Reply to Long: Redshirting August birthday girl?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]Isn't a lot of this leader vs. follower stuff really just about the child's innate personality and it wouldn't matter whether you redshirt or not? . . .[/quote]
. . . And as an anthropologist, I can tell you that your personality is to either be a leader or a follower.  You can build skills later in life to try to overcome your natural tendencies here, but this isn't something most kids or even teenagers can (or want to) do.  Studies have shown that males don't actually have gr[eat] impulse control until their 20s. . . [/quote]
This response strikes me as overly simplistic and inconsistent with my (albeit limited) experience.  Our DS is four and is very aware of social hierarchies, which, among children his age, seem to be mostly age-related.  If you put him in a classroom with a 12-month age range where he's on the low end, he'll follow whatever the oldest boys do.  If you put him in the same classroom with the same teacher and the same 12-month age range but make him one of the oldest, he'll do what the teacher wants him to do and he'll expect the other children to follow him.  I'm not speaking hypothetically here -- this pattern has repeated in his last two daycare rooms as the oldest kids have transitioned up to older rooms throughout the year and so he's progressed from being the youngest to being the oldest while other conditions have remained largely constant.

DS happens to have a February birthday, so red-shirting isn't an issue for us.  But if he'd been born in August or September, I'd surely have seriously considered red-shirting him, largely for the "leader vs. follower" issue.[/quote]

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