Why don’t schools have stronger policies about redshirting?

[Anonymous]

If you’re trying out for a club team by grade you should really try out for the team you should be in. Maturity and academics have nothing to do with athleticism and it’s unfair for the bubble kids who didn’t get a spot in a tough cut off because multiple kids are 15 months older.

basketball and lax club teams are both by grade level and not affiliated with the school so there’s no reason not to try out with kids more similar in age as your own.

Maybe you see it as whining, I just think it’s cheating the system. If you can’t make it in the actual grade you should be in you didn’t really earn the spot did you?

[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.

Not in our area. I don’t care either way but people should be honest. I have two kids born in March and June and one kid born in November. The spring birthday kids started preschool at 3 years old, then a second year of preschool (prekindergarten) at 4 years old. There was nothing left for them to learn at that level and they were mature. They would have been so bored repeating pre-k, I can’t imagine. The next step was kindergarten, a step they were more than qualified to take.

If I had a child with any kind of delays or difficulties I would have held them back no problem. But I don’t get how a child who is academically advanced at this young age could survive being stuck repeating a year.

Their parents are getting them high quality education enrichment.

What kind of enrichment and why do they need it? What is considered “high quality”. As much as people try to spin it, that’s a lot of repetition in that third year. If the child doesn’t get bored and is having fun that’s a good thing, it worked out. I know my kids would be bored and not happy to see their classmates go to kindergarten and they have to repeat transitional yet again.

I didn’t redshirt but my kid is right after the cut off and basically had the trajectory above — 3 years of preschool (starting with a couple times a week half day and ending with 5 days a week half day). If he had been born before the cut off, I would have happily sent him on time. But a year later, he’s a fluent reader (eg Magic Treehouse) and socially way more confident and secure. And he got an extra year to be a small kid and mostly play and be home.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Sorry but my son (August 30) wasn't ready for K at 5. Maybe if schools were different, he would have been. But he wasn't ready to sit on a laptop 5 hours a day, 30 min recess, he couldn't read yet, still wore a pullup at night. If K had been anything like his high quality, play based Pre-K I would have sent him.

At 6 he was perfectly ready for school. He felt confident and a leader in class. He could read, no pullups. Teachers praised his ability to sit still and control himself all year in K.

FWIW I sent my August dd to school on time. She was ready and school is more designed for girls IMO.

Mine youngest still wears an overnight pullup in 3rd grade. His doctor just shrugs and says some kids take a long time to have dry nights. It has no correlation to cognitive ability, emotional maturity, academic ability or even physical size. That is not a good reason to redshirt. If you were using that as your justification, you were either lying to yourself about the real reason, or badly misinformed.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:No one is here asking whether they should redshirt. The whiners are here saying other people shouldn’t be allowed to, and the parents who redshirt are asking people to get a grip.

Actually the premise of the thread was the idea that redshirting should just be more limited, to summer birthdays. For whatever reasons, people interpreted that view (which I think is reasonable) as anti-redshirting. I get some people believe redshirting should be more expansively allowed, but I am with OP that it should be limited to about 3 months prior to the cutoff, otherwise it just creates this situation here people keep trying to move their kid around to the back of the line to avoid being the youngest. Someone has to be, it's not that big of a deal.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:No one is here asking whether they should redshirt. The whiners are here saying other people shouldn’t be allowed to, and the parents who redshirt are asking people to get a grip.

Actually the premise of the thread was the idea that redshirting should just be more limited, to summer birthdays. For whatever reasons, people interpreted that view (which I think is reasonable) as anti-redshirting. I get some people believe redshirting should be more expansively allowed, but I am with OP that it should be limited to about 3 months prior to the cutoff, otherwise it just creates this situation here people keep trying to move their kid around to the back of the line to avoid being the youngest. Someone has to be, it's not that big of a deal.

If it’s not a big deal to you for your kid to be the youngest, great, don’t redshirt. The real issue of this thread is saying other parents shouldn’t get choices you don’t agree with— even when those choices are protected in law.

[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.

Not in our area. I don’t care either way but people should be honest. I have two kids born in March and June and one kid born in November. The spring birthday kids started preschool at 3 years old, then a second year of preschool (prekindergarten) at 4 years old. There was nothing left for them to learn at that level and they were mature. They would have been so bored repeating pre-k, I can’t imagine. The next step was kindergarten, a step they were more than qualified to take.

