. Or they have a kid! Allll kinds of stuff happens. Even throughout K-12 school, different areas have different cutoffs. The places that start school early in early-mid August in the Midwest and the South often have 7/30 cutoffs. The August and September birthday kids (and there are a lot, these are some of the most common birthdays of the year) didn’t meet the cutoff where they started school.

Ok, Spock, but were you never a child? It's easy to say "'don't sweat it" when you're a middle aged parent with the benefit of experience and hindsight and you don't actually have to do it. Not sweating it though is an altogether different matter when you're young and in the thick of it. If you can't see why a child would be self conscious about being older than all of their peers, then I don't know what to tell you other than you're just being willfully blind.

Hey Ashley, this is a you problem and nothing else.

I know it's probably hard, if you're a parent redshirting a child, to acknowledge that you're causing a lot more problems for your kid than you're solving (and so unnecessarily!), but don't say no one warned you.

Redshirting has been a thing in affluent areas at least since I was in elementary school in the 90s. Show any data about its “problems” please.

It's funny how reluctant we are to flunk children, even when they are not even in the ballpark of being at grade level in things like reading or math, because we worry about the social stigma and what it will do to their confidence and what it will mean for the rest of their lives.

But if we call it "redshirting," instead of "flunking," then people suddenly put quotation marks around the word 'problems' and demand to see academic papers on its supposed downsides.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If you redshirt your kids, the other kids will figure out what age your child is (most likely your child will simply tell them) and therefore their parents will too. It's less that people are cataloguing the ages and birthdays of every child and more that when you encounter an 8 year old in 1st or a 10 yr old in 3rd, it is notable, and kids and adults alike will share that info.

The fact that people discover this does not make them creepy stalkers. Again, usually this information is learned from the child themselves when they tell other kids what their age is, which is a very normal thing for kids to share with one another.

You can't control other people finding out and you can't control how they will feel about it when they do. Proceed accordingly.

+1, most talk about it and are proud to be old

Exactly. It's often a point of pride for kids in younger grades to be the oldest, so the redshirted kids get revealed very quickly. This can also be where the resentment starts, if you've got a redshirted kid in the classroom boasting about being the oldest. It's meaningless but it draws attention to it in a negative way.

If you redshirt, talk to your kids about how being a year older or younger isn't important. Make sure they understand that being older doesn't make them better, and find a way to explain why you redshirted that doesn't put other kids down. You don't want your redshirted kid lording it over other children.

TBH it's more likely that they will be uncomfortable and self conscious about being older than everyone else, like they're too old to be in the grade they're in.

Let us know how it goes when the other children make fun of your kid for being too old to be in his or her grade.

Because it will never happen.

said the person who has literally never met a child

How would the kids know what “too old” was unless psycho mom had a sit down and talked about it? Real kids only care about who’s birthday is next and if they are going to the party.

This is a strange world you live in where the moms know the ages of literally hundreds of children at their kids' schools, but the kids have no idea how old anyone is or what grade you're supposed to be in each grade.

There is no correct age per grade since school year isn’t the calendar year. Kids have birthdays all year round.

Have fun explaining that to all the kids at school.

Do you have any kids in school? It’s a non issue.

Pfft. If you have a kid who is older than some children in the grade ahead of them, the other kids will sniff that out in about three seconds and the entire grade will know within days. Some will think it's cool. Some won't care. Some will ask what is wrong with you.

The redshirted kid with be a year older than their peers forever. Elementary school. Middle school. High school. College. It will always be an issue, to varying degrees.

You do realize that college students vary wildly in age, right? Kids take a gap year between HS and college. Kids transfer colleges and their credits might not always transfer exactly. They take a year off for health reasons, or they join the military and have to take time off for training or because they actually get deployed. Or they have a kid! Allll kinds of stuff happens. Even throughout K-12 school, different areas have different cutoffs. The places that start school early in early-mid August in the Midwest and the South often have 7/30 cutoffs. The August and September birthday kids (and there are a lot, these are some of the most common birthdays of the year) didn’t meet the cutoff where they started school.

