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Red-Shirting

KindergartenMay 10, 2011 By Tom Matlack 6 Comments (Edit)

Why are so many parents holding their boys

back? Is it really good for them? And what impact is it having on everybody else?

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“I got paid $100 for that shot,” one of my players told me as wewarmed up for our basketball game, referring to a close-range layupthe prior week.

No, I’m not an NBA coach. The player wasn’t referring to someelaborate point shaving scheme cooked up by would-be sportsagents to high school prodigies. The player was 6 years old.The kid’s parents had paid him to make a basket. I was floored.Speechless. He said it in passing like it didn’t really matter, like evenhe thought it was kind of weird.

Pretty soon the boys were laughing and chasing each other aroundcones I had set up, trying without much success to dribble

the miniature balls while playing tag. Clearly, having fun was waymore important to this kid than any parent’s $100 payout. But it stuckwith me as a sign of something profoundly wrong with our generationof parents, and a potential danger to the generation of kids, especiallyboys, that we are raising.

It reminded me of what a kindergarten teacher at a private school inBoston recently told me: “I was cornered by an applicant’s father whoasked that if he sent his child to me in pre-K, could I promise that his

child would get into to Harvard in 14 years.”

Most particularly it made me think of the increasing number of families who are holding back their sons at the age of 5, particularly inprivate schools, in order to increase their competitive advantage,following, perhaps without knowing it consciously, the line of thinkingthat has been used to produce professional hockey players.

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In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell discusses the odd distributionof birth months among NHL players. In Canada, youth hockey is ahighly policed sport where players are registered strictly by calendar year. The oldest, therefore, at each level are those born earliest in theyear. Just by virtue of age they tend to be bigger and stronger.Gladwell argues convincingly that a disproportionate number of successful hockey players end up being born in the first few monthsof the year (see graph below). This selection process starts as earlyas age 8, and the effect persists all the way up to the NHL. It hasbeen very consistent over time.

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Source: http://behindthenet.ca/blog/

So if it is true of youth hockey players in Canada why wouldn’t it betrue of kindergarten boys in Boston, or San Francisco, whose parentsare hoping they will grow up to be President one day. That makessense right?

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I asked one admissions officer what he says to the parents of boysentering kindergarten about the idea of holding their son back. Hesaid, “I often tell parents that if allowing their children to be on theolder end, rather than the younger end, results in any of the following:starting for a sports team as opposed to sitting on the bench; beingone of the first to drive as opposed to one of the last (huge socialadvantage); the possibility they will be an A and B student asopposed to a B and C student; (for the dads) getting the girl or notgetting the girl, then it is worth considering.” (All the sources for this

article asked to remain anonymous given the sensitive nature of their day-to-day relationships with children and their parents.)

But a different admissions officer disagreed strongly: “The trend isdisgusting, but it fits with any arms race or conflict cycle model. I’vebeen wondering more broadly about what age we push kids throughall the school factories. All they have in common is age and sincethey all develop at different ages, that system often makes little senseanyway.”

What I have noticed is that more and more boys are being held back.As a result, the classroom dynamic is changing so that the kids whoplay by the rules are disadvantaged by those who are bigger andmore mature. As one teacher put it, “While I do believe there aresome cases where a child is served well by being slightly older, I donot think this is true for most children. The problem we repeatedly run

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into is that as some parents hold their children back, it wreaks havocon the class dynamic and turns a pre-K classroom into an ‘almostkindergarten’ one.”

If we keep our curriculum to what we feel is age-appropriate, we getparents who demand to know why we don’t challenge their child. If we cater to those in the class who are developmentally moreadvanced, we lose those children who are being children and aredevelopmentally where they should be. I would argue that thosechildren, both boys and girls, who are pushed at an early age, end upat a social disadvantage later on, as not enough attention was givento their emotional development, and far too much was given todeveloping skill sets. It is also these children who lose their love of school. Most children want to participate in pretend play, for instance,

but it is shocking to see those who have already internalized the ideathat pretend play is too young for them, and that being older issomehow more important.”

A psychologist in Boston who works intensively with children agreedwith the danger in holding boys back: “The press to perceive a child’sdevelopment in a competitive, cutthroat ‘I win you, you lose’ mindset… appears to be extending to younger and younger ages. Althoughdelaying school for a year may … benefit individual children, the

larger pattern seems likely to fuel collective anxiety among parentsand children in destructive ways.”

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Part of this problem is gender-based. “We know that the developmentof verbal skills for boys at that age can be 12 to 18 months behindgirls, yet they are in the same classrooms with similar, if not identical,expectations,” said one admissions officer.

