On “RedShirting” My Son
July 18th, 2008 . by economistmom
(photo of son Johnny, by daughter Emily)
The Wall Street Journal blog, “Real Time Economics“, points to a new economic analysis that is very interesting to me–more from my “mom” perspective than from my “economist” perspective. The NBER working paper on “The Lengthening of Childhood”, by David Deming and Susan Dynarski, suggests that delaying the start of kindergarten might actually reduce overall human capital accumulation in the U.S., because, as WSJ blog paraphrases:
Kids who start school a year late have one year less schooling before they reach the age at which they’re allowed to drop out, decreasing their average educational attainment and widening the gap in learning between rich and poor. (Low-income teenagers are more likely to drop out.) And those who do stay in school enter the labor force a year later — decreasing their average lifetime earnings as well as their contribution to Social Security.
I am one of those who “redshirted” a child from school–having chosen to delay my son’s entry into kindergarten until he had turned 6 (in late July). (The cut-off in Fairfax County, VA is September 30.) Given my “mom” experience going through a decision process that was heavily influenced by my son’s preschool teacher (who made the compelling case that my son was not emotionally ready having been the youngest in his preschool class and the youngest, and only boy, at home–and didn’t I want to give him some chance of being a leader instead of a follower somewhere in his life?…), and then seeing the benefits of having given him that extra year (he’s been a strong leader in school ever since), I have to think that the NBER analysis, at least as described by the WSJ above, is missing a couple important factors in the suggestion that delaying school is a bad thing:
- It assumes the annual productivity of schooling for the kid is independent of the extra year of maturity (or other psychological benefit from being an “older” kid rather than a “younger” kid in one’s grade)–so the kid might get one year less on a path that’s otherwise the same. I would argue that there’s evidence (ok, at least my casual evidence) that a given amount of education provided to a more mature kid leads to a larger amount of “human capital” accumulated in that kid (higher quality “learning”), so that the human capital production function gets a sort of technology boost when kindergarten is delayed.
- It assumes that the decreased years of schooling caused by drop out is caused by allowing the delay on the front end, rather than allowing the truncation on the back end. In other words, if the problem is drop out, why can’t the rules for minimum drop-out age be changed to correspond to a minimum number of years of school–so that kids who delay kindergarten until age 6 would not be legally permitted to drop out of school until the usual age plus one?
Oh, I know I should read the full paper and all the other analyses by education experts before I leap to these conclusions, but like I said at the start, I’m talking more from my “mom” perspective than from my “economist” one here, and I need to get home to my redshirted son, who I’m sure will graduate from high school (and hopefully, even more schooling) and be a very productive worker some day–I’m convinced even more productive than had I started him in school a year earlier.
I am all with you on this, based on experience with my grandson. To push a child before the child is mature and ready can cause a lot of damage to the child.
What does strike me of the WSJ blogl is the fact that it all boils down to pennies and cents and no thought to the well being of the child.
I’m someone who did the opposite (is that blueshirting?) with both my boys.
While I see your economic argument (productivity could easily be as important as time), I do get frustrated with the “I don’t want my child to be the youngest” argument sometimes. Someone has to be the youngest, and we seem to have entered a bit of an arms race in that an effort to avoid being the youngest, children are being entered in school later and later. If that is all that’s happening, I don’t think it would add especially to human capital.
It was great for my boys to be at the younger end, and in the end, I think it comes down to the individual. For my boys (particularly the older one), learning a bit of humility has been a pretty good thing.
My problem with school is that it is not challenging to an intelligent student. Delaying them an extra year reduces the challenge even further. So, you risk making your intelligent child more bored than they would be, particularly once they reach middle and high school.
If anything, I’d prefer to start my child a year early to help prevent them getting bored later on. Later on it’s always possible to hold a child back, but it’s almost impossible to bump them forward.
I frankly have a hard time with the notion that low income parents are going to choose to pay for another year of daycare and not put their kids in school. I think red shirting is a middle/upper class phenomenon that low income people can’t afford.
Still it should be what is best for the individual child and should not be determent by economics.
Children can and do jump grades. The system should be flexible enough to do the best for the individual child.