Ok, Spock, but were you never a child? It's easy to say "'don't sweat it" when you're a middle aged parent with the benefit of experience and hindsight and you don't actually have to do it. Not sweating it though is an altogether different matter when you're young and in the thick of it. If you can't see why a child would be self conscious about being older than all of their peers, then I don't know what to tell you other than you're just being willfully blind.

Hey Ashley, this is a you problem and nothing else.

I know it's probably hard, if you're a parent redshirting a child, to acknowledge that you're causing a lot more problems for your kid than you're solving (and so unnecessarily!), but don't say no one warned you.

Redshirting has been a thing in affluent areas at least since I was in elementary school in the 90s. Show any data about its “problems” please.

It's funny how reluctant we are to flunk children, even when they are not even in the ballpark of being at grade level in things like reading or math, because we worry about the social stigma and what it will do to their confidence and what it will mean for the rest of their lives.

But if we call it "redshirting," instead of "flunking," then people suddenly put quotation marks around the word 'problems' and demand to see academic papers on its supposed downsides.

Because starting K a year later isn’t the same thing. If your friends see you repeating 4th grade again, it’s a bit different. I would have thought this was obvious.

[Anonymous]

My November born 4 year old started K as required by my jurisdiction (NYC). He seemed fine. Tested off the charts for SHSAT and SAT later on.
He will be starting the London School of Economics this fall as a 17 year old.
As for me, I'm glad to have the kid out of the house.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If you redshirt your kids, the other kids will figure out what age your child is (most likely your child will simply tell them) and therefore their parents will too. It's less that people are cataloguing the ages and birthdays of every child and more that when you encounter an 8 year old in 1st or a 10 yr old in 3rd, it is notable, and kids and adults alike will share that info.

The fact that people discover this does not make them creepy stalkers. Again, usually this information is learned from the child themselves when they tell other kids what their age is, which is a very normal thing for kids to share with one another.

You can't control other people finding out and you can't control how they will feel about it when they do. Proceed accordingly.

+1, most talk about it and are proud to be old

Exactly. It's often a point of pride for kids in younger grades to be the oldest, so the redshirted kids get revealed very quickly. This can also be where the resentment starts, if you've got a redshirted kid in the classroom boasting about being the oldest. It's meaningless but it draws attention to it in a negative way.

If you redshirt, talk to your kids about how being a year older or younger isn't important. Make sure they understand that being older doesn't make them better, and find a way to explain why you redshirted that doesn't put other kids down. You don't want your redshirted kid lording it over other children.

TBH it's more likely that they will be uncomfortable and self conscious about being older than everyone else, like they're too old to be in the grade they're in.

Let us know how it goes when the other children make fun of your kid for being too old to be in his or her grade.

Because it will never happen.

said the person who has literally never met a child

How would the kids know what “too old” was unless psycho mom had a sit down and talked about it? Real kids only care about who’s birthday is next and if they are going to the party.

This is a strange world you live in where the moms know the ages of literally hundreds of children at their kids' schools, but the kids have no idea how old anyone is or what grade you're supposed to be in each grade.

There is no correct age per grade since school year isn’t the calendar year. Kids have birthdays all year round.

Have fun explaining that to all the kids at school.

Do you have any kids in school? It’s a non issue.

Pfft. If you have a kid who is older than some children in the grade ahead of them, the other kids will sniff that out in about three seconds and the entire grade will know within days. Some will think it's cool. Some won't care. Some will ask what is wrong with you.

The redshirted kid with be a year older than their peers forever. Elementary school. Middle school. High school. College. It will always be an issue, to varying degrees.

You do realize that college students vary wildly in age, right? Kids take a gap year between HS and college. Kids transfer colleges and their credits might not always transfer exactly. They take a year off for health reasons, or they join the military and have to take time off for training or because they actually get deployed. Or they have a kid! Allll kinds of stuff happens. Even throughout K-12 school, different areas have different cutoffs. The places that start school early in early-mid August in the Midwest and the South often have 7/30 cutoffs. The August and September birthday kids (and there are a lot, these are some of the most common birthdays of the year) didn’t meet the cutoff where they started school.