A kindergarten teacher commented, “Many schools set up their 

classroom and schedules to reflect a typical girl learner, not a youngboy. Asking a 4 or 5-year-old boy to sit at a table and do prolongedwork with a pencil and paper is asking far too much, and yet if weexamine the kindergarten or first-grade schedule, they are shuffledfrom room to room, subject to subject, and we slowly take away their time to play and make independent choices, and recess becomes adistant memory to many fifth-graders. I watch parents as they tour our school and see the anxiety on their faces as they realize that their child is not ‘ready’ for all this.”

Fessenden and Dexter (where JFK famously attended) areboth private schools in Boston exclusively for boys. These schoolsneutralize the argument that boys need to be held back to keep upwith girls by teaching them separately. Yet the issue isn’t purely aboutboys keeping up with girls. It’s about parents putting pressure on their very small kids and the teachers who teach them even when boys are

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being taught in an all-male environment.

“There are those families that enter with the attitude that they arepaying for education and the play-based curriculum in the younger grades makes no sense to them,” said one Boston-area teacher. “Iwill never forget the conference where the parent asked merepeatedly if his 5-year-old was in the top third, middle third, or bottom third of the class. My answer of how that was an inappropriateranking of a kindergarten child made no impression on him. Heexplained that he needed to know if this expense was really worth it.

There is an enormous lack of appreciation for childhood these days—people see it merely as preparation for the rest of life, and there is notrecognition of the inherent value of childhood experiences.”

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In the end the issue is about the kids and about how we collectivelydefine learning. Perhaps the intense pressure at a young ageamongst those financially capable of sending their kids to privateschool stems from a national public education system that isprofoundly broken, where many kids cannot even read to grade level.

Perhaps there is a feeling that if one’s son doesn’t have everyadvantage, they will not only not get into Harvard, they will fallbetween the cracks and become part of the unfortunate mass of undereducated and under-employed young people in our country.Still, the Race to Nowhere, as a recent film calls it, does more harmthan good—whether boys are learning to play basketball or read abook. They don’t really care if they are winning. They just want to playand read.

As parents we should know better than to put our anxiety on our kids

like some kind of disease. Education is supposed to be an adventure,one that is largely directed by the child’s own passions andinspirations. When it is working well, you see the child’s eyes light uplike a Christmas tree when he discovers something new and eagerlywants to tell you about it. It isn’t a competition. There is no fixedamount of learning that goes into kindergartens across the country,and for which each family has to fight for more than their share. It is

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quite the opposite: Learning grows like a weed among children whenit is shared. One child reinforces another’s learning. It’s as much aprocess for the group as the individual.

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Yet despite all the negative indications of the broader trend, there aresome cases when holding back a child does make sense.

One parent told me, “I have two boys who are summer birthdays—one is now 28 and the other is 17. My wife, a teacher, and I chose toallow them to be older. While we do not pat ourselves on the back for our parenting, we do for this decision. Our older son had anunbelievable senior year in high school where he emerged as a very

good athlete (late bloomer), his academics came together, and hewon a bunch of awards—none of which would have happened if hehad graduated a year earlier! His confidence level going off to collegewas sky high, which I don’t believe would have been the case if hehad not had the extra year. Our younger son, a June 1 birthday, hadhis struggles from an early age and is finally finding himself as a highschool junior. Again, our thoughts as parents are that we cannotimagine him ready for college this year, but are very pleased andcomfortable with his trajectory and readiness for college next year.”

An administrator recently recalled, “A few years ago, my best friendsince fourth grade told me that he wished he had repeated. Frankly, Iwas stunned by this statement because while I knew he was theyoungest in our prep school class with a November birthday, I alsoknow that he graduated first in our class in high school, first in hisclass in college, and first in his Ph.D. program at Stanford. I calledhim on this statement and asked why he felt that way and hisresponse was, ‘I was a late bloomer both socially and athletically. Iwas going to be smart regardless of which class I was in, but my

overall experience in school would have been much more positive if Ihad had that extra time to develop in areas I was desperate to besuccessful and comfortable.’”

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So what to do about the increasing trend of holding boys back for kindergarten, not just at private schools but public ones too?

Maybe we should return to the core principals of what kindergarten isfor. This doesn’t mean we should never hold back a kid, but it shouldbe the exception instead of the rule. And we must to do more torelieve the competitive pressure among parents and focus instead onhow to serve the needs of kids.

“It constantly comes back to expectations,” one teacher told me.“What do we teachers expect of our students? What do the parentsexpect of us? What do the parents expect of their children? An

administrator recently told me her mantra is whatever works for thestudents. What she meant by this was that no matter how difficult thedecision, she would always do what she felt would benefit thestudents, even if that meant firing a teacher, having a toughdissuasion with a parent, changing a school routine, or dispensingwith a school tradition. It could all be done if it meant that the studentswould benefit. It is a motto we could all learn from, as schools thesedays are so bogged down with competition and politics that we oftenforget that schools exist to serve students.”

Amen to that.

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