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Health & Fitness

Kindergarten Red-Shirting

Is it good or bad to hold your child back from Kingergarten if they have a late birthday?

What's up peeps. Been a minute since my last blog post but I've been lurking around in the background. My topic this week came from one segment on 60 minutes this Sunday. The topic was holding kids back from Kindergarten until they were six years old instead of the traditional five years old. (it's called Kindergarten redshirting) This intrigued me because I didn't realize doing that was a "thing". I did this with my son. His Birthday is June 22nd and he has Aspergers Syndrome. The  extra time really helped out with maturity. The segment has parents doing it mostly for reasons of leadership and sports potential of their kids with academics and maturity the secondary concerns. When I decided to do it it was mainly for maturity with academics second to that. I felt the ability to socially interact with his peers was very important and that is an area he struggles with. I wish I could say that after reading about the parents who did this for leadership and sports reasons I was apalled and disgusted by them, but I can't. If it wasn't for the maturity issues with my son, he would've gone into kintergarten at age five like everyone else and been one of the youngest in his class. If that had happened and I saw this report, I would've been jealous of those parents who thought of doing it. The 60 minutes piece tries to be balanced, but you can tell they are slanting the story towards the parent who didn't red-shirt her kid despite the peer preasure to do so. They report that her kid is doing fine. For me though, I think it's my duty to give my kid every advantage I can and being the youngest in the class during the years where each week of learning is huge seems like a disadvantage. For full disclosure, I have to say we didn't do it for my daughter, and she is an honors student in high-school now, but her birthday is in March and she has always been mature for her age. That's the other thing, girls generally mature sooner than boys which is anothere reason I probably should've done it for my son even if he didn't have Asperger's. I'll end with a potty story to illustrate my experiences with the maturity level of boys vs. girls - One of the stratigies we used for potty training the kids was to not change their diapers right away when they did number two. It was very succesful with my daughter. She hated having a soiled diaper on her. We assumed my son would be the same. Nope, he didn't really care. It was cool with him. He knew eventually someone would change it for him. We had to use the reward and over the top praise system for him. We have heard similar stories from other parents of boys. What do you guys think, did you or will you hold your kid back until they are six before putting them in kindergarten?

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