Getting Ready for Kindergarten Early (and Forgetting about Redshirting)

These days, getting ready for kindergarten can take forever for children. And it's kind of fashionable to allow this to happen too. That's the way it is with one out of ten kindergarten-age children in America. Apparently, with some parents, it's even a kind of sneaky strategy. They feel that if they do this, their children will be older and more mature than the other children and they'll do very well in school. Actually, delaying getting ready for kindergarten is so popular it even has a name – they call it redshirting (borrowed from sports).

It isn't just parents alone who do this. Teachers often think this is a good idea too. In the beginning, young redshirted children in kindergarten can really seem to perform better. But that's an illusion and it really fades quickly by the time they reach the end of elementary school. Actually, as research tells us, redshirted kids are often less motivated than regular kids, and they don't do any better in life in general. All that happens through all of this is that they are worse off by a year’s salary by the time they retire.

So for a child to take his time getting ready for kindergarten is a bad idea, and redshirting doesn't work. So what does work?

A large-scale study done in Canada on dozens schools found that children who are young for their class are the ones who do best. They make more progress more quickly because there are motivated. Even a child who is a month younger can often be at an advantage. Why would this be?

How about this for an explanation – school makes kids smarter. And so, the sooner you send a kid to school, the earlier his going to feel the heat of competition and gear up all smart and motivated? For instance, a high achieving kid who skips a grade often has the incentive to do even better. They usually get farther ahead in school and in life. They also have better emotional lives overall. Basically, the rule is clear – the more challenged a child feels, the better he's going to perform.

And there is science behind it too that really supports this. The first six years of a child's life, his brain goes through some major growth and development. At no other point in life does the brain grow and organize itself at that speed. This is the time that children need to be really challenged and be put in stimulating environments.

Basically, the idea that starting a child off in school too early is some kind of silly modern-day competitive parenting thing, is just plain wrong. Send your child off to school as early as possible, and you child will thank you for it one day.