Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Having what should be the youngest child in a grade (very late summer birthday), I am frustrated with these posts that don't appreciate what the impact of their redshirting is doing to my child particularly in Kindergarten. Yes, 1 year is a long time developmentally between the oldest and youngest in the class. I find it frustrating that those who say it is only 3-6 extra months don't realize they are increasing an already wide gap by 25% to 50% 3/12 to 6/12. Developmentally the extra time makes a huge difference and makes my bright kid in younger grades seem slow. Ok if your kids have special needs like ADHD poster but it most cases that I've seen it is a one upsmanship battle. Everyone's snowflake can't be the oldest but the longer this goes on the worst it gets. IE people start holding back for 6 months and then 6 months seems normal so people hold back a full year. Of course 7 year Johnny is going to smoke barely 5 year old Suzie in reading. Happy?

This is exactly my problem with the anti-redshirting crowd. Their big issue is their kid is now going to be the youngest and they want it to be some other kid. When did it become a thing that children should not be exposed to children of other ages and no one should have to be the youngest? My choice to hold my son back has nothing to do with the age of the other children and everything to do with what I think he is ready for.

No I understood going in my late summer birthday child would be the youngest normally but now you've added another 3-6 gap on top of the one year gap my child would normally have.
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And my redshirted junior high school child is not going to go through puberty any time soon. So he actually looks younger than his classmates.

Anonymous wrote:Yes. The jr. high girls in our school joke about the jr. high boys in other schools having mustaches because they are often 2 years older!

Jr. High school boys, including mine, have mustaches because they hit puberty in jr. High school. This has nothing to do with being two years older.

Anonymous wrote:Having what should be the youngest child in a grade (very late summer birthday), I am frustrated with these posts that don't appreciate what the impact of their redshirting is doing to my child particularly in Kindergarten. Yes, 1 year is a long time developmentally between the oldest and youngest in the class. I find it frustrating that those who say it is only 3-6 extra months don't realize they are increasing an already wide gap by 25% to 50% 3/12 to 6/12. Developmentally the extra time makes a huge difference and makes my bright kid in younger grades seem slow. Ok if your kids have special needs like ADHD poster but it most cases that I've seen it is a one upsmanship battle. Everyone's snowflake can't be the oldest but the longer this goes on the worst it gets. IE people start holding back for 6 months and then 6 months seems normal so people hold back a full year. Of course 7 year Johnny is going to smoke barely 5 year old Suzie in reading. Happy?

This is exactly my problem with the anti-redshirting crowd. Their big issue is their kid is now going to be the youngest and they want it to be some other kid. When did it become a thing that children should not be exposed to children of other ages and no one should have to be the youngest? My choice to hold my son back has nothing to do with the age of the other children and everything to do with what I think he is ready for.

Anonymous wrote:Having what should be the youngest child in a grade (very late summer birthday), I am frustrated with these posts that don't appreciate what the impact of their redshirting is doing to my child particularly in Kindergarten. Yes, 1 year is a long time developmentally between the oldest and youngest in the class. I find it frustrating that those who say it is only 3-6 extra months don't realize they are increasing an already wide gap by 25% to 50% 3/12 to 6/12. Developmentally the extra time makes a huge difference and makes my bright kid in younger grades seem slow. Ok if your kids have special needs like ADHD poster but it most cases that I've seen it is a one upsmanship battle. Everyone's snowflake can't be the oldest but the longer this goes on the worst it gets. IE people start holding back for 6 months and then 6 months seems normal so people hold back a full year. Of course 7 year Johnny is going to smoke barely 5 year old Suzie in reading. Happy?

My kids are young

If you're treating school as a competition against the other children in the class, you and your child will have a long and frustrating experience. My kids are a little older, and that feeling dissipates as they get older (and as the significance of the extra 2-5 months lessens).

I have redshirted one DC and not my other DC although I probably should have. My child is a summer birthday and almost all of the summer birthdays redshirted. Others did as well. We have a span of redshirts from fall to summer. I can definitely see how this creates a problem for non redshirts especially those with summer and spring birthdays.

Having what should be the youngest child in a grade (very late summer birthday), I am frustrated with these posts that don't appreciate what the impact of their redshirting is doing to my child particularly in Kindergarten. Yes, 1 year is a long time developmentally between the oldest and youngest in the class. I find it frustrating that those who say it is only 3-6 extra months don't realize they are increasing an already wide gap by 25% to 50% 3/12 to 6/12. Developmentally the extra time makes a huge difference and makes my bright kid in younger grades seem slow. Ok if your kids have special needs like ADHD poster but it most cases that I've seen it is a one upsmanship battle. Everyone's snowflake can't be the oldest but the longer this goes on the worst it gets. IE people start holding back for 6 months and then 6 months seems normal so people hold back a full year. Of course 7 year Johnny is going to smoke barely 5 year old Suzie in reading. Happy?


My kids are young

Yes. The jr. high girls in our school joke about the jr. high boys in other schools having mustaches because they are often 2 years older!

