I love this because I see it all the time. Parents are all concerned that their child is not ready for the big industrial school. It really has to do with how a child is reared. Here are two scenarios, you decide who is ready:John and Peter have the same birthdays but grow up in different families. Both are only children. John gave up the pacifier at three months. Peter finally gave his up at three years. John was potty trained slightly before his second birthday. Peter was nearly four when he chose to use the toilet. John colored with his parents, learned his letters at three, how to listen at four and played the piano with his mom. Peter's crayons stayed mostly in the box because of the family's white carpet. He learned to sing some TV songs, and did some computer letter games. We could go on and on. When there are growing up expectations, children simply grow up faster. They are more than ready for the next step - school. A good guideline is: Infancy - 1 year. Toddler - two years. Preschool with Kindergarten - three years. It's true that lots of people like children to stay young. It's true as well that some children simply stay young on their own. But consider the future. They won't be young at 18. When children are still in high school at 19 because they were held back, there is often a boredom problem that needs to be addressed earlier than 19. It's worth thinking about. More Boys Finding They're Ahead of the Game When They're Held BehindBY NARA SCHOENBERG
Chicago Tribune
Like many people who have exited the fast track, Aaron Dorman is happy and fulfilled, with many interests and a full schedule.
What sets him apart is that he is only 4 years old.
After "failing" a creative movement class - he refused to pass the beanbag - and resisting the long separations from a parent or caregiver required in preschool, Aaron settled into a schedule of shorter classes and supervised play that likely will not deliver him to kindergarten by the traditional age of 5.
"I don't know if he's developmentally on the mark or not, and I don't care," says his mother, Bernadette Pawlik, an executive recruiter.
"He's a happy, kind person who takes great joy in life. So what more could I ask for?"
If Aaron continues at his current pace, he will join a surprisingly large, and some say growing demographic: boys whose parents are delaying their entrance into kindergarten until age 6.
Some parents want their children to perform better academically; others worry about the social and emotional effects of starting a boy before he is ready, or of allowing a child with a summer birthday to be the youngest and smallest in his class.
Many of these parents are affluent, educated and aware that because of factors such as mandatory testing, kindergarten is harder than it used to be, with educators referring to it as the "new 1st grade."
Some also have been influenced by research indicating that boys typically mature at a slower rate than girls in key school readiness areas such as language and fine motor skills.
About 11 percent of American boys entered kindergarten a year late in the 1990s, compared with about 6 percent of girls, according to the most recent national study. But those figures may now be outdated.
"We've had this whole No Child Left Behind thing (since 2002), which is really whipping schools to accelerate as much as they can" and making delayed kindergarten entry more attractive, says Leonard Sax, author of "Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know about the Emerging Science of Sex Differences."
In his practice as a family physician in affluent Montgomery County, Md., about 1 in 2 boys are starting kindergarten at age 6, compared with 1 in 10 a decade ago.
Another rough indicator, the percentage of boys starting kindergarten at about age 6 or older has gone up, from 7 percent of boys in 1970 to 18 percent in 2001, according to calculations by the U.S. Department of Education.
The number of girls starting kindergarten at about age 6 or older has gone up, too, but from 5 percent in 1970 to a relatively modest 10 percent in 2001.
Some experts object to the practice of holding boys out, also known as redshirting, a reference to the practice of keeping college athletes out of competition for a year in order to extend eligibility.
"There are fairness and equity issues here," says Samuel Meisels, president of the Erikson Institute school of child development, who points out that many parents can't afford the child-care costs involved in delaying kindergarten.
"If you can afford to do this, you're really giving your child an advantage. And, after all, all of our children - we want to give them the greatest advantage. But this is one where class really does play a role, so in a school where there is a mixture of social class, these are kids who are older; these are kids who are bigger. They may in fact get onto the sports team first. They may get the parts in the school play.
"I can't say for sure, but it does change the platform for the start of school, and I'd rather see the starting line be the same for everyone."
But others vehemently defend redshirting, with Sax saying that, due to the academic difficulty of kindergarten and the slower developmental schedule of boys in key areas, 90 percent of boys should be redshirted.
