Six is the New Five

School readiness is such a huge can of worms that in some ways I hesitate to open it.

On the other hand, I've been struggling all year to get my head around the trend in our area, and I really want to talk it through and hear other people's perspectives.

What is the trend? Holding back kids (mostly boys) who are old enough to make the age cutoff to start school, so that they won't start until the following year. The reason? So that they will be bigger and more coordinated and socially more mature throughout their school years.

To be clear: I don't have a problem with any child not starting school at the "appropriate" age (as determined by the state) if he or she isn't emotionally ready to be in school, sit still for directions, share with other kids, take some personal responsibility for completing work and cleaning up, and so on.

And in many cases, the logic I hear is that boys mature more slowly than girls and that boys who are painfully shy have a hard time of it throughout school.  However, that fact of human development does not necessarily mean that all boys are less mature than all girls.  Moreover, I have a huge problem with holding back a kid who turned five in June (when the state cutoff is December 1) so that he will be "more coordinated" throughout school.

Because in my experience, this is basically code for holding a kid back so that he will be more likely to excel at athletics amongst his "peers."  And, for a whole lot of reasons, I don't really think that holding a kid back so that he can be a soccer star in 10th grade is desirable.

Primarily, I think this creates a problem with identifying so-called "peers"--because, of course, the kid who turned five in June and was held back from starting kindergarten that September is actually seven to ten months older than many of the kids in his class.

There is a reason that most youth sports leagues are organized by age rather than grade, and that they have rules about how you can "play up" (meaning play on teams where everyone is in the next older bracket) but you cannot "play down."  Just think how it would be if my preschooler on her four-year-olds soccer team had to play against a team of six-year-olds. Ludicrous, right?

And yet, we are creating situations not much unlike this in schools by allowing large numbers of kids to wait to start kindergarten.

In a class where there is a posse of older kids like this, suddenly, the kids who are starting school on time look immature. My kids, who are both very tall for their ages, have faced this issue in small ways all their lives: out in public, people always assume they are older than they are, and when a kid who is tall enough to pass for six has the melt-down of a four-year-old, people look at you and tsk tsk! audibly because they do not get that he actually is only four.

Think about this in a kindergarten classroom. A kid who is well into his sixth year simply has a longer attention span, better ability to cooperate, a clearer sense of how to present his ideas in front of the class, greater skills at negotiating social dynamics.  In short, he is more mature than a kid who is barely five.

This is not a shock.

But is it really necessary for kindergarten?

When I started kindergarten, a lot of kids still sucked their thumbs.  No one could read yet. We needed daily reminders not to eat the paste.

Now, at the start of kindergarten, at least half of the class is starting to read. They are expected to sit still for an hour of "center time" where they rotate responsibly from one table to the next doing assigned work. They have homework.

We have raised expectations so high in terms of the kinds of academic work that we expect of five-year-olds that it is not surprising that we are worrying about their social and physical maturity as well.

But if we raise the bar so that the maturity of a six-year-old is requisite for succeeding in kindergarten, then why not raise it so that seven is the new six? Surely, by seven, they will be mature enough to sit through much longer stints of work. They will have greater patience. Obviously, this is a slippery slope that I don't think we really want to go down.  And yet, we are perfectly willing to allow kids who turned five many months before the mandated cutoff date to have one more year to play, to "just be kids," so that they don't have to buckle down and be so mature and grown up.

If we are so worried about kindergarten being onerously tasking for a five-year-old, then perhaps we need to think carefully about what kindergarten is requiring.

But I don't think the solution is holding back children as a common practice.  That results in a potential age spread in any given grade of eighteen months. At almost any school age I can think of, that is tremendous. Think about the difference between a child who is seven and one who's eight-and-a-half. Now think about having a mix of that in a single classroom and trying to accommodate the range of maturity. It's enough that teachers have the herculean task of teaching to students who come in with different levels of skill; to ask them to deal with a huge range of behavior and maturity capacities seems almost impossible.

I don't pretend to have all the answers here. And I, fortunately, am not faced with a looming problem in our own family as a result of this issue. But I think that if we really want to educate our children well, we need to think about their school readiness not just in terms of individual skill (in the brains or brawn department) but also in terms of peer dynamics. While it might be great for any individual kid to be the oldest and biggest by far in his class, does it really serve class dynamics well to have half a dozen kids who are more than a year older than most of the rest of them in the class?

Could this trend have anything to do with the increase in bullying nationwide? (I have no evidence; I am just asking. It does seem a situation ripe for exploitation, though, to have such a wide range of ages in a single classroom pretending to be all at the same level.)

I know a lot of parents face agonizing decisions. They have a child who is very tall, always mistaken for older, who really is simply not ready to sit still for a long school day, and so they hold her back in her own best interest, and thereby end up with a child who always looks two grades older than she is--but who is successful and happy. Or they have a child who is academically gifted but socially shy, and they struggle mightily with which aspect of the child's life should be lived "at grade level." I am not trying to belittle those very difficult decisions.

But I do think that it's really important to remember that readiness and knowledge are not the same thing. Being ready to learn to read is not the same thing as already knowing how. Being ready to work in groups is not the same thing as having mastered group dynamics. I worry that we have begun to confuse being ready for kindergarten with already having mastered the skills that we once expected kindergarten to teach.

And I will say this as the parent of a child who just missed the state cutoff, and who thus theoretically should have been one of the oldest in the class: kindergarten is a fantastically magical year in which kids learn a tremendous amount. Despite the age "advantage," my bright, academically-a-little-advanced son was socially very reticent when he started kindergarten. But in the last month, he has taken magic tricks, jokes, and other performances for his Show and Tell. The outgoing and vivacious kids who could hardly write their own names when the year started? They are good, basic readers now.

My point is: in the first year or two of school, skill levels even out somewhat. This is not to say that by second grade everyone will be at the same point. But it is to suggest that the vast ranges in maturity and skill level do shrink to smaller ranges as children begin to figure out what it means to do school.

And I think there might be something to be said for trusting that our kids will rise to the occasion instead of needing to be held back until they have already surpassed what used to be goal.

**Thanks for Amber's post for inspiring me to articulate what I've been struggling with all year. You might also want to check out the comments on hers.**