If I had a child with any kind of delays or difficulties I would have held them back no problem. But I don’t get how a child who is academically advanced at this young age could survive being stuck repeating a year.

Their parents are getting them high quality education enrichment.

What kind of enrichment and why do they need it? What is considered “high quality”. As much as people try to spin it, that’s a lot of repetition in that third year. If the child doesn’t get bored and is having fun that’s a good thing, it worked out. I know my kids would be bored and not happy to see their classmates go to kindergarten and they have to repeat transitional yet again.

I didn’t redshirt but my kid is right after the cut off and basically had the trajectory above — 3 years of preschool (starting with a couple times a week half day and ending with 5 days a week half day). If he had been born before the cut off, I would have happily sent him on time. But a year later, he’s a fluent reader (eg Magic Treehouse) and socially way more confident and secure. And he got an extra year to be a small kid and mostly play and be home.

He doesn’t get an extra year of being a small kid. He is a kid not in school by parents choice losing a year of academics and being with age appropriate peers. Then, he goes a year later delaying being an adult despite being an adult.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Nobody with a brain wants their kid to be the youngest so this is a game that always has losers.

Many people would prefer this.

Being on the older side:

It makes them more socially mature when can help navigate school situations easier.

All top students end up on accelerated tracks so they just end up at the very highest or beyond accelerated track.

An extra year of AP classes in high school can save a year of college tuition.

Depending on the sport, it can give them an extra year to train and grow before college recruitment.


This idea that kids need to struggle is probably true, however you let them struggle on a highest accelerated track rather than the standard track.

What makes you assume younger kids will not academically achieve? So, you hold the, back, pay an extra year of preschool to pressure them to speed up to skip a year of college. Why skip a year of college?

They aren’t more mature. They are less mature if they are older with younger kids.

[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.

Not in our area. I don’t care either way but people should be honest. I have two kids born in March and June and one kid born in November. The spring birthday kids started preschool at 3 years old, then a second year of preschool (prekindergarten) at 4 years old. There was nothing left for them to learn at that level and they were mature. They would have been so bored repeating pre-k, I can’t imagine. The next step was kindergarten, a step they were more than qualified to take.

If I had a child with any kind of delays or difficulties I would have held them back no problem. But I don’t get how a child who is academically advanced at this young age could survive being stuck repeating a year.

Their parents are getting them high quality education enrichment.

What kind of enrichment and why do they need it? What is considered “high quality”. As much as people try to spin it, that’s a lot of repetition in that third year. If the child doesn’t get bored and is having fun that’s a good thing, it worked out. I know my kids would be bored and not happy to see their classmates go to kindergarten and they have to repeat transitional yet again.

I didn’t redshirt but my kid is right after the cut off and basically had the trajectory above — 3 years of preschool (starting with a couple times a week half day and ending with 5 days a week half day). If he had been born before the cut off, I would have happily sent him on time. But a year later, he’s a fluent reader (eg Magic Treehouse) and socially way more confident and secure. And he got an extra year to be a small kid and mostly play and be home.

He doesn’t get an extra year of being a small kid. He is a kid not in school by parents choice losing a year of academics and being with age appropriate peers. Then, he goes a year later delaying being an adult despite being an adult.

…did you learn that great reading comprehension with your age appropriate peers?

[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.

Not in our area. I don’t care either way but people should be honest. I have two kids born in March and June and one kid born in November. The spring birthday kids started preschool at 3 years old, then a second year of preschool (prekindergarten) at 4 years old. There was nothing left for them to learn at that level and they were mature. They would have been so bored repeating pre-k, I can’t imagine. The next step was kindergarten, a step they were more than qualified to take.

If I had a child with any kind of delays or difficulties I would have held them back no problem. But I don’t get how a child who is academically advanced at this young age could survive being stuck repeating a year.

Their parents are getting them high quality education enrichment.

What kind of enrichment and why do they need it? What is considered “high quality”. As much as people try to spin it, that’s a lot of repetition in that third year. If the child doesn’t get bored and is having fun that’s a good thing, it worked out. I know my kids would be bored and not happy to see their classmates go to kindergarten and they have to repeat transitional yet again.

I didn’t redshirt but my kid is right after the cut off and basically had the trajectory above — 3 years of preschool (starting with a couple times a week half day and ending with 5 days a week half day). If he had been born before the cut off, I would have happily sent him on time. But a year later, he’s a fluent reader (eg Magic Treehouse) and socially way more confident and secure. And he got an extra year to be a small kid and mostly play and be home.

