Lisa Larney started researching college when her daughter was 3. She wanted to know everything she could about the long-term impacts of delaying kindergarten enrolment for her daughter, born just a week before her school district’s enrolment cutoff date.
Would she benefit from going to college a year later? What if she’s too tall for her grade? Would she perform better academically if held back?
After two years of studying her daughter’s social interactions and researching her options, Larney decided to ‘redshirt’ her, the term used for keeping children in prekindergarten instead of enrolling them when they’re first eligible at age 5.
Redshirting was originally popularised in college sports: Coaches would keep athletes out of competition for a year to develop their skills and extend eligibility. When it comes to kindergarten readiness, the hotly debated practice is most common among parents of kids with summer birthdays because it decides the difference between being the youngest in their class or the oldest, with all the advantages that come with age.
Some parents who redshirt say their child isn’t ready for a classroom setting. Others admit they want to give their kid a leg up by enrolling them in kindergarten at age 6, instead. And even others do it in an attempt to mitigate existing disadvantages, whether perceived or very real. The thinking is they’ll always be a year ahead academically, physically, socially.
Larney, 44, of Bala Cynwyd, in the end, waited to enrol her daughter, and made sure she was challenged academically in her second year of preschool to avoid boredom. The decision, ultimately, was because Larney thought her daughter could use time to mature, and wanted to protect her sensitive child from the impending ‘girl drama.’ Larney said her now 9-year-old, who is headed to third grade, still struggles from time to time with self-confidence, but in that extra year, she learned to better stand up for herself.
“I knew that this would be the best thing for her,” Larney said, “and I 100 percent do not regret it, and I can’t imagine I ever will.”
A handful of studies show that while children who are redshirted experience academic and social advantages while in kindergarten, that can dissipate by middle school. Some researchers argue redshirting can harm children’s development over the years if they aren’t challenged enough, and others suggest it’s actually the youngest kids who perform better academically over time.
But the redshirt-or-not stress remains, particularly among highly educated parents in high-income areas where the conversation has become a point of contention on playgrounds and in preschools. Parents say they’ve lost sleep over the decision, worried that the wrong choice could irreparably damage their child’s development. Even after the fact, parents say they still think about it years later, wondering what social or academic milestone could have gone differently.
“It’s a very tricky and conflicting decision,” said Jen Cohen, 41, a mother of two from Wynnewood who enrolled both of her summer-birthday boys, now 13 and 6, in kindergarten when they were first eligible. “As more and more parents do it, the pressure to do it becomes kind of bigger.”


There’s so much pressure to redshirt
Only about 6 percent of children are redshirted, a number that’s been relatively consistent for the last 15 years or so, according to Diane Schanzenbach, an economist who co-authored a 2017 study on redshirting.
But among boys and those with educated parents, the rate is higher. College graduates are almost twice as likely as high school graduates to redshirt their sons. Schanzenbach’s study showed nearly one in five boys with summer birthdays and college-educated parents were redshirted in 2010. One reason may be that it’s mostly higher-income families who can afford to keep their children in preschool an extra year.
Dominic Gullo, a professor of early childhood education at Drexel University who studies the long-range effectiveness of pre-kindergarten and kindergarten programmes, said that for some parents, it isn’t an academic ‘readiness’ issue, but rather they are trying to right personality traits they believe are obstacles to success.
“It’s an ‘I want my child to be older, smarter, more ahead of everybody else,’ and that’s why you see it in that particular demographic,” said Gullo, who added that in most cases, “if they are 5 by the cut-off date, then your child is ready to enter kindergarten.”
Gullo said the practice of redshirting has been going on since at least the 1980s as the emphasis on early childhood education increased in public discourse. But things amplified after Malcolm Gladwell seemed to endorse the idea in his 2008 bestseller, Outliers, in which the first chapter is about the relative advantage of being slightly older in competitive situations.
“There’s so much pressure to redshirt,” said Schanzenbach, Professor of Human Development and Social Policy at Northwestern University. “The parents feel like everybody is doing it. You kind of feel like, ‘Am I doing the right thing for my kid by not redshirting them?’”
Eileen Christy felt so much pressure that she thought about kindergarten enrolment when she was due to give birth in late August. She hoped her daughter would be born late, so she’d be one of the oldest kids in her class once kindergarten came around.
Her daughter ended up being born on time. But Christy knows what it feels like to always be the youngest kid in the class, having had a close to cut-off birthday. So she and her husband have already decided they will keep their daughter, who turned 4 this month, out of kindergarten until she’s 6.
“We always knew we wanted to put her at an advantage rather than a disadvantage,” said Christy, a 34-year-old mother of two who lives in the Far Northeast.
But the most recent research isn’t altogether consistent. Schanzenbach said her study shows the academic advantages for children who had an extra year to prepare for kindergarten often dissipate by middle school.
However, a separate 2017 paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded children who are older compared with others in their grade have higher test scores even into high school. That study, though, didn’t measure the impacts of redshirting, but rather compared older children born in August to those born in September. The authors of that report have warned that its results are not an endorsement of redshirting.
Experts roundly say the practice can be successfully used in unique circumstances, like for a child who has experienced trauma or has been adopted and is adjusting to a new culture. But the risk of redshirting is that a child who is held back but doesn’t need it may become bored and act out.
Gullo said children who are redshirted tend to have a higher prevalence of behavioural issues over time and drop out of high school at a higher rate.


What to consider before redshirting
It’s impossible to predict how this decision might affect your child’s long-term development, but studies show there are risks associated with redshirting. At the same time, being the youngest student in the class could come with its own benefits.
If a child notices all of his or her friends are moving on to kindergarten, the child’s self-confidence could suffer, said Marcy Safyer, the director of the Center for Children and Families at the Chicago-based Erikson Institute. She said this feeling can make kids anxious and affect their ability to cope.
“If you feel like you’re not as worthwhile as other children or you feel that somebody feels like you’re not smart or you can’t cut it,” she said, “it can be very inhibiting.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer/TNS