128: Should I Redshirt My Child?

Parents - worried about their child's lack of maturity or ability to 'fit in' in a classroom environment - often ask me whether they should hold their child back a year before entering kindergarten or first grade.  In this episode I review the origins of the redshirting phenomenon (which lie in Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, and which statisticians say contained some seriously dodgy math), what it means for your individual child, as well as for the rest of the children in the class so you can make an informed decision.   Jump to highlights: (01:00) Malcolm Gladwell's anecdote about the Junior League Medicine Hat Tigers and Vancouver Giants ice hockey teams that initiated the redshirting craze (02:56) Ability grouping is done in early childhood, just like in sports (03:59) Parents holding their children back from kindergarten came to be referred to as redshirting (10:20) How common is redshirting? (11:04) Boys are redshirted at a ratio of 2:1 compared to girls (12:18) The maturationist approach of why to redshirt (13:05) State support and agenda for redshirting (15:10) Teachers tendency to view a maturationist view of development. (17:16) The Maturation Hypothesis (17:36) Parents redshirt their children to give their child an advantage (20:34) Redshirting as a way to give boys age and size advantage and avoid getting bullied (27:28) Making a judgement call into what benefits mean with regards to the body of research on redshirting (29:24) The evidence of whether redshirting is beneficial (35:19) Misdiagnosis of ADHD caused by relative maturity (37:56) A year outside of school reduces the likelihood that children receive timely identifications of learning difficulties (38:35) Students with speech impairments may actually benefit from redshirting (39:22) Redshirted students may have more behavioral problems in high school (46:04) Children from higher socioeconomic status are more likely to perform well in tests in kindergarten (48:19) It’s possible that the way the teacher sees the child is what helps the child because of Labelling Theory (49:46) Opportunity hoarding associated with middle-class, White parents. (52:01) Is kindergarten truly the new first grade? (56:06) Advocating for Developmentally Appropriate Practice or DAP (57:35) Almost everyone agrees that retention has negative impacts on children (58:55) Accumulative Advantage (01:00:07) Malcolm Gladwell’s proposed solution to homogenize and my thoughts on it (01:02:32) Summary (01:04:56) Why I think asking "should I redshirt my child" is the wrong question   Books and Resources: Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell 13 Reasons Why Your Child Won’t Listen to You and What to do About Each One School Can Wait, by Raymond S. Moore and Dorothy N. Moore   Links: 085: White privilege in schools 086: Playing to Win: How does playing sports impact children? 117: Socialization and Pandemic Pods   Join our the YPM Facebook Community: Your Parenting Mojo Facebook Group   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen  00:02 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives, but it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting.   Jen  00:29 If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released, and get a FREE guide called 13 Reasons Why Your Child Won't Listen to You and What to do About Each One, just head over to YourParentingMojo.com/SUBSCRIBE. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners and the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group.   Jen  00:48 I do hope you'll join us.   Jen  01:00 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.  We have an odd person to thank for what has turned into a bit of an epic episode, and that’s Malcolm Gladwell.  His 2011 book Outliers: The story of success opens with an anecdote about the junior league Medicine Hat Tigers and Vancouver Giants ice hockey teams.  The point of the book is to demonstrate that personal explanations of success that draw on a narrative of self-made brilliance have a lot more to them – that successful people are the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and opportunities that help to give them a leg up in a way that isn’t open to most of us.  In the example of the ice hockey teams in the book (which we’re calling ice hockey for my English listeners, to distinguish it from actual hockey, which is played on a grass field), Paula Barnsley, who is the wife of psychologist Dr. Roger Barnsley, noticed during a game that the majority of the players on teams just like the Medicine Hat Tigers and Vancouver Giants had birthdays that clustered in a certain way.  Roger Barnsley went home and researched all the junior league players he could, and then the national league, and found that in any elite group of ice hockey players, 40% of the plyers will have been born between January and March, 30% between April and June, and 20% between October and December (Gladwell doesn’t say what happened to the 10% born between July and September).  Barnsley said that “In all my years in psychology I have never run into an effect this large.  You don’t even need to do any statistical analysis.  You just look at it.”   Jen  02:28 The reason for this is that the eligibility cutoff for age class hockey is January 1, which means that children born at on January 2nd are a whole year older than children born on December 31st, which is a large proportion of a young child’s life.  The same effect replicates in baseball and football (which I refuse to call “soccer”), because these also have similar age cutoffs in youth sports.   Jen  02:56 Then there’s a half page of text that really caught parents’ ears – reference to a study by two economists who looked at the relationship between scores on a standardized test, and the child’s age at the time of taking the test, and the effect was found here as well.  One of the authors of that paper, Dr. Elizabeth Dhuey, was quoted as saying “Just like in sports, we do ability grouping early on in childhood…so, early on, if we look at young kids, in kindergarten and first grade, the teachers are confusing maturity with ability.  And they put the older kids in the advanced stream, where they learn better skills; and the next year, because they are in the higher groups, they do even better; and the next year, the same things happen, and they do even better again.”  Dr. Dhuey subsequently looked at college students and found that students belonging to the relatively youngest group in their class are underrepresented by about 11.6%.  Gladwell concludes: “That initial difference in maturity doesn’t go away with time. It persists. And for thousands of students, that initial disadvantage is the difference between going to college – and having a real shot at the middle class – and not.”   Jen  03:59 Now those words are almost guaranteed to strike fear into the heart of parents, even though the real problem here is the perception that college is the only path to “having a real shot at the middle class,” who responded by holding their children back from kindergarten when their birthdays were within the last few months of the kindergarten eligibility cutoff.  In the U.S., this practice came to be known as redshirting, which is a term borrowed from sports.  In college athletics, which is big business in the U.S., athletes are only allowed to play for four years but they might ‘redshirt’ the first year which means they wouldn’t formally participate in competition while they get bigger and stronger.  Then they can still play four years after that.  But they’re not just sitting out in that year; they’re practicing with the team and getting bigger and stronger, and they wear a red shirt in practice to indicate that they’re in redshirt status.  From what I’ve read on Wikipedia a coach can tell you at the beginning of the year that you’re redshirting but it isn’t confirmed until the end of the season, so if the star quarterback gets injured then the redshirted player can give up their redshirt status and still play.  So that aspect doesn’t come into play in the academic setting, but the practice of holding a child out...