Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com.
This week, Dave answers a question about holding your child back from school for a year.
Ryan:
We have two sons. The oldest just turned six at the end of August, which is like two weeks after the start of the public school year in our city. He is in first grade, doing really well with the schoolwork, and most importantly, seems to love school. He often takes a while to warm up socially and we can hardly get more than two minutes out of him about what happens at school (on a good day!) so we are left to fill in the blanks. We chose to start him in Kindergarten last year knowing he would be one of the younger kids in his grade with the encouragement of his preschool teachers. Most days I feel totally fine about this.
Here's the thing—at least three kids in his class have already turned seven. Our son has recently told us that he doesn't play with his friends from last year as much anymore because they're always playing soccer at recess and they're all better and faster than he is. These are the moments when I feel like maybe we fucked up. I am crestfallen that he sees a bunch of his friends playing recess soccer and thinks "I'm not good enough" in first grade(!!) before he has ever played an organized game (moves from "soccer class" to "soccer league" this fall).
We talk about this a lot because our youngest is also a late summer birthday and could technically start next school year as one of the youngest in his class. My wife and I often overthink things and I am not seeing a way off this particular loop.
I'm sorry that your son is sad about his relative athletic prowess. But, oh, to be at an age where life's disappointments are confined to recess! It's great to hear he's already got the schoolwork part nailed, and greater that he "seems to love school." Sounds to me like you guys are in fine shape so long as the kid stays away from the pitch.
But, perceived soccer inadequacies notwithstanding, let me say that I think you made the right parental call by sending your son to first grade on schedule. I would have rendered the same verdict had you not imparted the great news that he's fab with schoolwork and, despite disappointments at recess, loves the school. So, it all comes down to whether you should have held him back for sports, also known as "redshirting." Ryan, I took on your plight because this is a topic that I've been obsessed with for years. Redshirting has had a horrendous impact on scholastic sports and the scourge is only getting worse. The Atlantic ran a story in 2022 that said redshirting was booming among white boys from "affluent or well-educated parents.” You don't wanna be lumped in that demographic!
I'm glad you haven't taken part, at least not yet. Odds are, even if you'd held him back he wouldn't be the best soccer player in the class. And it's for the greater good, I promise! Stay strong with the younger one! Like you, I have two boys. Both started school on schedule and stayed. The older one, now in college, played basketball for his D.C. public high school and I was as awed by the skulduggery kids went through to be part of that nationally ranked program as I was by his team's talent level. By my count, five of the eight players in his class on the varsity team were transfer students, and at least four were redshirts. Again, this was a public school.
Not that your kid's playground pain isn't real. I've been there! I, too, was cursed with a late birthday. I remember a lot of the kids at Westlawn Elementary were better at sports than me when I started first grade (we didn't have kindergarten in Fairfax County, Va., back then). Whereas your son feels soccer inadequacies, I took tetherball beatings to heart. But I'm sure I didn't link my lack of sporting successes to my September birth at first, because I doubt I even thought about being young for my class until I started playing Little League at age 11. Teams were grouped by birthday instead of grade, so I was clumped in with kids who were a year behind me at school.
For my 12-year-old season, my final year of Little League, I was one of the oldest players in the league. At that stage of life, with age comes athletic advantages. The other kids were mostly smaller than me, and they mostly sucked ass more than I sucked ass! Some of my age-induced perks were cool: I still remember the joy I got from hitting an over-the-fence home run at Lee-Graham Park, and warm fuzzies from making the league all-star team at the end of the year. But on the flip side, I spent the summer before 8th grade still stuck in Little League playing mostly with strangers on rinky-dink diamonds, while all my junior high friends had moved up to Babe Ruth League, where fields had 90-foot base paths just like the big leaguers on TV. I know I would've had much more fun playing with my classmates. (Plus, my relative bigness in Little League led to one of the largest, um, headaches of my childhood.)
When I got to high school, I was again younger and less talented than teammates and opponents in my grade. I turned 17 during my senior football season, and was likely the youngest 12th grader on the team. Coincidentally or not, I was also among the lousiest. (Video proof exists: I'm number 54 in white, the right tackle for the Falls Church Jaguars getting pummeled by 1978's eventual national champs from Annandale.) But I haven't gone through life moping for even a second about how if only my parents held me back a grade for sports, I could have sucked less at high school football. To this day, whenever I recall my skill-free schoolboy gridiron "career," it's with an embarrassing level of fondness. By staying in the grade I was born to be in, I got to play alongside my friends. Who cares if they were somewhat older and better. I had a blast.
Those same sporting joys can come your son's way, Ryan, without your family ever wading into the redshirting cesspool. Over the years I've followed these chronological sports shenanigans as they've taken over school sports, like the 2012–13 Bishop O'Connell basketball team, and the lacrosse scene in the D.C. suburbs. For a time in the last decade, it seemed like every boy in hoidy-toidy Montgomery County, Md., was being held back in school, and nobody even bothered pretending there was an academic purpose. This was all about lacrosse. I was shocked when the principal of my kids' public elementary school told me in 2014 that as academically inclined as her family was, she and her husband had redshirted their son to make sure he'd get to play lacrosse for Landon, a private prep in Bethesda with a powerhouse program.
I remember speaking at the same time with a local lax dad who blamed the redshirt epidemic then raging in his Upper Caucasia neighborhood on Malcolm Gladwell. The first chapter in Gladwell's 2008 book, Outliers, had tested the "relative age theory" using a group of top junior hockey players in Canada, who according to Gladwell disproportionately had birthdays early in the year. Because youth hockey teams were grouped by calendar year, these kids were the oldest players on their team. And, according to Gladwell, being the oldest meant they're likely also the biggest, strongest, fastest, and overall best players at an early age, which leads to more confidence, better coaching, a widening of the talent gap and, bottom line, a better shot at going pro then those born later in the year. Yes, Wayne Gretzky was born in January.
The well-heeled MoCo dads of today prefer the term "reclassifying" over redshirting. But by any handle, their mindset was: If you can't beat 'em, cheat em. Holding back children for non-academic reasons generally isn't allowed in public schools. But the privates had no such ban. So lacrosse parents figured out they could get a kid the same "birthday bias" advantages Gladwell's hockey players had over their peers merely by opening their wallet, enrolling the lad in a private prep and repeating a grade; voila, the kid's immediately older than every non-redshirt in his class.
Baseball announcer Bob Uecker's old joke, "The three best years of my life were 10th grade," used to tell an audience he was a bad student. Today it could mean his dad really, really wanted him to play college ball. The Wall Street Journal told a tale earlier this year of a California dad intent on redshirting his son in middle school to enhance the kid's chances of getting a college scholarship and maybe even a financial windfall from the new pot of NIL money available to NCAA recruits. So Dad paid $20,000 to a private school already teeming with redshirts, and apparently paid no mind to the fact that his plan also meant that the kid, described as a "straight-A student," would be 16 years old as a high school freshman.
But high school is a long way off for you, Ryan! And your question was about kindergarten. Trust your instincts and follow your kid's lead. Watching a child grow up can be like the 400-meter hurdles at the Olympics. Yes, there's a staggered start, so early on it can seem like some lucky guys got handed a big lead and some saps got stuck way in the back. But pretty quick you realize everybody has to run the same race. Yeah, my sportsy metaphor needs some work. But I like where I'm headed!
I like where you guys are headed, too. You can be sure that stuff that means the world to him now, like not being as good as the older boys and girls at playground pastimes, will mean less with each passing school year. For now, whenever the athletic hand your boy's been dealt gets you down, remind yourself you got a kid who already loves school and learning. Those are things you can't redshirt your way into.
