Reply to Long term affects - good or bad - of holding back from kindergarten

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]What you don't realize is that it is detrimental to your children to have classmates who are unprepared to be there. [/quote]

This is true. It's also detrimental - over time - to have children who are overprepared to be there. I believe that kindergarten has too academic a focus these days. The belief that every child should be reading by the end of kindergarten is not borne out by research, but the push has made parents who have children who are on the later end of acquiring that skill (or others, like fine motor pencil grasp) more inclined to retain their children in kindergarten. That reinforces the idea that those are set of skills that should be held by every child in k, rather than the reality that those skills are something children acquire at different times over a period of years. These expectations increase the academic demands in every year and unfortunately as parents hold their children back, the schools aren't forced to actually teach children as they (appropriately) are.

If the end result were superior, I would have less to be concerned about. But our high school graduates are not any more prepared than they were 20, 40, 60 years ago when it was understood that some children did not read fluently until 8, that some children's fine motor skills came when they were older than 5, and so on. Instead, we're putting our small children through this wringer of unreasonable expectations. Parents are attempting to protect their children which unfortunately allows the unreasonable expectations to continue.[/quote]

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