Mom!
we are teetering on the edge of insanity here. is the purpose of life really “increased productivity”? more money for the economy?
look at what money buys. look at it. are you sure that what god and man and your kids need is more of it?
moreover, “years in school” is less than a guarantee the kids will learn more. far more likely they will burn our from the bull—-. unless they have been tamed… in which case they will spend their lives in obedient submission, and “they will have their reward.”
in the economics of hell, every mom is a stage mom. wanting only what is “best” for her child… a harvard degree. a career on wall street. what more could life offer?
“decreasing their average lifetime earnings” AND “their contribution to Social Security”
dear god in heaven. i am maybe the last real advocate for Social Security on the planet, and I can smell the brimstone on this one.
sorry, I am too apopleptic to make it clearer than that. But if you have to ask, you will never get to know.
why are they so concerned about this?
maybe i can put it this way: the Trustees estmate future productivity gains to be 1.7% per year, and future real wage gains to be 1.1.% per year.
someone plans to collect the difference.
reminds me of an analysis i read a few years ago that showed that raising the retirement age would add 90,000 dollars per old person per year to “the economy.” since we can be fairly sure the average wage of those old people is not 90,000 per year. and we know that given the choice, people choose to retire early on less money rather than late on more money… and we know that these people have all paid for their own retirement..
it would appear that the move to delay retirement amounts to a desire to make money out of the involuntary labor of old people.
and now the WSJ is worried about the delayed entry of young people to the labor market.
is it really all about more money for the exploiters of labor?
(disclaimer: i am not a communist and don’t use “exploiters of labor” as a replacement for thought. but that seems to describe what is being advocated here.)
coberly wrote:
Mom!
we are teetering on the edge of insanity here. is the purpose of life really “increased productivity”? more money for the economy?
in the economics of hell, every mom is a stage mom. wanting only what is “best” for her child… a harvard degree. a career on wall street. what more could life offer?
dear god in heaven. i am maybe the last real advocate for Social Security on the planet, and I can smell the brimstone on this one.
Good god in heaven, give it a rest! You remind me of a certain third-party candidate in that you seem to feel there is “not a dime’s worth of difference” between those who openly wish to scrap Social Security, those who wish to privatize it, and those who wish to modify it in any way, even if that change may strengthen it. Judging from your hell and brimstone references, you seem to feel that they are all envoys of the devil. You’ve now anointed yourself the “last real advocate for Social Security on the planet”. By the way, why are you excluding Bruce Webb from this? Did he disagree in some way the the official coberly view of things?
It’s fine to have strong opinions on an issue. However, you can’t force everyone to discuss that issue exclusively, much less to agree with your point of view. Economistmom just mentioned Social Security in passing and the last two of your three comments chose to focus on it. Finally, even if you are convinced that we are all envoys of the devil and/or idiots when it comes to the subject of Social Security, I would suggest that you keep that under your hat. I think that any discussion will be much more productive if we keep it civil and treat everyone here as equals, at least in their intentions.
Davis
i would apologize for my old fashioned metaphors. but then i don’t like the new fashioned metaphors very much myself. I do not have other language to express the extreme danger I see that comes from looking at all issues as though they could be decided simply by adding up the money.
Bruce Webb is my hero. If I call myself “the last real advocate” it is a kind of joke. I realize that a sense of humor about oneself is not common among those of you who know everything, such as what “change may strengthen it.”
as for” keeping it civil and treating everyone as equals, at least in their intentions”… i don’t suppose you new days folk have ever heard that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
the problem for you, my friend, is that if you hear someone shouting fire in a crowded theater… do you shoot the messenger or look for smoke?
btw
it wasn’t economist mom who just mentioned Social Security.
it was the evil people who were alla sudden trying to sell increased schooling as a way to shore up Social Security.
my reaction was to their dishonesty. i thought it necessary to offer my credentials as an advocate for Social Security if I was going to reject this oh so sincere idea for “just strengthening it.”
sorry if i offended by going outside your paradigm. it is a problem i have had since i first started trying to teach the heathen that sacrificing their children to Moloch really did not guarantee a good crop.
B Davis
I would be glad to see your proposal for stating the case that deciding what’s best for your child by asking what is the greatest return to the economy, not to mention Social Securiyt, is a dangerous way to look at the question, without the use of metaphors outside your comfort zone.
Similarly, I would be glad to see your case that “just strengthening” Social Security is a wiser policy than leaving it alone.