He doesn’t get an extra year of being a small kid. He is a kid not in school by parents choice losing a year of academics and being with age appropriate peers. Then, he goes a year later delaying being an adult despite being an adult.

So what? Why do you even care? Not everyone graduates college at 21/22 for many reasons. There’s more than one way to live.

[Anonymous]

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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.

Not in our area. I don’t care either way but people should be honest. I have two kids born in March and June and one kid born in November. The spring birthday kids started preschool at 3 years old, then a second year of preschool (prekindergarten) at 4 years old. There was nothing left for them to learn at that level and they were mature. They would have been so bored repeating pre-k, I can’t imagine. The next step was kindergarten, a step they were more than qualified to take.

If I had a child with any kind of delays or difficulties I would have held them back no problem. But I don’t get how a child who is academically advanced at this young age could survive being stuck repeating a year.

Their parents are getting them high quality education enrichment.

What kind of enrichment and why do they need it? What is considered “high quality”. As much as people try to spin it, that’s a lot of repetition in that third year. If the child doesn’t get bored and is having fun that’s a good thing, it worked out. I know my kids would be bored and not happy to see their classmates go to kindergarten and they have to repeat transitional yet again.

I didn’t redshirt but my kid is right after the cut off and basically had the trajectory above — 3 years of preschool (starting with a couple times a week half day and ending with 5 days a week half day). If he had been born before the cut off, I would have happily sent him on time. But a year later, he’s a fluent reader (eg Magic Treehouse) and socially way more confident and secure. And he got an extra year to be a small kid and mostly play and be home.

He doesn’t get an extra year of being a small kid. He is a kid not in school by parents choice losing a year of academics and being with age appropriate peers. Then, he goes a year later delaying being an adult despite being an adult.

You are unhinged. You’ve got to be the weirdo with adult kids constantly posting to these threads

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Nobody with a brain wants their kid to be the youngest so this is a game that always has losers.

Many people would prefer this.

Being on the older side:

It makes them more socially mature when can help navigate school situations easier.

All top students end up on accelerated tracks so they just end up at the very highest or beyond accelerated track.

An extra year of AP classes in high school can save a year of college tuition.

Depending on the sport, it can give them an extra year to train and grow before college recruitment.


This idea that kids need to struggle is probably true, however you let them struggle on a highest accelerated track rather than the standard track.

What makes you assume younger kids will not academically achieve? So, you hold the, back, pay an extra year of preschool to pressure them to speed up to skip a year of college. Why skip a year of college?

They aren’t more mature. They are less mature if they are older with younger kids.

Just as an example, my kid was already 2 years ahead academically and then we redshirted and now 3+ years ahead academically. It didn’t slow him down at all because he would always need acceleration. What the class covers would never be helpful.

[Anonymous]

If you have a normal, bright child, then redshirting seems crazy. They're going to be bored repeating the same grade, they should be with children at similar maturity levels and you're going to give the kid an inferiority complex. They're going to wonder why they were held back when kids who are the same age moved ahead.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If you have a normal, bright child, then redshirting seems crazy. They're going to be bored repeating the same grade, they should be with children at similar maturity levels and you're going to give the kid an inferiority complex. They're going to wonder why they were held back when kids who are the same age moved ahead.

The weirdest thing is redshirting your kid because they're "small." What? We're not fish. No one is going to eat your child because they were physically smaller than the others. Kids grow at different rates.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If you have a normal, bright child, then redshirting seems crazy. They're going to be bored repeating the same grade, they should be with children at similar maturity levels and you're going to give the kid an inferiority complex. They're going to wonder why they were held back when kids who are the same age moved ahead.

Do you think parents don’t talk to bright four and five year olds? If you ask my daughter why she is in preK another year she’ll tell you it’s to learn more of her second language and do more global travel. She’s not weeping about being “held back”

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If you have a normal, bright child, then redshirting seems crazy. They're going to be bored repeating the same grade, they should be with children at similar maturity levels and you're going to give the kid an inferiority complex. They're going to wonder why they were held back when kids who are the same age moved ahead.

Do you think parents don’t talk to bright four and five year olds? If you ask my daughter why she is in preK another year she’ll tell you it’s to learn more of her second language and do more global travel. She’s not weeping about being “held back”

Are you seriously asking me to take a preschooler's word for it?