Reply to NOT redshirting an August birthday

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Reply to "NOT redshirting an August birthday"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I find all the people claiming their kids would be “so bored” to be odd, but I generally think parents claiming their children are so smart that school bores them to be a little bit of a red flag. I didn’t redshirt, just my general life observations. [/quote]

But what you are missing is that if you redshirt, your child could wind up 12+ months older than peers in their grade level, as opposed to 9-11 months younger. In K-2nd when there's already a pretty broad range of normal of things like learning to read, I'd rather my average kid be in the group closer to her actual age, even if she's the youngest, than be a whole year-plus older.

I have zero problems with redshirting but personally would not do it unless my kid was showing signs of an social or cognitive delay. In my experience with a kid with a birthday right before the cut off, even an average kid can essentially "play up" to the level of the older kids in class, as long as they have the same PK preparation and no LDs or special needs. My kid might be the youngest in class, but there are plenty of kids who are within only a couple months of her, so it honestly doesn't even register. There are only a few kids who are actually 11 months older, and yes, those kids seem more mature and catch on faster. But a redshirted would be a full year older and then some -- it would make the differences even more pronounced.

It's really not about thinking your kid is so advanced.[/quote]Your math is wrong.  You're ignoring that there are kids who are redshirted who are 12-15 months older than a non-redshirted kid.  So the kid born in late August near the cutoff is 0-15 months younger or 1 week-12 months older than their class.  They actually fit more closely in the redshirted class.  [/quote]

My math isn’t wrong, you are just assuming a situation where redshirting is common! In my district, redshirting is very hard to do so you will have, at most, one or two redshirted kids in class. And those kids pretty much always have delays that resulted in the consent to redshirt. Many classes have no redshirted kids at all. So even if you child was born the day before the cut off, they will be in a classroom where 99-100% of kids are within the same 12 month window.

This is the problem with liberal redshirting policies— it pushes more parents redshirt because if they don’t, their kid could be the youngest by as much as 15 or 16 months, which is too big of a gap. Again, if a child has a delay that makes redshirting make sense, it should happen. Better than trying to hold them back a grade later. But redshirting just for its own sake creates a push for everyone to do so, and then what is the point?

Someone has to be the youngest in the class. You can play “not it” if you want, but there’s nothing to stop everyone else from playing the same game.[/quote]

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