The topic lives in thread after thread here because younger peers are an asset for the child that is needfully held back while there seems to be no academic research supporting the idea that the held back children are assets for their younger peers. Parents are left with their actual experiences given the gap in research.

Anonymous wrote:PP – no, parents really do have an idea about the diagnosis (or lack) of a child if they spend any time in the classroom. “Under the radar” is in your imagination. Holding a child back because of issues does not solve the issues, it only makes the kid larger so when they push my kid down on the playground or do anything else physically to my child, my child is going to be hurt. Plus, ADHD kids demand so much time from the teacher. Try to address your kid's problem. Making your kids a year older doesn’t address the problem.

You have no idea what you are talking about here. You don't have a child with ADHD, you haven't spoken with clinicians about the best way to educate a child with ADHD. Basically you are irresponsibly diagnosing children you don;t know and then mouthing off about what YOU think is best for them.

I can guarantee you that nobody would know that my DD has ADHD. It shows up differently in girls. And she is not a behavior problem. And I don't know where you get off on this idea that kids with ADHD are pushing kids down. Neither of my children have EVER done that or anything physically aggressive at all.

Giving the kids an extra year often does address their problems. You really have to decide. Do you want a child who isn;t ready to be in your DC's class disrupting the other children and taking a disproportionate amount of teh teacher's attention? Or do you want a child who is ready to be there in the classroom?

ADHD is not the only reason to give a child an extra year. There are many ways in which children can be immature, especially given the demands now on younger and younger children.

PP – no, parents really do have an idea about the diagnosis (or lack) of a child if they spend any time in the classroom. “Under the radar” is in your imagination. Holding a child back because of issues does not solve the issues, it only makes the kid larger so when they push my kid down on the playground or do anything else physically to my child, my child is going to be hurt. Plus, ADHD kids demand so much time from the teacher. Try to address your kid's problem. Making your kids a year older doesn’t address the problem.

And something to note- what is expected of kids in each grade is more and more, so the choice to redshirt, may have NOTHING to do with how a child performs compared to others, and more of what a child is expected to do in class is just not developmentally appropriate. The choice to wait to start or to hold a child back a yr may very well have NOTHING to do with any other child except that one. I understand others may not like it, but it isn't about any other child but my own. I couldn't care less how she does in sports, etc. This is abotu what is expected at schools by teachers.

It occurs to me reading through this thread -- and all the other blah blah blah threads about redshirting -- that there is a lot of pining for the old days when kids went to school when the school district dictated and not when they were ready. Its similar to the pining about the old days when we didn't recognize and treat ADHD. Maybe for very typical kids the old days were fine. But for a child with any kind of variation in development, the old days were a nightmare. I know because I have sibs who never recovered from the elementary school setbacks. We ALL knew kids like that -- the ones whom we called spazzes, or dummies. The world is a hell of a lot better for these kids now because we are flexible and attentive to developmental differences. And you may smugly think this somehow hurts your typically developing child, but you are wrong. ALL of our kids benefit when the children who are in the classroom are ready to learn, and given the support so that they can learn. As the parent of two children with ADHD, and one with Aspergers, i can tell you that I am so grateful for the changes that have occurred.

And for those of you who say, as is always the case in these discussion, "well we aren't referring to kids with diagnosed disorders," (1) you really have no idea which kids have a diagnosis. I can tell you that because I have one child who travels completely under the radar. And one reason you don't know is because of this new flexibility, and (2) there are differences that don't rise to the level of an actual diagnosis. That doesn't mean the challenges aren't real, and (3) ADHD is often diagnosed later in elementary school, so that the child whose parents thought he just wasn't ready for kindergarten may turn out to have a ADHD.

Two years is not a stretch. The assumption that parents who hold their kids back have kids close to the cutoff date is false. A lot of parents hold their kids back regardless of their birthday. So, that adds two years. Then add into the mix (especially in HS) the kids who entered schools that had an earlier cutoff date and were held back, adds more time. One PPs statement of kids turning 16 in 9th grade is very true. My DCs enrolled on time in the MD system and turned 16 in 11th grade. One PP complained about the term “fair” that another PP used. I don’t know what term I would use but I do know that the system is ridiculous. I have kids two years apart in HS. My younger DC’s friends are older than my older DC. It does matter socially and I do think schools should address this. I think the parents who are so vocal about this don't have HS students.

Anonymous wrote: The marginal difference from redshirting is tiny.

That's true when redshirting is rare. When it's not, over time it stilts people's expectations of what is appropriately on grade.

Not only is a child in a class with children over a year older (the children red shirted the previous year), a child with a summer birthday who is not retained has few similar age peers. An August birthday child's closest age peer might be a May birthday child, with the other June-July-August birthday children being a year older. There will be few other children in class that have that large of a gap, thus it's more likely for summer birthday children who go on time to be perceived as "behind."

Fortunately, as children age, 1/4th of a year gap makes less and less of a difference. For those in the midst of it, I think the concerns (on all sides) make sense.