Ok, Spock, but were you never a child? It's easy to say "'don't sweat it" when you're a middle aged parent with the benefit of experience and hindsight and you don't actually have to do it. Not sweating it though is an altogether different matter when you're young and in the thick of it. If you can't see why a child would be self conscious about being older than all of their peers, then I don't know what to tell you other than you're just being willfully blind.

But they aren’t self-conscious about it, that’s the thing. There’s always been redshirting but in the 80s and 90s, it was more for sports. I have a summer birthday and went on time and I had friends a full year older in my same grade, and friends my exact age in the grade below. Honestly it’s more socially annoying and a problem being the youngest in a grade. You’re the last to get a drivers license (probably not as big of a deal these days since fewer kids drive), the last to have those milestone birthdays, you feel immature and behind compared to the held-back summer birthday kids and the fall kids from right after the cutoff. My friend group always skewed young too. The less mature/younger kids find each other early on and then it just compounds on itself.

That's not been my experience at all, as a parent of a kid with a summer birthday. Yes there were challenges, but meeting those challenges resulted in growth. By 3rd grade, I really didn't see a difference in maturity, and at that point kids were no longer self-segregating by youngest and oldest in the grade. I view issues like a child "feeling immature or behind" or watching peers hit milestones first as learning exercises that have helped her develop resilience, determination, patience, and the ability to stop focusing so much on peers and instead just focus on her own growth and progress.

I don't think my kid feels self-conscious about being the youngest. She may have at some point, but she worked through it. Everyone is going to have moments like this in life, times when it feels like you are an outlier in an uncomfortable way. You have to learn how to handle that.

To be clear, I don't have an issue with parents redshirting their kids if they think it's best. But this fear of being the youngest just feels overblown to me. My kid is mature, confident, has plenty of friends (of varying ages), and doesn't feel behind. I don't view being younger on its own as a problem. It's among the less significant challenges you might need to help your child through, IMO. There are other reasons to redshirt but if the main concern is "I don't want my kid to be the youngest," I personally think that's not a particularly compelling reason. It's fine.

Great, now tell us about your summer birthday son since OP has a son and most people here are talking about boys.

Why wouldn't boys also benefit from working through the challenges that come from being the youngest? It seems really reductive and weirdly misandrist to argue that girls can handle and find growth opportunities from being the youngest in the grade but boys can't possibly. Why would that be the case?

So you’re saying boys and girls are exactly the same?

No, they are different in some ways. But you didn't answer my question. Why, specifically, can't boys benefit from working through the challenge of being the youngest? Why can only girls benefit from that but not boys? How do the differences between boys and girls impact this specific issue?

Who said boys can’t? You said that, nobody else did.

It was clearly implied. The previous comment was about a child dealign with the challenges inherent in being the youngest and learning and growing and getting through it with success. Nothing about it was gendered. But the response was "well that doesn't count because the child wasn't a boy." But why would being a boy matter in this instance? What is it about boys that renders them incapable of dealign with the challenge of being the youngest?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If you redshirt your kids, the other kids will figure out what age your child is (most likely your child will simply tell them) and therefore their parents will too. It's less that people are cataloguing the ages and birthdays of every child and more that when you encounter an 8 year old in 1st or a 10 yr old in 3rd, it is notable, and kids and adults alike will share that info.

The fact that people discover this does not make them creepy stalkers. Again, usually this information is learned from the child themselves when they tell other kids what their age is, which is a very normal thing for kids to share with one another.

You can't control other people finding out and you can't control how they will feel about it when they do. Proceed accordingly.

+1, most talk about it and are proud to be old

Exactly. It's often a point of pride for kids in younger grades to be the oldest, so the redshirted kids get revealed very quickly. This can also be where the resentment starts, if you've got a redshirted kid in the classroom boasting about being the oldest. It's meaningless but it draws attention to it in a negative way.

If you redshirt, talk to your kids about how being a year older or younger isn't important. Make sure they understand that being older doesn't make them better, and find a way to explain why you redshirted that doesn't put other kids down. You don't want your redshirted kid lording it over other children.

TBH it's more likely that they will be uncomfortable and self conscious about being older than everyone else, like they're too old to be in the grade they're in.

