Reply to Has anyone “redshirted” a January kid?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]So again, how old is too old? If 6y8m isn’t too old to start K, how old is? This is not a rhetorical question - I’d like to hear answers from redshirt supporters.[/quote]

I am strongly in favor of flexibility because from what I see, most parents have a decent sense of their child's readiness. I guess you could say it's pro-redshirting but what I am really in favor of is flexibility. Some kids strongly benefit by an earlier start, some by a later start. (I think this strict cookie cutter date approach is bananas.) It doesn't surprise me that the only large-scale study of the impact of relative age on ADHD medication/diagnosis where relative age didn't correlate to diagnosis was from the Netherlands, which is very flexible about starting year and allows for a lot of parental discretion. IMO that model is much better. Anti-redshirt DCUM posters are all about crazy slippery slope arguments, but I doubt that would happen in practice.

To answer your specific question, I think having a rule that kids have to be in school by the time they are seven is reasonable. Alternatively I think a two-year age range would be okay: you can elect entry in one of two years. I think in practice this how things work in the Netherlands: kids are given a wide starting age range from 5-7. It seems like a reasonable approach.

My child (not redshirted) was in a class with a child who was redshirted because of SNs, February birth. There were also other redshirted kids. It was fine. I saw literally none of the supposedly horrid impacts that DCUM's stressed-out anti-redshirt posters said would happen. Kids didn't care, parents (at least the sane, normal ones I hung out with) didn't care. Parents made the right choice as far as I could tell. It was NBD.[/quote]

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