Why don’t schools have stronger policies about redshirting?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This all seems very backwards. You want your kid to be the youngest. They will learn the most. The older kids will be bored.

Montessoris often have mixed age classrooms. They'll put first, second and third graders all in the same classroom. They do it so the younger kids learn from the older ones.

+1

It's totally normal at Montessori's to have six, seven, eight and nine year olds in the same class. No one bats at eye at some kids being 3.5 years younger than other kids in their classroom.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Because it doesn’t make a difference for the school. Kids testing well in whatever grade they are in is what matters.

These kids who are held back don’t test well. Who would hold back a child born in March if they were academically advanced. No one. My Boston area suburb had cut off dates of December 31 and the only one held back were some boys with immaturity or learning disabilities. A typical case of holding back was my brother who was born in October. He had learning disabilities and had to repeat first grade. I don’t think it was something that was done for no reason. The schools were in charge not the parents with regard to being held back. It was not a desirable thing to have to do.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This all seems very backwards. You want your kid to be the youngest. They will learn the most. The older kids will be bored.

Montessoris often have mixed age classrooms. They'll put first, second and third graders all in the same classroom. They do it so the younger kids learn from the older ones.

+1

It's totally normal at Montessori's to have six, seven, eight and nine year olds in the same class. No one bats at eye at some kids being 3.5 years younger than other kids in their classroom.

That would make sense for Montessori’s because their method is different than a typical academic school.

[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.

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.

Ok— once again, share the data on how redshirted fourth graders show such adverse emotional and social outcomes. At least 30 years of available data.

Congrats! You get the award for the most obtuse person on DCUM.

So…nothing. Just your hurt feelings.

Eh, it just seems like a moronic request.

If you say so, but a very quick google shows a pretty sizable body of data on the benefits of being older. So this assertion that there’s all sorts of problems seems…fake.

https://ohiofamiliesengage.osu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Redshirting-Kindergarten.pdf

What’s interesting is the best “there may be drawbacks” article you could find still concludes that it should be up to the parents whether to redshirt a student. I agree with that conclusion.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This all seems very backwards. You want your kid to be the youngest. They will learn the most. The older kids will be bored.

Montessoris often have mixed age classrooms. They'll put first, second and third graders all in the same classroom. They do it so the younger kids learn from the older ones.

+1

It's totally normal at Montessori's to have six, seven, eight and nine year olds in the same class. No one bats at eye at some kids being 3.5 years younger than other kids in their classroom.

It's very amusing to hear y'all complaining about your child being *slightly* younger than other kids in their grade. My child is a month younger than everyone else! The horror!

[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.

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.

Ok— once again, share the data on how redshirted fourth graders show such adverse emotional and social outcomes. At least 30 years of available data.

Congrats! You get the award for the most obtuse person on DCUM.

So…nothing. Just your hurt feelings.

Eh, it just seems like a moronic request.

If you say so, but a very quick google shows a pretty sizable body of data on the benefits of being older. So this assertion that there’s all sorts of problems seems…fake.

https://ohiofamiliesengage.osu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Redshirting-Kindergarten.pdf

What’s interesting is the best “there may be drawbacks” article you could find still concludes that it should be up to the parents whether to redshirt a student. I agree with that conclusion.

"No one has conducted a true randomized trial related to redshirting."

Shrug emoji!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The redshirt debate is so dumb. The advantages are highly exaggerated. No one is going to think your kid is super smart because they repeated a grade. And your kid may feel self conscious and embarrassed by being older than everyone else for the rest of their time in school (not to mention being incredibly bored having to repeat a grade).

Lol no. The only people who have a problem are people like OP who think they made a mistake or missed out. It’s all upside for redshirters.

I’ve seen it go sideways in athletics with kids who were used to cruising by being the stars in elementary and when some of the younger kids came out ahead post puberty they struggled not being the best on the team and didn’t have the grit and work ethic to keep up and dropped altogether. I saw that even in 4/5 grade when kids started evening out.

