No Holding Back! The Argument for Sending Four Year Olds to Kindergarten (a.k.a. No “Red-Shirting”)

After reading this article in Sunday’s New York Times the other day, by Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt, about “redshirting” kindergarteners (that is, keeping them back a year if their birth date falls near the cut-off date, leaving them “young” for their class), I did one of those silent victory-arm-pump things in my kitchen: I had been right! Okay, well, at the very least, my own decision to send my sons to kindergarten at 4-and-three-quarters was validated: Manipulating school start dates may seem on the face of it to be yet another attempt to give your child an edge — who hasn’t heard writer Malcolm Gladwell’s contention, in his best-selling book Outliers, that January and February babies, usually the oldest in their classes, do better in life? We perhaps think an extra year in preschool will allow our younger-than-fives to get physically bigger, socially more savvy, and just, well, smarter; another year to get ahead on reading and writing. I always felt as though doing so was gaming the system for no real gain. According to these writers — authors of Welcome to Your Child’s Brain: How the Mind Grows From Conception to College — not only is the gain negligible, it actually comes with some losses, for all the kids.

 

 

This is particularly resonant right now, as both my boys’ birthdays are coming up in the next several weeks, both of them pushing the edge of the cut-off date for our district, which is December 1. And both are — of course — boys. Approximately 300 people (possible exaggeration; who remembers?!) asked me, as both were approaching kindergarten, if I was going to “hold them back.”

 

Hell to the no!

 

My oldest was actually a good case-study for considering a hold-back. A late talker, a November baby boy, a slightly (well, maybe quite a bit more than “slightly”) socially spacey kid, it would seem, if you believe the notion that boys are slower and less-quickly socialized than girls, that my boy was the ideal candidate for another year of prep-by-preschool. But here’s the thing with him: It was because of his developmental delays that I wanted to get him into kindergarten as soon as it was age-appropriate. He’d been in daycare since he was 19 months old, had been getting speech therapy since 23 months, and had been going to a special-ed preschool five days a week for two years by the time he was “ready” for K. If I held him back, what was I supposed to do with him?

 

Beyond the practical issues (what would he be doing in yet another preschool setting?) and the financial ones (boy, was I was looking forward to my daycare/preschool bill going down to one kid), I asked myself: Did I care if my child was the one presumably behind the eight-ball? And honestly, I didn’t — especially when you put the emphasis on the “presumably”: by whose metric might he be “behind”? Behind what, or whom? Yes, he was going to spend the first two months of kindergarten as a four year old, but he already knew the basic going-to-school drill: he was familiar with the bus, the backpack, sharing crayons at a table with other kids, and washing his hands before snack.

 

And despite the often-discussed fact that kindergarten is far more academically rigorous now than it was when I went (I like to say, and I mean it, that what I did in kindergarten back in 1971 is essentially what my sons did in daycare when they were three), those things I mentioned above? The backpack, the sharing, the predictable routines, the Pledge of Allegiance and hand-washing and circle time, and generally recognizing your environment and the other people in it? That’s all a kid needs to know when he gets to kindergarten. Everything else, as my son’s teacher wisely told me, they catch up on.

 

And if it takes a while for them to catch up? What’s the harm?

 

My second boy also started K at the tender age of four, though there’s much less that’s tender about my second son than my first. Mr. Social Butterfly (the “preferred friend” in his daycare), my younger kid was less a candidate for red-shirting. That said, aside from being calendar-age young, he’s also physically small (now a second grader, he’s the same size as some kindergarteners, my Skinny Minnie, and yes I know I shouldn’t call him that but I can’t help it; he’s such a squirt). He wasn’t great at some of the things that, according to popular wisdom put him at a disadvantage in kindergarten. For example, he wrote many of his letters backwards. He wasn’t great at scissoring, or coloring. And even though he’d spent the large majority of his young life in nearly full-time, out-of-the-house care, kindergarten tuckered him out in the first few weeks; his teacher told me he’d just lay his head down on the table at the end of the day, without a word (I know, cute, right?).

 

This may be either radical or mean of me to say, but honestly, much as I want my children to succeed in school and out, I don’t care if they’re the top or the best or the one with the best advantages, including this age thing. That’s why I did it, why I sent two relatively immature four-year-olds to kindergarten. The way I look at it, there are cut-off dates in every district, and school systems everywhere have their reasoning (which they change, too, from time to time). Given that there will always be some cut off or other, this means that some kids are going to be the young ones, and some are going to be the older ones.

 

Some will be, as in my older boy’s kindergarten class, the December and January and February Alpha girls who startled me with their wordliness and chattiness and (yes, even at 5) cattiness. Some will be like another November boy in that class, who didn’t talk at all. I spent some time in that classroom, helping out about once a month and you know what? Those Alpha girls would give me the lay of the land, telling me that (swear this is true) my son was the “best” boy; or that that boy (the other November baby) “doesn’t talk.” Not to be mean, just to clue me in. So I felt as though I were adding my child into a larger mix — from whom he’d learn, but also to whom he could offer a few lessons of his own (specifically, that not all boys are loud and they don’t all push, tease, or jostle).

 

Which was exactly what this article says is missing when parents try, en masse, to remove the younger, so-called disadvantaged kids from kindergarten classrooms. What’s lost in the evaluation parents make about whether their particular child might be a jump ahead by being the oldest instead of the youngest is an emphasis on how children actually learn. A classroom full of fully-five and close-to-six year olds might be easier for the teacher to handle, Wang and Aamodt write. That’s nice, though it doesn’t last. And when the work is relatively easy for these held-back kids or just plain older kids, they may try less hard. As for the younger kids: they are challenged by emulating the older ones (which is why it might be an advantage in some cases, the writers contend, to have a very bright child skip ahead a grade).

 

They also point out that kids’ brains, being so absorbent and busy in this age range, will basically be hanging around with nothing much to learn if they spend another year in preschool, waiting for their bodies or their “social skills” to catch up. It seems that younger kids like mine benefited from the increased in rigor from preschool to kindergarten, even if they had to be a little socially bewildered (my older boy) or tired out (his little brother).

 

They write:

Parents who want to give their young children an academic advantage have a powerful tool: school itself. In a large-scale study at 26 Canadian elementary schools, first graders who were young for their year made considerably more progress in reading and math than kindergartners who were old for their year (but just two months younger). In another large study, the youngest fifth-graders scored a little lower than their classmates, but five points higher in verbal I.Q., on average, than fourth-graders of the same age. In other words, school makes children smarter [my emphasis].

So it’s sort of ironic: the kids who benefit most from red-shirting are the younger kids in the next year’s class, who get the boost of learning from older classmates who should have started kindergarten a year earlier.

 

As they approach their seventh and ninth birthdays, I know my boys notice their relative youth; one of the first things my new fourth grader did in school this year was check the birthday chart, and he was quite happy to report that there are three other November birthdays — all later than his. Awesome.