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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=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.[/quote]

How is this an advantage?[/quote]

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.[/quote]

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