Recently the New York Times published an article discussing “redshirting,” the practice of holding a child out for an extra year prior to entering kindergarten. Here’s one parent’s experience with the concept…
I spent this spring and summer uncomfortably sitting with my decision to hold my five year old boy back from Kindergarten until next fall. If his birthday were August I would have felt more sure-footed in this decision, but his birthday is the end of May. This means he has been five for a couple months already, and this also means he will be seven the last week of Kindergarten.
As the school year ended this past spring I began to feel that he might not be ready. When I visited his pre-K class he was one of a few children who were not interested in engaging with the group, and also one of two of the youngest. Bright, quiet, and a little dreamy, he struggles with following directions and often will simply walk off to play at his own pace. He is drawn to younger children just as his is peers.
At his end of the year Pre-K Caterpillar Graduation Potluck (rule: everything requires a Graduation Potluck), he walked across the stage with much pomp in his new Spiderman pajamas to receive his gift — we are currently celebrating at least two years of his wearing pajamas almost every day.
After his beloved teacher hugged him, he was momentarily confused about where to sit. I heard an aggressive older boy in his class yell “Not THERE! You’re NOT supposed to go there! Over HERE! NOW!” and my son hurriedly shuffled over with his bag and squeezed himself onto the stair riser to sit where he was told. I thought to myself, “If he goes into Kindergarten this year there will be a boy like that in every grade, in every class, for him to contend with, and he’ll be amongst the youngest.”
My older girl attends the school into which my son will enter. It is an inner city South Seattle public school which I can proudly say is in the middle of the most diverse zip code in the United States. Our school is an “alternative” school, although the District has most recently taken to calling it “K-8”. I’m not entirely sure what this means in the language of changing dictated monikers from the organizational upland, but what I can say is: The school is non-traditional and there is a strong component of parental influence to the school. Also, informally, I’m going to wing it and say we likely amongst the highest percentages of artists, published authors, and families of mixed ethnicity and GLBT parents of any other public school in the city. I love our school and I am proud to be a part of it.
My school-aged girl writes poetry, makes amazing art, sings, and puts her hands in the dirt to garden every single week at school. These things are precious and dying on the vine in public schools today. At our school we don’t shy away from social justice and activism and in fact, we embrace it as a community.
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Some of the criticism I have read about redshirting involves a perception that parents holding children back are attempting a “leg up” toward academic and standardized testing success. I guess the logic here would be: hold your kid back and you’ll have the biggest, smartest, most competitive mutha-flipping kid around and therefore be able to smash the 2nd grade competition where they stand.
Honestly, this part really hadn’t occurred to me.
What has occurred to me is this: by the time my daughter was in first grade, even at a West Coast non-traditional school where she gardens each week and writes poetry daily, the testing pressure was in full force. She came home crying this past year in third grade because of stress over standardized tests. As I looked at her spring report card even I noted, “Hmm…sixth percentile drop for her in 2009/2010? What happened?” I have to remind myself to snap the hell out of it.
Grade school is a different place than it was in the 1970s when I showed up in my Toughskins with my metal lunchbox. Even with taking measures to shelter and protect my kids from the ballooning academic pressure, the intensity around testing and competition enters the grade school experience like a toxin in the atmosphere. Standardized testing cuts a wide swath through all aspects of our public educational system today and in its wake lie the victims: art programs, music enrichment, and other “extra” tidbits like fostering creativity and critical thinking.
So, earlier this week I formally notified the district that my son will not be attending school when it starts in September. I am going to give my son another year to be five and quirky and free of public school pressure.
I am giving him a year to wear his bunny mask around if he wants.
I’m giving him one more year to go to school in Spiderman pajamas all day or walk around the house naked in the afternoon (not that this isn’t OK at our house anytime).
My “leg up” for him into the competitive world of today’s grade school is: I love you and I am giving you one more year to just simply play.
This doesn’t need to be done every time, however. Here in Ontario, we have two years of kindergarten so we start a year earlier. The cutoff is December 31, the last day of the year.
