OF A GOLDEN AGE

This New York Times story on parents postponing kindergarten for a year is the latest example of insane, one-up-oriented 21st-century parenting technique.

“I have met mom after mom who is intentionally holding her child back a year,” said Jennifer Finke, a mother of two in Englewood, Colo. “They say they don’t want their kids to be the youngest or shortest. Is that right? Is it fair?”

Or this:

Suzanne Collier, for one. Rather than send her 5-year-old son, John, to kindergarten this year, the 36-year-old mother from Brea, Calif., enrolled him in a “transitional” kindergarten “without all the rigor.” He’s an active child, Ms. Collier said, “and not quite ready to focus on a full day of classroom work.” Citing a study from “The Tipping Point” about Canadian hockey players, which found that the strongest players were the oldest, she said, “If he’s older, he’ll have the strongest chance to do the best.”

The article goes on to explain that there’s added pressure to hold children back a year since if they enter at the correct age they’ll be up to 18 months younger than other children in the same class, which can have serious effects on personal development.

I didn’t go to kindergarten and started first grade instead. Because of the genetic lottery, I always was the tallest girl in my class regardless of age, so size didn’t have any effect on me after starting school early — I can’t speak to that part and do not underestimate how children may get picked on or left out because they are smaller.

But in terms of maturity or life experience, simply being older doesn’t make a damn bit of difference. Someone just like me who had started kindergarten at age 6 would be 19 at her high-school graduation and 23 if she followed it directly with a bachelor’s degree.

She would enter the world of entry-level work two full years after I did and compete against both those who had gone to work right away and those who had spent a year doing community service or some other kind of transitional experience. By age 25 I’ll have four years of full-time work experience where this theoretical person will have two.

More importantly, Americans fall further and further behind the rest of the industrialized world in every core academic subject, and to suggest that our children aren’t capable of or couldn’t find happiness and fulfillment in starting to read or count at the same time they have for decades is the same old overindulgent American helicopter-parenting crapola.

We want our children to be bigger and stronger than other children but don’t mind that they will start their learning and organized socializing a full year later? That sounds like a formula for creating bullies.

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