Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Skipping/Red-shirting

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Most of these families- I would say are middle to upper class to several full on ultra wealthy. Many, but not all, of the parents are Ivy leaguers and plan for their kids to be the same.

The more wealthy folk also choose elite private schools where many well known public personalities send their kids. I find it interesting. These parents also believe it is "who you know" and they want their kids to be friends with certain groups of kids. I doubt I will still know them in 12 years to know if it made a difference in their kids lives or not. That said, their kids are great kids and I hope they do have awesome school careers, whether they play sports or not.

I think the point in the book Outliers about this is that the older, more physically developed kids were considered to have "natural ability." Hence they received better coaching, more opportunities, support, etc. that all played a part in their development into star athletes. Maybe they really did have natural ability, but when Gladwell looks at the birthdates of the players on an elite Canada hockey team he finds a disproportionate representation of January 2-March birthdays (cutoff is Jan 1) on the roster. It makes no sense for Canadian men born in Jan-Mar vs Apr-Dec to have greater "natural ability" in hockey, does it?

Specific dates in each region will differ depending on the cutoff for sports and whether kids are age-normed or grade-normed but the idea is the same. Around here I believe it's age-based at the end of July or August, which should give the fall birthday kids an advantage, and would actually work against the summer birthday jocks as they would be "playing down" or against younger kids when their real competition when it matters is the next grade up. The irony.

I differentiate between redshirting for competitive reasons vs for developmental reasons. In my area, it seems to happen mostly with boys from wealthy families, and there's quite a few of them.

My concern about redshirting as it applies to me personally is that DD skipped K and so is in class with boys almost 2 years older than her. Not a big deal now because she doesn't care about boys but I'm a little freaked out middle and high school. And truthfully it's not just the boys, I'm worried about the girl politics too.

I see a HUGE difference between accelerating and (most cases of) redshirting: accelerating doesn't give my child a competitive advantage. I had to jump through hoops to get her the grade skip whereas anyone can redshirt their child with just their say-so. And schools have a vested interest in improving their test scores so who will say no to the redshirting parent?

After reading this, I just looked up the Little League World series and the age is 11-13. You could turn 13 after May 1st but not Aug 1st. And most of the players were 13. Now you cannot say that these players just happened to have their birthdays so they would be the oldest and happened to be the best players. In a large sampling size, maybe the few months difference does make a big difference in the development of coordination, giving them incentive to practice more.

But if you red shirt,maybe the kid loses the practice time and has delays in ability. Would you keep them out of little league and stuff if you were redshirting?