Posted on 17 Jan, 2023

Ask most parents, and they’ll readily admit that they want to provide their children with every advantage possible and every opportunity to succeed. In some cases, that means making important decisions during those first critical years of formal education: Will the right preschool lead to the best prep school and college? What professors will help further their careers? What careers will afford them the life they want?

It’s a lot to consider when planning the future for someone who has yet to master the alphabet, but one of the first such decisions some parents have to make is: Should we redshirt?

Delaying kindergarten takes children who would be among the youngest in one class and postpones advancement so that they are among the oldest in the next class. Once a relatively rare occurrence, “redshirting” has become more common — and controversial — in the past decade.

“Many parents think everybody is doing it, but it’s a small percentage,” says Laura Saunders, a psychologist at Hartford Hospital’s Institute of Living in Connecticut.

Most children are enrolled in kindergarten at age 5. In 1968, 4 percent of kindergarten students were 6 years old. By 2008, the number had risen to 17 percent — more boys than girls. Many parents think enrolling their children in kindergarten when they’re older will give them an academic or athletic advantage in the long run, but research is mixed on this.

“It is not necessarily an advantage to hold kids back,” notes Saunders, who urges parents to look at developmental guidelines, not just at a child’s stature, when making a decision to postpone kindergarten for a year. “Is it in the child’s best cognitive, social and emotional interests?” Saunders asks.

READY OR NOT

“I can’t tell you the number of conversations I’ve had on the playground about this,” says Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, director of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University and co-author of Is Your Child Ready for Kindergarten?, an article published in 2017 in the Education Next journal. “Everybody thinks about it if their kid is anywhere near the (cutoff) bubble.”

Schanzenbach recommends that parents wait until the last minute to decide whether they’re going to delay kindergarten for younger children. That’s because kids can grow leaps and bounds — physically and cognitively — the summer before school starts, depending on the enrollment date. “Sometimes waiting and seeing and getting more information before you make a decision is the right approach.”

In 2007, Schanzenbach co-authored a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research that challenged earlier research suggesting that redshirted children tended to do better socially and academically throughout life. Her analysis found the opposite: The early edge faded by middle school and in the long run, kids who started kindergarten younger ended up on top. “It’s that younger kids are inspired by their (older) classmates,” she says, and end up surpassing them.

Older kindergarten students scored significantly lower on achievement tests in middle school than those who started at a younger age, she says. They were also less likely to take college entrance exams. One of the culprits: Redshirted kids who go through school as the oldest and smartest in their class may suffer from boredom and end up not pushing themselves academically.

On the other hand, a 2018 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that kindergarten students who turned 5 in the month before kindergarten started were more likely to be diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder than children who started kindergarten in the month they turned 6.

WHAT’S A PARENT TO DO?

Saunders and Schanzenbach say readiness for school — not a child’s size — should be the most important factor in deciding whether to redshirt. Parents of younger boys who are short in stature and feel pressured to hold them back should talk to their pediatricians. If a child is very small, pediatricians can do a simple test to make sure their growth hormones are in balance.

A child’s teacher is another good resource, and some grade schools can evaluate a child’s readiness for kindergarten. Schanzenbach recommends taking that advice “with a grain of salt,” however, since preschools stand to gain an extra year of tuition if a child is redshirted and elementary schools often find older children easier to teach.

She says that parents who enroll younger children in kindergarten and then decide they’d benefit from a delay can determine at the end of the year whether their children need to repeat the year.

“It’s something you can do down the road,” she advises parents.

Click here to check the original article