Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
You can argue all you want - but parents are going to do what they feel is best for their own child no matter what. Its part of being a parent. Sure I am conscious and considerate of others in my life - but my kid comes first to me. Why wouldn't he?
Exactly. Would you suggest that we not read to our kids in order to not get a jump on those whose parents do not read to their children?
If parents abide by the official September 30 cutoff instead of the unofficial July cutoff, then there would be less worry about incorrect ADHD diagnoses.
You can read to your children or not. The official guidelines are to read to your children.
Actually I think it's likely that the actual data out there show that redshirting has little to no class-wide impact on ADHD diagnoses. If it had a significant impact, the Canadian study would have come out differently from the various US studies, because redshirting is considerably less common in Canada. There is no study that shows that redshirting has any impact whatsoever on rate of ADHD diagnosis.
I think it's very likely that redshirting has no statistical impact whatsoever on classrooms, but on individual kids there can be a significant impact. The issue is that basically for individual kids you need to weigh the likelihood of an ADHD diagnosis over the possible negative impacts (see, e.g., the
Deming/Dynarski paper, though there is debate over their methodology which seems fairly sloppy in my opinion). Either way there aren't good options.
I realize it's fun to get frothy and indignant about redshirting, but it would be nice if you'd spend that considerable energy trying to change the educational system such that this gross imbalance based on age exists, rather than armchair judging parents who are unlucky enough to have a child born on the cusp. It's appalling that youngest kids are more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD, whether there is redshirting or not.