My birthday is December 31 and I went in my year anyway. I was quite little in my first year and it showed, apparently. During parent-teacher interviews, my mother was told, “Sometimes she acts more like she’s three.” My mom said, “She IS three.” Oh right.
But kindergarten isn’t everything. By the time grade school rolled around, the difference was much smaller and I always did fine. I ended up doing very well academically by high school.
I think it’s really a matter of each individual child and their circumstances. And the more time you spend worrying about the myriad of consequences that your choices might have down the road, the less you’re focusing on what they need NOW.
My parents had a lot of trouble deciding whether to hold my younger brother back (he’s another Sept. baby). My mother, in particular, was worried that he would have to repeat her own experience: the teachers waiting to hold her back for a second year of second grade. Labeling herself as a “failure” (yay for Catholic schools on that one) at that age hindered the rest of her academic progression, and she didn’t want him to feel like he “failed a grade” when he was old enough to see it that way. She was equally worried that, since I hadn’t done two years of preschool, he would compare the two and still feel inferior. My father was worried that keeping him back would be a problem years later, since everyone in his family matured early (early puberty, etc. My father had a beard in 7th grade).
In the end they decided to let him try Kindergarten (in an attempt to keep a two year gap between the two of us in all things). He did have trouble at first, but over time he was fine. And, considering that both of us did mature physically very early, it was probably a good thing that he did not wait a year.
On the flip side, I also had a classmate (K-12) that had been held back to enter my grade in order to give her that “leg up”. It worked, and she excelled to a point where our teachers were always talking about having her skip forward. The pressure and stress of always being the “best” academically led her to fail out of her freshman year of college. ::shrugs::
Everyone’s different, and I think making the best decisions for your kids NOW is more important than worrying about whether there are advantages or disadvantages later.
First off, many have mentioned how boys are “developmentally behind”. As a group, boys are caught well caught up to girls by this age. (The stats for boys being behind is so slight ON AVERAGE it’s not a guideline for each INDIVIDUAL boy and the difference within the sexes is greater than between, as always.) It’s a bad idea to hold him back just because he’s a boy.
Secondly, personal experience one way or the other be it good or bad doesn’t always mean that holding back was the right or wrong decision. An awkward child will have difficulty whenever they start. I don’t mean that holding back is a bad thing but it’s not some kind of magical protector against school difficulty.
My personal experience, I was started early to kindergarten but held back to “repeat” kindergarten after I was deemed “too slow” for 1st grade. End the end it doesn’t really make a difference but the reason I was slow is because I was (am) a cautious, perfectionist child not because I couldn’t do the work. Instead of holding me back, I could have used some assistance with learning to let go and worry less because that trait hindered me until I was old enough to figure it out myself, as an adult.
Urban public school teacher here.
I must say that I’m a big believer in pre-school. At my school ,pre-k is half day and they still get to go to PE, music, and library just like “the big kids”. When they come to kindergarten, you can seriously tell the difference. I’ve seen some kids repeat pre-k and it seems easier than trying to repeat kindergarten when they have a secure place and a social group. But that’s just my opinion.
It’s very difficult for schools to hold kids back unless a parent chooses. Many teachers will “push” kids forward because they have to. It makes schools “look bad” to hold kids back so they push kids forward who are not ready. If you know your kid is not ready and/or your teacher believes so as well, YOU have the power to hold them back, not the teacher. It’s been very frustrating seeing children who are years behind in their skills because it was too hard to keep them back a year.
That all being said, I was the youngest child in my class. My birthday was the entirety of three days before the cutoff. The school suggested that I be held back but my preschool teachers told my parents that if I repeated pre-k that I might end up bored and have trouble with school after. They put me in kindergarten anyways. I started at age 4. I am so glad my parents did that, because I was a bright kid who excelled in school. It did suck being the last to drive and stuff, but it’s not that big of a deal. (My coworkers still make fun of me because the first year teachers in my building are older than me haha). Alternatively, My fiance is a year and ten days older than me, but we graduated high school the same year because his school had a different cut-off date.