Let us know how it goes when the other children make fun of your kid for being too old to be in his or her grade.

Because it will never happen.

said the person who has literally never met a child

How would the kids know what “too old” was unless psycho mom had a sit down and talked about it? Real kids only care about who’s birthday is next and if they are going to the party.

This is a strange world you live in where the moms know the ages of literally hundreds of children at their kids' schools, but the kids have no idea how old anyone is or what grade you're supposed to be in each grade.

There is no correct age per grade since school year isn’t the calendar year. Kids have birthdays all year round.

Have fun explaining that to all the kids at school.

Do you have any kids in school? It’s a non issue.

Pfft. If you have a kid who is older than some children in the grade ahead of them, the other kids will sniff that out in about three seconds and the entire grade will know within days. Some will think it's cool. Some won't care. Some will ask what is wrong with you.

The redshirted kid with be a year older than their peers forever. Elementary school. Middle school. High school. College. It will always be an issue, to varying degrees.

You do realize that college students vary wildly in age, right? Kids take a gap year between HS and college. Kids transfer colleges and their credits might not always transfer exactly. They take a year off for health reasons, or they join the military and have to take time off for training or because they actually get deployed. Or they have a kid! Allll kinds of stuff happens. Even throughout K-12 school, different areas have different cutoffs. The places that start school early in early-mid August in the Midwest and the South often have 7/30 cutoffs. The August and September birthday kids (and there are a lot, these are some of the most common birthdays of the year) didn’t meet the cutoff where they started school.

Ok, Spock, but were you never a child? It's easy to say "'don't sweat it" when you're a middle aged parent with the benefit of experience and hindsight and you don't actually have to do it. Not sweating it though is an altogether different matter when you're young and in the thick of it. If you can't see why a child would be self conscious about being older than all of their peers, then I don't know what to tell you other than you're just being willfully blind.

Hey Ashley, this is a you problem and nothing else.

I know it's probably hard, if you're a parent redshirting a child, to acknowledge that you're causing a lot more problems for your kid than you're solving (and so unnecessarily!), but don't say no one warned you.

Redshirting has been a thing in affluent areas at least since I was in elementary school in the 90s. Show any data about its “problems” please.

DP but the biggest problem with redshirting is reflected in the continuing debate and controversy over it.

If redshirting were really just about helping a few kids who are on the bubble gain a bit more maturity, I don't think it would be a big issue. It becomes debated because of what people are talking about on the thread now -- this idea that being the youngest, in itself, is a major disadvantage. If this is the reason for redshirting, it's just a snake eating its own tail. For every kid that is redshirted, it creates another kid who needs to be redshirted to avoid being the youngest. We can't redshirt all the kids.

Someone HAS to be the youngest. If that's your reason for redshirting, then it should be banned because there's no way to implement it fairly and it just creates controversy and resentment.

However, if redshirting exists because some kids have social delays or need extra time in PK, then redshirting is fine, since that's not really about age so much as it's about maturity, which can vary by age. But to implement this kind of redshirting, we should probably have some kind of assessment done by the school. Because there are enough people who are just genuinely afraid of their kids being the youngest that they will simply claim their child has maturity issues to avoid it.

Exactly .. the irony of people saying those who don’t red shirt have anxiety … people who do redshirt do so out of anxiety of their kid not measuring up to their peers if they are on the younger side

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If you redshirt your kids, the other kids will figure out what age your child is (most likely your child will simply tell them) and therefore their parents will too. It's less that people are cataloguing the ages and birthdays of every child and more that when you encounter an 8 year old in 1st or a 10 yr old in 3rd, it is notable, and kids and adults alike will share that info.

The fact that people discover this does not make them creepy stalkers. Again, usually this information is learned from the child themselves when they tell other kids what their age is, which is a very normal thing for kids to share with one another.

You can't control other people finding out and you can't control how they will feel about it when they do. Proceed accordingly.

+1, most talk about it and are proud to be old

Exactly. It's often a point of pride for kids in younger grades to be the oldest, so the redshirted kids get revealed very quickly. This can also be where the resentment starts, if you've got a redshirted kid in the classroom boasting about being the oldest. It's meaningless but it draws attention to it in a negative way.

