TAE was immediately offended.
The psychologist argued that little boys are just less mature than their equal-aged female peers, and aren't ready to learn like little girls are. Give them an extra year (to do what, I wondered) and they'll thrive, and have more self-confidence because they'll do better in school.
Despite the lack of empirical evidence to support this, I want to examine his theory.
Many people refer to this as "redshirting" their boys before Kindergarten, stealing the term from collegiate sports where a player attends college for a year but does not lose that year of eligibility. Turn on an NCAA football game, and you'll hear the term "redshirt freshman" a hundred times.
Here, in a well-written essay, Holly Korbey explains how her son, Holden, barely 5 before the first day of Kindergarten, was told by the preschool teacher to redshirt her son:
"I think you should hold Holden back from kindergarten," she said."Are you joking?"
I felt myself getting defensive. I started talking too loud. "He reads! He's fully reading! He meets every criteria on this list, except one! Why on earth would we hold him back?" My mind was racing. I was thinking there must be some explanation. He was smart, social, pretty well-behaved. He definitely had his moments. But still, I couldn't think of what would make the teacher want to hold him back from kindergarten.
"Yes, Holden is a very smart boy. But, he acts very young."
"He's four."
"How Holden acts is perfectly age-appropriate. But, he does act young."
"What is he doing that's so young?" I began to have nightmarish visions: Holden yanking down his pants and peeing on a kid. Hurling toilet paper wads at the bathroom ceiling.
"Well, for one, he sucks his thumb."
Sucks his thumb? I knew kids who sucked their thumbs in high school! (Ones who went to Stanford, by the way.)
"I think if it continues, the other children will make fun of him."
She cited other examples of his immaturity: when they did a silly song and dance on Fridays, he participated. (The other boys did not.) Also, he liked to play by himself.
When I was a young child, I was very small. Although a March birthday, like mine, isn't that late in the year compared to summer birthdays, nevertheless I was one of the last birthdays in my class. Compound that with my short stature and you end up with a very small boy. In grade school, it seemed like all the boys around me would have a growth spurt, then, a few months later, I'd have about 2/3rds of that growth spurt. I felt small and a lot of kids picked on me. There was one kid, ironically a kid that was held back, who took particular delight in ruining my day with his behemoth stature (aside: he later did 5 years for grand theft auto).
But being held back was never really an issue I think my parents discussed. When I was a kid, my peers that were held back were done so almost entirely for mental reasons; most of the kids that were held back were also the kids in special ed classes. You certainly didn't see this:
In the next four weeks, I had seven more conversations with moms who insisted that I not send Holden to kindergarten. They told me their own success stories. One mom told me her son acted "effeminate," and she held him back a year to ensure that he was larger than the other boys, so they'd be less likely to pick on him. Another told me that she was holding her younger son back so there would be more room between him and her older son. "That way he (the older son) can enjoy high school without baby brother in his business." Still another mother was concerned about dating. "Tommy will be able to get his driver's license with all the other kids, be able to drive, go out on dates a year earlier." I listened in horror. Nobody mentioned academics. These moms were more concerned with the social advantages that came with being older and bigger: dating, driving, and — oh, yeah, one more thing.
There was one more reason, a blip on the radar, every single mom mentioned to me, however sheepishly: sports eligibility. In a state known for near-deadly sports competitiveness, Texas wisdom is that the bigger the boy gets, the more competitive he'll be at sports, especially in high school. And the older ones will be bigger first.
Is holding your son back becoming a vanity issue, and not a parental care issue?
Let's get back to the psychologist I heard this morning. His argument, unlike the "Dallas rich white people who want NFL quarterback sons" argument, is that boys are not emotionally ready to learn. The first question, I have to ask, is whether the psychologist claiming this was held back, or wasn't. The second question is how, exactly, did we make it this far with emotionally green men? Is it just me, or are all men, no matter what age a little less mature than women? In a culture where the term "man-boy" has become a commonly applied trait, I have to wonder if holding our sons back will really age them, or is the perceived immaturity of the male half of the U.S. population a symptom of a larger scale problem: decreasing personal responsibility and increasing levels of people blaming their environment for their own failures:
"My darling little boy is a terror because his birthday is in June, not because I let him play ultra-violent video games late into the night, drink loads of Mountain Dew, let him have free rein over the house, let him watch "R" rated movies, buy him whatever toys will keep him shut up, and then blame his teachers when he misbehaves in the classroom."
Holding your son back is not something I universally oppose. Many people take a year of grade school twice, and it helps. But it shouldn't be used as some sort of strategy for collegiate athletic scholarships.
Korbey states:
We all want our kids to be the best they can be. I want Holden to have every advantage, because he's a good kid with a ton of potential. But redshirting seems to me like thinly disguised one-upmanship, a show of force and a way that rich, white kids can gain yet another advantage over the other children. And frankly, it seems unfair — especially to the kids who could probably use another year in preschool if their families could only afford it.
I hate to sound cynical here, but when I see the truckloads of little kids at the local golf course, idly swinging clubs as their parents sit nearby and read about Tiger Wood's Nike contract and the huge piles of money he makes, I have to say that I don't really think all parents want what is best for their kids. A lot of parents want what is best for their own retirement accounts, and a professional athlete as a son certainly helps that desire.
Further thought: I have heard arguments that elementary schools should go to a semester system, so that kids would start kindergarten at two points during the year, hopefully making it easier for August babies, like Holden in the story above, to enter grade school with equal-aged peers.
And although this seems like a potentially clever solution and I consider it very reasonable, it really doesn't address the "problem" the Dallas parents have: they want their sons to be older than their peers. It also doesn't solve the psychologists' issue: boys are dumber than girls.
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