Moms Talk: When is the Right Time to Start Kindergarten?

Delaying the start of kindergarten is catching on among parents. It’s something I’ve heard about anecdotally and now the latest statistics bear out the “redshirting” phenomenon: According to a Los Angeles Times story posted last week on the Baltimore Sun’s website, “among children born in 2001, 16.4 percent started kindergarten at age 6 or older. In 1993, only 9 percent of incoming kindergartners had already passed their 6th birthday.”

Those figures from the National Center for Education Statistics show that an increasing number of parents are holding their children back from starting kindergarten until they feel they are ready, regardless of the enrollment age for entering school.

In Maryland, a child must turn five years old on or before Sept. 1 this year in order to enter kindergarten. That means a kindergartener’s birth date must fall between Sept. 2, 2005, and Sept. 1, 2006, according to the Baltimore County Public Schools.

That same Baltimore County Public Schools FAQ website has all sorts of instructions for parents who want to send their children to kindergarten ahead of time through early admission testing, so there must be plenty of people who want to squeak their slightly younger kids into school each fall. But you don’t hear about them very much – more people seem to want to give their kids a leg up by having them be older than their peers.

The arguments for redshirting would-be kindergarteners as mentioned in the Los Angeles Times story include wanting a child to be more socially or emotionally mature. Other parents interviewed wanted their child to be as ready as they could be academically speaking, or they simply didn’t want their child to be the youngest in the class and therefore always lagging behind the pack. One parent said she was looking even further down the line to when her children would be a teenagers – her theory was that if her children were slightly older than their peers, then her kids would make better moral choices when faced with peer pressure.

My children are still too young – way too young – for kindergarten so this isn’t something we are mulling yet. My daughter was born in January 2008 and my son in May 2010, so neither of their birthdays are on the Sept. 1. bubble. My daughter will start kindergarten in fall 2013 and will turn six early in 2014, so she’ll naturally be among the oldest in her class.

Our son will enter kindergarten in fall 2015 and won’t turn six until May 2016, so it’s very likely that he’ll have some peers who are much older than him in his class. Even so, I don’t imagine that we’ll want to keep him for an extra year of preschool, though it’s certainly hard to predict now, when he’s only 15-months-old. Both of my children are at a daycare center that is academically rigorous from their early days there, so I feel like they will be ready to head to kindergarten as soon as the law allows.