Probably no need to thread-jack here… though mom did bring up both questions… you would need to think for quite some time to make a case that wouldn’t provoke my more emotional responses.
I’d suggest you begin by stating clearly what you mean by “strengthening,” and why Social Security needs any strengthening. And just what is Social Security anyway.
You may, if you choose, explain why mom should send her boy to school a year earlier in order to shore up Social Security.
small point
you may wish to explain, to your English teacher, why
“i am maybe the last real advocate…”
is the same as
“You’ve now annoited yourself the last real advocate..”
please explain the equivalence between “may be” and “have annointed.”
if you are feeling up to it, you might explain to the class what Coberly was gettiing at and why it differed from the conclusion you jumped to. But this will involve reading in context, and not just responding to words three at a time in Pavlovian reaction to their personal emotional connotations for you.
Some scattered thoughts:
Like Jennifer (commenter 2) we accelerated our daughter on her kindy teacher’s recommendation, and it has been one of the best decisions we’ve made. Along the way we will always hear, “Well, I’d never do THAT. I don’t want my kid to be the youngest..” And the thing is, someone has to be. I was always the youngest AND the smallest, and it never seemed to bother me or my peers. What is age if the kid is ready? My daughter, now 10, has found her peers and they come in a range of ages.
Our focus all along has been, “How do we keep this kid engaged? How do we keep her in an environment where she loves to learn?” For us, it was acceleration. For others, it might be redshirting. I think you really have to consider the individual kid. For EconMom, redshirting worked best.
I am curious, however, about the “leadership” argument for redshirting. I have often heard this put forth as the reason to hold back, and I’m wondering what it really means. I understand the thinking that kids will look up to older kids, but the reality is that is not always the case. The kids who are the “leaders” in my kids’ classes are not necessarily the oldest, or the smartest, or the richest, or whatever.
Why is the focus on having one’s kid be the “leader”? I’m not suggesting I want a follower, but it seems to me that following and leading are more inherent in personality types, not age. If most of the kids are redshirted–and this practice is increasingly common around here–who will lead?
I’m convinced it IS a very kid-specific thing–whether to accelerate or hold back or just go with the normal flow. In my son’s case, I’m sure that the combined effect of birth order (his being the youngest in our family) and gender (his being a HE as well as the only HE among my kids) really mattered. I do think that boys seem to lag behind girls in emotional maturity (tons of evidence on this, right?), and the fact that had we kept our son “on schedule”, he would have been just one grade behind our 3rd daughter, who is 22 months older than him (and more than 22 months maturer than him), just didn’t seem right. When my son’s preschool teacher first told us she didn’t think my son was ready for kindergarten, I have to admit it hurt my pride a bit, being an overachieving parent more inclined to push my kids ahead. (I myself was accelerated as a first grader and graduated from high school having just turned 17, and I think it worked out well for me… but I was a girl and the oldest kid in my family.)
A whole year makes a big difference in young children, that is the difference between the oldest and youngest child in a class room. A child not able to concentrate as well as the others could make for a very unhappy child and happy children learn better and are less likely to to become problem children. So why not give a child time to grow?
Just the same children needing to be more challenged should have the opportunity too. Good schools and good teachers know that.
Girls are more mature earlier and boys catch up sooner or later.
Coincidentally I was born on the last day to be school eligible for my year. I was a pretty precocious kid and had pretty much exhausted the learning possibilities of what was then paid kindergarten so my parents let me go to first grade at the age of five and a half. Which worked well enough until it was apparent that my intellectual brain was growing up well before my emotional one and my physical body was lagging both with the result that when I started High School I was five foot tall and weighed seveny some pounds. Which wasn’t much fun, particularly in gym class.
And it was only kind of fun being a freshman enrolled in sophomore biology and the best student in the class. The other kids liked me, I was kind of like a mascot, so I don’t think they were being consciously malicious when they taped me to that chair. It was much the same as kids teasing a puppy. Who may or may not be enjoying the extra attention but really doesn’t have a lot of choice.
So particularly for boys I think parents need to think hard about the issues of physical and emotional development first and not worry about the kid being bored or held back intellectually, there are all kinds of ways of addressing that outside of school hours or even within it given the right school and teacher.
