Reply to Does anyone petition to send their kids to K early?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I was also the youngest in my class years and years ago, though redshirting was unheard of at that time. My experience was very different than yours, OP.

Our oldest DS was young for the grade. We sent him on time because he was ready and we didn’t know better. If I could do-over one parenting move, it would be that one. Academically, he was fine. Socially and emotionally, not so much.

What you need to be thinking about is not kindergarten, but rather[b] the lunch table at middle school, the kid who cannot drive when all his peers can, the 17-year-old going to college. Our younger DS was going to be the youngest in his class and we did not send him. [/b]It has been 1000 times easier on every front.

[/quote]

I turned 5 during fall of K, and wow, none of these things were ever a concern for me.  I had no real sense of who was older or younger than me throughout school.  I mean, middle school wasn't smooth, but I don't attribute it to being young at all (I attended a pretty rough middle school as a new kid).

The only annoying thing I can think of was that I was 17 for a couple of months as a freshman, and so I couldn't go out to bars/nightclubs with my friends for a little while.  I finally felt challenged during my Ph.D. program, which I finished in my mid-20s.  I say this just to say I don't think any of us can draw a definitive straight line between the decision to redshirt or not, and later outcomes.  Some things may have happened irrespective of redshirting; some of it is just individual temperament.

I think there may be a bit of a confirmation bias going on on the part of some posters--if they thought about redshirting but didn't and there are negative outcomes later, they look back and think, "Holy cow, this is because I/my child started school too early.  None of this would have happened if I had only held them out of school an extra year."  It's pretty natural to want to control outcomes, and to look back and try to figure out what we could have done differently (just listened to an episode of Hidden Brain about this very phenomenon).  When in reality, the negative (or positive) outcome may not have much to do with redshirting.[/quote]

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