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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Some of my relatives are pressuring me to hold my 4 year old back before he starts kindergarten.  I did not grow up in the US and would never, ever have considered it.  To be honest, I'm still not considering it but I wondered if anyone else would help explain why they are so insistent this is the right thing to do.  (They did this in their immediate family and insist it was the best decision they ever made).

My son's birthday is mid-September, so he is the youngest in his class.  And yet, academically, he's far advanced of any of the other kids in his class (he's in PK4 in a DC charter).  The teacher is already having to work with him on his own because, for example, he's the only kid who is reading so far and "small group" wouldn't work for him when the other kids are still learning their letters or just beginning to sound out words (he's reading at about 1st or 2nd grade level).  It's the same with math.  He's also doing well socially -- he is extremely attentive, has good comprehension and knows "how to behave" at school.  He also seems to get on very well with the other kids.  All in all, he's settled well and it is not noticeable that he is younger than everyone else, and almost a year younger than some.  He is not tall, but he's not the shortest either.

I know there's the sports issue and he may not be as physically advanced as some of the other kids (not noticeably so though) but I've never really placed a lot of value on competitive sports anyway.  Why else would we hold him back?  Given that he is already ahead of his class, surely it would just exacerbate that if he were held back a year and put in with all the three year olds?  After all, someone has to be the youngest.[/quote]

I think the non-snarky answer to this is that when I was a kid, parents who wanted to foster their children's talents would push for them to get ahead in class. My parents wanted me to skip a grade and they might have wanted it for my brother if he hadn't been born the day before the cutoff. I think the theory parents had back then was that if you got to do stuff a year early, you had even more of your life to develop and succeed.

The more modern research seems to support the opposite theory: Being older/more advanced than your classmates matters much more when you are younger (and the relative age difference is larger) than when you are older. You pick up the material better, and you tend to get more attention from teachers, coaches, etc. Perhaps in part for the same reasons, there is a body of evidence showing that students who take time off before college or before grad school tend to outperform what you would predict from prior grades and test scores alone.

So, I think parents that are redshirting are doing it on the belief that the best available evidence suggests it will help their children in the long run.

Now, all that being said, there are obvious downsides. If your child really is gifted, holding them back may exacerbate an inability to focus in class, a disconnect from one's peers, etc. Most parents should probably stick with a school district's normal age cutoffs, because those are your best indication of where their child belongs.

Of course, a very simple way to eliminate the incentive to redshirt would be for elementary schools that have more than one classroom per grade to group students by birthday. (e.g. if there are three third grade classrooms, one should have the kids born in Jan-April, the second May - August, etc.). That way, age bias would be reduced. I don't believe many schools have adopted this approach.[/quote]

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