Same for academics.

If you are truly gifted, then redshirting can give you that edge to be a champion. But that needs to overcome the challenge of not being challenged in your grade level program.

No- if you’re truly gifted you be a champion even if you’re the youngest.

If you are not truly gifted, but redshirting for edge, then redshirting is just delaying inevitable lackluster performance.

Lackluster kids are always lackluster.

If you are holding back a year because you aren't mature enough for the original assigned grade, you'll thrive.

Immature kids are always immature.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Because it doesn’t make a difference for the school. Kids testing well in whatever grade they are in is what matters.

Yah but it seems like a short term solution. I’m thinking of my own kids who are not at the top of their class with testing and it seems like they might do well for one year repeating the curriculum they already learned and then drop back to the same percentiles they are “naturally” at. I wouldn’t expect them to suddenly be acing everything.

Being older is advantage from an attention standpoint and other developmental factors and that can factor info confidence and love of learning. To your point though, it’s not going to make a child smarter. That sad, success in school is not solely based on IQ and that’s where attention and developmental factors can be important.

[Anonymous]

To all the pro-RS people claiming their choice doesn’t affect anyone else’s kid—of course it does! It turns young kids who are sent on time into even more of an outlier if some of the kids are over 12 months older. So parents who don’t want to red shirt very much have a stake in the choice other parents on their community make.

I am so thankful that red shirting is uncommon in my area. My summer birthday son is petite for his age but academically advanced and was so ready to go to kindergarten at 5, and I’m glad that there are other boys similar to him in his class and no boys who are 12+ months older than him.

[Anonymous]

We are in a good school pyramid in fcps and at our school most go on time. Even a late September birthday boy from another county on time.

The boys or girls that are redshirted are mostly autistic or other 2E

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:5 year olds (and 4.9 year olds) are mature enough to start kindergarten, it is only when 6 year olds join KG, water gets muddied! I support the hard cut-off rule.
I think the baseline for maturity is getting skewed big time by older children in kindergarten. Parents who want to cheat will find a way to cheat and it is getting out of hand.

Only poor ones though. Private schools do not think “4.9” year olds are mature enough for kindergarten. Amazing what poverty does to make children ready to learn right?!?

4.9 year olds are absolutely in private schools. But they have extended PK and transitional K classrooms for younger kids. The idea the 4 and 5 year olds aren't old enough for classrooms is just incorrect, and private schools agree. At the most elite privates, children have generally been in some kind of organized classroom for 2-4 years by the time they enter K.

The preference for redshirting in private schools is driven by a desire to have kids all at a minimum academic level prior to starting K, to make it easier for teachers at each level and to enable more accelerated curriculum. If all children have basic reading skills at the beginning of K, it enables you to do all kinds of additional academic enrichment not only in K but at every level,because stronger reading skills enable kids to accelerated in math, science, and social studies as well. To get kids to this level, they generally have to go to school. It's called pre-K or transitional K, but often the curriculum is no different from a K classroom in a public school.

Meanwhile, redshirting in publics does not have this benefit, because it's disjointed and you will still have kids starting K without basic reading and other academic skills. When redshirting is done by parent choice instead of school initiative, it's totally divorced from the school's goals and curriculum. Plus publics have to take all comers, so they will be accommodating kids at all academic levels no matter what. Redshirting serves no real purpose in public and redshirted kids may receive no additional support during their redshirted year to get them up to a certain academic level. And even if they do, they will have peers who aren't at that level so it won't matter. Teachers will still have to differentiate and classrooms will focus on the on-grade coursework and bringing kids who are before grade level up to grade level.

So no, redshirting in private schools is not about a superior understanding of how 6 year olds are better suited to K. It has to do with establishing an academic minimum to facilitate more homogenous classes and ease of teaching.

- private school teacher

I think you need to read more carefully— I didn’t they’re not in private preK or not ready for some sort of classroom— I said private school doesn’t put four year olds in K.