Also mid-course corrections are not always possible. When I was a fifth-grader we shared a school with the seventh and eight graders. Then the next year they opened the brand new and (being Marin County in the year 1967) hip junior high school. Which was pretty exciting for everyone except for the kid whose parent held him back in sixth grade not for academic reasons but precisely because they didn’t think him mature enough to go on to the now older school. I don’t think he ever really recovered from the humiliation, all his friends moved away and left him back with the little kids. Believe me repeating six grade is not a lot of fun particularly if you did okay the first time around, this kid ended up bored and frustrated and so naturally acting out and getting in disciplinary trouble.
So just based on my experience starting early and my friend’s experience being held back mid-stream I would think that parents should always use the ‘best interest of the child’ standard. Let someone else’s kid be the youngest freshman at Harvard. And for God’s sake don’t worry about lifetime productivity, people aren’t (or shouldn’t be) simply work units whose worth is measured by the wealth they create for themselves or others over the course of a work life. As I said in relation to this post over at Andrew Bigg’s sometimes economists act as if the Protestant Work Ethic came down from Sinai with the Commandments.
my physical body was lagging both with the result that when I started High School I was five foot tall and weighed seveny some pounds. Which wasn’t much fun, particularly in gym class.
Bruce: I can relate… my dreading PE was back in elementary school, when we had to deal with dodge ball games! (Talk about getting battered physically and psychologically…)
mom
i am very glad that your decision was not based on what is best for GDP and, of course, the solvency of Social Security.
now, if we could apply the same kind of motherly wisdom to, say, polar bears…
Diane we relate.
On the other hand I am now six feet (yet skinny) and still waitng Concord’s financials on Social Security. RSVP.
coberly wrote:
Similarly, I would be glad to see your case that “just strengthening” Social Security is a wiser policy than leaving it alone.
Probably no need to thread-jack here… though mom did bring up both questions… you would need to think for quite some time to make a case that wouldn’t provoke my more emotional responses.
As I have better things to do than to provoke your more emotional responses, I suggest that we put this off until mom hosts the “party” that she mentions at http://economistmom.com/2008/07/what-were-being-marked-down/#comment-762 .
B Davis
i think you have a reading problem. i was suggesting you, just as an exercise, try to make the same point i was making without the emotional language. and then, of course, i was proposing that you try to make a logical argumenat about social security one way or another. but then i’d have to teach you what a logical argument is.
but you prefer your brand of emotional response to my brand. i can’t complain about that… beyond noting that i know the difference between emotion and logic even when i have had to give up the one for the other due to lack of interest.
coberly wrote:
i think you have a reading problem. i was suggesting you, just as an exercise, try to make the same point i was making without the emotional language. and then, of course, i was proposing that you try to make a logical argumenat about social security one way or another. but then i’d have to teach you what a logical argument is.
but you prefer your brand of emotional response to my brand. i can’t complain about that… beyond noting that i know the difference between emotion and logic even when i have had to give up the one for the other due to lack of interest.
You’re just full of insults, aren’t you? All because I committed the high crime of suggesting that you be civil. In any case, I’m learning nothing from you and you are obviously learning nothing from me so I suggest that we end this discussion.
B Davis
somehow i thought it was you who started with the insults. i expressed in emotional terms what i thought about deciding what is best for a child by looking at an imaginary effect on GDP and a thoroughly dishonest plea to the solvency of Social Security.
you objected to my rhetoric because you personally found it offensive… even though it was not directed at you. nor did it insult you, because until you wrote, i had never heard of you… well, not in this thread.
so, maybe you can talk it over with your therapist and he can help you understand where you went un-civil first.
btw. there are exactly -no- insults in the paragraphs you quote. a reading teacher would identify that you have a reading problem. that is not an insult. that is a diagnosis.
and let the world note
that the economist mom made her decision as a mom
and not as an economist
for which i heartily cheer, endorse, and celebrate her.
and it’s all i was sayin’.
I grew up in the rural midwest of the US (I’m in my mid 30’s so it was a while ago) and most of the “redshirting” that was done was so that the children would have some sort of competitive advantage in athletics. I don’t know of any of the redshirted kids that actually flourished in athletics enough to merit a scholarship, but they tended to be the better athletes around the middle school years.
yeah
i noticed that too.
when i was in the eighth grade i just wasn’t competetive with the kids who were shaving. but the coaches loved them.