"That argument borders on incoherent," he says of those who criticize redshirting on the grounds of fairness.
"What you're arguing is that affluent parents should disadvantage their kids so as not to give them an unfair leg up on poor kids. I don't think anyone could get the words out if they understood that's what they're saying."
The rise of redshirting dates to the 1980s, when mandatory testing put pressure on schools to make the early elementary grades more rigorous. As 3rd and 4th grade became more demanding, kindergarten had to keep up. Savvy parents were increasingly likely to worry about their children's early academic performance and resort to redshirting, Meisels says.
A parallel national trend of moving back the cutoff age for kindergarten eligibility, making the average child older when he or she began, also contributed to the "graying of kindergarten."
And the more 6-year-olds there were in kindergarten, the harder classes became and the more likely parents were to engage in redshirting.
That process is on display on a blustery winter afternoon outside the Chicago City Day School, where the mother of a boy who started kindergarten at age 5 talks about the effects of widespread redshirting.
"I happen to have a small child and he is so small and so young" compared with the kids who were redshirted, she says, noting that "he definitely has issues" with the situation.
"Why am I so little? Why am I so much smaller? Why can't I run as fast?" he asks his mom, who asks not to be identified because she doesn't want to damage her relationship with the school.
"It's a cycle," she says of redshirting, "Once it starts, what are you supposed to do? You don't want to put your child at a disadvantage."
In one Wisconsin school district, 94 percent of the boys and girls were redshirted, according to a 2000 study co-authored by Beth Graue, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A review of data by the Connecticut department of education found that wealthy districts had redshirt rates of up to 20 percent while some low-income districts had rates of 2 to 3 percent.
Ironically, it's unclear whether a late start to kindergarten helps children in the long run, with one study in the journal Pediatrics actually suggesting the opposite.
The 1997 study co-authored by pediatrician Robert S. Byrd found that teenagers who were older than their classmates because they had started school late were more likely to have behavioral problems than kids who had started on time.
But supporters of redshirting point to the work of researchers such as Harriet Hanlon of Virginia Tech.
"In girls, the areas of the brain involved in fine motor skills, like handwriting and language, are way ahead of where they are in boys, so in those areas the brain of a 5-year-old boy looks like the brain of a 3-year-old girl," Sax says.
"So for most 5-year-old boys, getting them to read and write is like trying to get a 3-year-old girl to read and write. It is not developmentally appropriate."
In the Lake Forest, Ill., First Presbyterian Church Preschool director Ruth Luke says kindergarten has become so demanding that some kids can't keep up.
Among the results she has seen: tutoring for 5-year-olds, parents who agonize about when to enroll their children in kindergarten, and a rise in redshirting.
In one case, she says, a very immature 5-year-old boy had a "disastrous" start in kindergarten. He couldn't sit still or recognize any letters. His parents pulled him out in November and started him again the next year, and he did beautifully the second time around.
"I really can't say I disagree with some of these people," Luke says of parents who redshirt, "because these little guys really struggle, where (for) the 6-year-olds, it's just a piece of cake."
Pawlik says she and her husband were initially concerned by Aaron's reluctance to separate from a caregiver and start preschool, but, after much discussion, they decided it was fine for their son to proceed at his own pace.
"The most important thing is that he have positive feelings about his school experience," Pawlik says.
"And whether he starts preschool at 4 or he starts kindergarten at 5 or 6 - when he's 25 or 30, that's not really going to matter."
For Kristen Weisberg of Lake Forest, Ill., the decision to start her son Porter, 5, in kindergarten next fall at age 6 was a multilayered process, in which she and her husband considered factors such as Porter's summer birthday and their own experiences as relatively old kids in their grade school classes.
Weisberg talked to her male peers about the issue, and the ones that had been young for their classes said they would have preferred to have been older.
She also took into account the availability of a preschool program for 5-year-olds at First Presbyterian Church Preschool.
"It worked out well for me," she says of redshirting. "They all catch up and it all evens out in the end, whether they're smart, half-smart, not smart. But I think later on, especially with guys, they drive first and they have one more year on them as far as height and ability, especially in sports.
"So we'll see. Give me a call in 16, 18 years. We'll do a follow-up story."