The private schools we visited in NoVA all cited six as a preferred developmental age which yields better educational outcomes, but of course it’s possible that your school chooses six for different reasons.

It’s both what OP said and the fact that it is easier to accelerate when kids are starting K at an older age. Take something like holding a pencil - most children will not be able to do the correct grip until 5. If kids are struggling to hold their pencils you can’t easily practice writing and writing and reading are important to all other subjects and accelerating the curriculum. Attention and stamina are also more of an issue with younger children. And most privates in DC, NYC, Boston, etc. don’t say start K at 6. They basically follow a formula of the child should turn 6 either the summer before or well in K, so kids whose birthdays are between September- May will turn 6 during the K school year and summer birthdays will turn 6 prior to the K school year. My children’s NY private school (PK-12) will not allow a spring (March -May) birthday to apply as a redshirt unless there are lots of extenuating circumstances (e.g., end of May birthday and exceptionally shy and that is apparent in interview, play date, and teacher reccs). I’ve never heard of parents trying to redshirt Feb, March, or April birthdays in the wild: it’s just on DCUM.

[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.

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.

Ok— once again, share the data on how redshirted fourth graders show such adverse emotional and social outcomes. At least 30 years of available data.

Congrats! You get the award for the most obtuse person on DCUM.

So…nothing. Just your hurt feelings.

Eh, it just seems like a moronic request.

If you say so, but a very quick google shows a pretty sizable body of data on the benefits of being older. So this assertion that there’s all sorts of problems seems…fake.

https://ohiofamiliesengage.osu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Redshirting-Kindergarten.pdf

What’s interesting is the best “there may be drawbacks” article you could find still concludes that it should be up to the parents whether to redshirt a student. I agree with that conclusion.

Ask Perplexity or ChatGPT what the academic consensus is on redshirting. Spoiler alert: It's not positive.

[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.

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.

Ok— once again, share the data on how redshirted fourth graders show such adverse emotional and social outcomes. At least 30 years of available data.

Congrats! You get the award for the most obtuse person on DCUM.

So…nothing. Just your hurt feelings.

Eh, it just seems like a moronic request.

If you say so, but a very quick google shows a pretty sizable body of data on the benefits of being older. So this assertion that there’s all sorts of problems seems…fake.

https://ohiofamiliesengage.osu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Redshirting-Kindergarten.pdf

What’s interesting is the best “there may be drawbacks” article you could find still concludes that it should be up to the parents whether to redshirt a student. I agree with that conclusion.

Ask Perplexity or ChatGPT what the academic consensus is on redshirting. Spoiler alert: It's not positive.

Cool! Maybe that settles it for the anti crowd. They can calm down and let others ruin their kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:To all the pro-RS people claiming their choice doesn’t affect anyone else’s kid—of course it does! It turns young kids who are sent on time into even more of an outlier if some of the kids are over 12 months older. So parents who don’t want to red shirt very much have a stake in the choice other parents on their community make.

I am so thankful that red shirting is uncommon in my area. My summer birthday son is petite for his age but academically advanced and was so ready to go to kindergarten at 5, and I’m glad that there are other boys similar to him in his class and no boys who are 12+ months older than him.

And if that is something you want to avoid, you have the same degree of parental choices as everyone else. My September birthday was in class with someone 12+ months older than her this year and as I mentioned I didn’t know that until well after the school year ended because normal parents make decisions for their kids unrelated to the choices of other parents.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This all seems very backwards. You want your kid to be the youngest. They will learn the most. The older kids will be bored.

Montessoris often have mixed age classrooms. They'll put first, second and third graders all in the same classroom. They do it so the younger kids learn from the older ones.

+1

It's totally normal at Montessori's to have six, seven, eight and nine year olds in the same class. No one bats at eye at some kids being 3.5 years younger than other kids in their classroom.

It's been our experience that mixed classrooms tend to benefit younger kids more than older kids.