If you redshirt, talk to your kids about how being a year older or younger isn't important. Make sure they understand that being older doesn't make them better, and find a way to explain why you redshirted that doesn't put other kids down. You don't want your redshirted kid lording it over other children.

TBH it's more likely that they will be uncomfortable and self conscious about being older than everyone else, like they're too old to be in the grade they're in.

Let us know how it goes when the other children make fun of your kid for being too old to be in his or her grade.

Because it will never happen.

said the person who has literally never met a child

How would the kids know what “too old” was unless psycho mom had a sit down and talked about it? Real kids only care about who’s birthday is next and if they are going to the party.

This is a strange world you live in where the moms know the ages of literally hundreds of children at their kids' schools, but the kids have no idea how old anyone is or what grade you're supposed to be in each grade.

There is no correct age per grade since school year isn’t the calendar year. Kids have birthdays all year round.

Have fun explaining that to all the kids at school.

Do you have any kids in school? It’s a non issue.

Pfft. If you have a kid who is older than some children in the grade ahead of them, the other kids will sniff that out in about three seconds and the entire grade will know within days. Some will think it's cool. Some won't care. Some will ask what is wrong with you.

The redshirted kid with be a year older than their peers forever. Elementary school. Middle school. High school. College. It will always be an issue, to varying degrees.

You do realize that college students vary wildly in age, right? Kids take a gap year between HS and college. Kids transfer colleges and their credits might not always transfer exactly. They take a year off for health reasons, or they join the military and have to take time off for training or because they actually get deployed. Or they have a kid! Allll kinds of stuff happens. Even throughout K-12 school, different areas have different cutoffs. The places that start school early in early-mid August in the Midwest and the South often have 7/30 cutoffs. The August and September birthday kids (and there are a lot, these are some of the most common birthdays of the year) didn’t meet the cutoff where they started school.

Ok, Spock, but were you never a child? It's easy to say "'don't sweat it" when you're a middle aged parent with the benefit of experience and hindsight and you don't actually have to do it. Not sweating it though is an altogether different matter when you're young and in the thick of it. If you can't see why a child would be self conscious about being older than all of their peers, then I don't know what to tell you other than you're just being willfully blind.

Hey Ashley, this is a you problem and nothing else.

I know it's probably hard, if you're a parent redshirting a child, to acknowledge that you're causing a lot more problems for your kid than you're solving (and so unnecessarily!), but don't say no one warned you.

Redshirting has been a thing in affluent areas at least since I was in elementary school in the 90s. Show any data about its “problems” please.

It's funny how reluctant we are to flunk children, even when they are not even in the ballpark of being at grade level in things like reading or math, because we worry about the social stigma and what it will do to their confidence and what it will mean for the rest of their lives.

But if we call it "redshirting," instead of "flunking," then people suddenly put quotation marks around the word 'problems' and demand to see academic papers on its supposed downsides.

Because starting K a year later isn’t the same thing. If your friends see you repeating 4th grade again, it’s a bit different. I would have thought this was obvious.

The thing about kindergartners is that they eventually become fourth graders, and they'll still be a year older than all their friends, and just in time for them to start becoming self conscious about ways in which they are different from the other kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We live in a very heavy redshirt area. We moved from DC right before kinder. My son is June and his grade is very old. I just found out two more friends are now being held back. He’s incoming first. One has a Feb bday and the other March. Our cut off date is Sep1. They are struggling with reading but the gap is just becoming very large for the kids on time. This is a public school. Right now even with June he’s the youngest boy in the grade. When we started I actually asked admin these questions and they weren’t honest about it and said most went on time born in summer. Once we started I realized almost everyone from March on redshirted so he’s significantly younger. He’s doing fine but I wish the school was honest about it prior to starting as he’s made friends now so it would be a big transition to do it now.

Going back to MARCH?! I have never heard of such a thing barring a strong academic or social reason.

My second grader is a June, started on time, and has at least 4-5 classmates with summer birthdays.

+1 March is insane