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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Parents who are competitive enough to worry about whether other kids are redshirted don't send their kids to Montessori schools.[/quote]

I just think it is “rich” that the pro redshirters are calling the anti-redshirters competitive. [/quote]

It's true, though. Anti-redshirters are upset that their children are at some imagined competitive disadvantage - although, paradoxically, many also pay lipservice to believing that redshirting impairs development. It's never been clear to me whether this is just a lack of logic or a cynical attempt to pretend that what they believe is in their own self-interest (no redshirting) is also in the interests of the children who would otherwise be redshirted.

They're the ones doing the comparing, not the redshirting parents. If everyone just made decisions based on what's best for their own kid, and didn't worry about what everyone else was doing, there would be none of this ridiculousness.

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The redshirted parents compared enough to hold their own kid back and it wasn’t a decision that was in a vacuum without effect on making other kids younger for the grade.

[b]Anti redshirters may be competitive but not competitive enough to hold their own kids back[/b]. [/quote]

Juuuuuuuuuust competitive enough to complain on the internet. Got it!  :lol: [/quote]

Now you’ve got it.  :lol:  I can’t even complain IRL because my friends do it. But having a young for the grade kid, I experienced [b]things others might not have experienced and often barriers can be invisible[/b] to those who don’t face them so I do speak up online. [/quote]

What specifically has your child experienced? 
[/quote]

My child is the correct age for grade, but the youngest in her grade by a few months. She attends a school where redshirting is rampant, and has a late summer birthday. The age range in her class is about 18 months. Not only is she the youngest, but there is a gap. The next youngest child is a couple months older than her, and then another gap and then finally a more even distribution. The youngest quarter of the kids in the class span 6 months worth of birthdays, leaving 3/4 of the kids in oldest 2/3rds of the age range. There are more redshirted summer birthdays than correct age for grade summer birthdays.

In the younger grades, this meant when my child was behaving in age appropriate manners, her behavior stood out as "immature" because when you're 5, 6+ mos of development for an average child can make a huge difference. The academic and behavior standards were geared to the older cohort of kids, since they were the majority. The younger kids were expected to keep up and reach that standard as well.

In K and 1st, when writing samples were put up on the wall, my child was well aware that her writing was not nearly as neat as the children who were a year, a year and a half older than her. And having almost no close in age peers meant seeing very few other samples of children at a similar level. The same held true for other situations.

Fortunately, these extreme differences close up fairly quickly. While a 6 mos gap at 5 years old is large, it can often be developmentally invisible by 7. It was still obvious the class was geared to the older children, because they were the overwhelming majority, but the differences were less obvious to the kids so there were fewer instances of the youngest children being called or treated like "babies" by the oldest kids.

By 3rd grade, for my child, you couldn't tell a difference at all. And not redshirting has been fantastic for my DC. She has grit like you wouldn't believe because of being in such an uneven environment her first few years, and working hard to meet a standard that was usually above her ability. If she'd been a particularly easy to discourage child, we probably would have seen negative results from this instead of positive, but fortunately she took on the challenge rather than internalizing the gap.

When you have classes that are inappropriate for the age range they are supposed to teach, some parents are going to respond by setting their children up for success and getting their children as close as possible to the age that the class is geared for. [b]Schools need to either modify their curriculum so it's age appropriate[/b], or change the age ranges so they're getting the ages they want to get. Parents shouldn't be left doing this on an ad hoc basis. It just privileges the well off because they're the ones who can afford to keep kids home for an extra year. And it penalizes the less well off, because their kids are being held to an inappropriate standard that's being reinforced by the growing tendency towards redshirting.[/quote]

This is the actual issue. If we had half-day, play-based Kindergarten you'd see redshirting go way down. But K is now 1st grade. That's why we waited until our child was 5 (turning 6) instead of 4 (turning 5) to start K. 
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