what is redshirting?

[Anonymous]

Am I the only one who does not know what this term means? Please clarify. Thanks!

[Anonymous]

Delaying kindergarten entry for a child who meets the age requirements set by the school or state. Usually done for summer bdays when the kinderg deadline is in Sept. Also known as being "held bak".

[Anonymous]

Kids are old enough to start Kindergarten (the minimum age in FCPS is 5 yo, for example). But parents can choose to keep their child out of Kindergarten until the following year so they are 6 yo when entering.

The term comes from college sports. From Wikipedia: In United States college athletics, redshirt is a delay or suspension of an athlete's participation in order to lengthen their period of eligibility.

So the idea is to delay a Kindergartner's school start time by waiting a year.

The topic stirs up a lot of emotion on DCUM.

[Anonymous]

It's not just delaying entry to Kindergarten. Children are redshirted going into middle school or high school as well.

In areas where there are "pre-first" programs, redshirting can be used to describe the K-Pre1st-1st route rather than K-1st.

Essentially, any time when a parent chose to retain or hold out a child rather than a school flunking a child.

[Anonymous]

I was going to say. I thought a child can be redshirted any year.

[Anonymous]

It has no consistent definition when it comes to 5 yr olds. It's clumsily derived from college sports:

In United States college athletics, redshirt is a delay or suspension of an athlete's participation in order to lengthen their period of eligibility. Typically, a student's athletic eligibility in a given sport is four seasons, a number derived from the four years of academic classes that are normally required to obtain a bachelor's degree at an American college or university. However, in a redshirt year, student athletes may attend classes at the college or university, practice with an athletic team, and dress for play but may not compete in games. Using this mechanism, a student athlete has up to five academic years to use the four years of eligibility, thus becoming a fifth-year senior.

[Anonymous]

Holding your child back to try and give them an age advantage. So instead of sending your 5.5 yr old to K, you hold them back a year and send them when they are 6.5 in the hopes that they will be the oldest and that will advantage them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:So instead of sending your 4.75 yr old to K, you send them when they are 5.75 for one or more reasons--but no reason is required.

There, fixed that for you.

[Anonymous]

21:42 provided the real reason.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:21:42 provided the real reason.

She can only speak for herself. She doesn't speak for me.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Holding your child back to try and give them an age advantage. So instead of sending your 5.5 yr old to K, you hold them back a year and send them when they are 6.5 in the hopes that they will be the oldest and that will advantage them.

How is this an advantage?

[Anonymous]

Holding your child back to try and give them an age advantage. So instead of sending your 5.5 yr old to K, you hold them back a year and send them when they are 6.5 in the hopes that they will be the oldest and that will advantage them.

That is a straw man. Most kids who are redshirted are much closer to the fifth birthday.

[Anonymous]

It's not a real advantage, it is a perceived advantage. If you don't think your kid can handle the K curriculum "on time", then by holding them back, they all but ensure they can handle it when they do enter. Of course, at that point, their little snowflakes are competing against kids younger, leaving a false sense of accomplishment.

That's great your first grader does so well in K!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Holding your child back to try and give them an age advantage. So instead of sending your 5.5 yr old to K, you hold them back a year and send them when they are 6.5 in the hopes that they will be the oldest and that will advantage them.

How is this an advantage?

Say you have a particularly impulsive child. It's not uncommon for a young 5 (or 6, or even 7) to be impulsive. You may find out that the kindergarten program your child is due to begin requires a lot of seat work. You may find out that there's minimal PE, and recess is intermittent or 10-30 mins a day at most. You may look at your child in comparison to his preschool mates and realize that your child is consistently the one in time out because he hits his seatmates if he sits for more than 5 minutes, he's the one who must hold the preschool teacher's hand on the playground because when confronted with a pile of woodchips he wants to throw them. You may decide that your child does not have the tools to be successful in the program available to him. Rather than work with the program to try to make it more appropriate for your child (additional recess, less seat work, strategies for handling the times he gets handsy) you decide to avoid the problem by giving him the "gift of time." Which means taking a year from his adulthood and taking it onto his childhood.

The next year, even if your child is still impulsive, your hope is that he will less likely to be the child in trouble all the time, and that he will be better able to deal with the kindergarten environment available to you. The problem with this is that when your child is 8 or 10 or 12 and suddenly leapfrogs in maturity or competence, your child is stuck at the lower level. If your child is interested in sports, this can still be beneficial because he'll be one of the older (and presumably larger and more focused) children. (From what I've read, redshirting doesn't appear to have the same benefit in sports for girls, for what it's worth.) If your child is not interested in sports, assuming your child doesn't get bored with school he will probably still have a slight edge in being older, although longitudinal studies indicate that children who were held back don't do as well as their counterparts who remained on track. Keep in mind there are problems with the longitudinal studies so you shouldn't necessarily let them overly influence your choices for your particular child. Your child will be a year older when he goes to college, so you will hope he will do better (being more mature, no reason for a gap year, but also probably less opportunity for a gap year than for a child who wasn't redshirted. How old does a kid want to be when he finally goes to college?). You will probably also hope your child remains on the 4 year plan for college, rather than the becoming-more-common 5 year plan, since he already "took" his extra year in Kindergarten. And how old do you want your "child" to be when he becomes an adult? So 19 at HS graduation, 23 at college graduation. Now does he want to go to grad school? Med school?

I think it's easy to see a potential advantage early on. Longer term, it's not clear there is one, especially not for redshirting in Kindergarten. One assumes the middle or high school redshirting happens because you know you have an interested and talented sports child it's likely to be beneficial either in terms of college scholarship or future career opportunities.

[Anonymous]

So instead of sending your 4.75 yr old to K, you send them when they are 5.75 for one or more reasons--but no reason is required.


There, fixed that for you.

NP here, and you're a major ass for changing someone else's words simply because you disagree with them.

Write your own posts and stop changing other people's words.