Every parent wants the best for their kid. We want them to have every opportunity and live the life of their dreams. We want them to have every chance at success.

We want it so bad. But do we ever stop to ask if our hopes for them are the right hopes or our sense of success is actually good? And where do these hopes come from?

Parents have a lot of pressure. From themselves, family, friends, neighbors, colleagues and coworkers, church members, and total strangers.

From the moment we announced my wife was pregnant, we started to get all sorts of unsolicited advice. About the birth, breastfeeding, sleeping, scheduling, expectations, boundaries, discipline, development, reading goals, preschools, when they should start school.

We rarely instigated or asked for their advice. No, people just freely gave it! And with a knowing smile “oh…just wait!”

Or, in the midst of survival mode and sleepless nights and employers who don’t care how poor your sleep is (it’s your fault–you made that bed!), we’re told “to cherish these moments.” They go so soon and you’ll wake up one day and they’ll be teenagers!

And all I’m thinking is at least teenagers sleep!

Then I get behind the wheel and put the car in gear, but then I don’t let up on the break because, wait, that’s kind of a dick thing to say. Where’s the sympathy? Where’s the oohing and ahhing over my ridiculously adorable kid? Where’s the Fraternity of Parents where one of our own is struggling and it’s up to you to cheer them up?

Parenting is hard and we all know it. But that isn’t the worst.

We heep responsibility onto parents but without respect.

Parents know all these things already. We often read books and actively solicit advice from sources we trust. It is part of the deep-seated anxiety of the American parenting culture.

• Your kids must be better than you.
• They must prove worthy of love, but we must love unconditionally.
• Raise them to respect authority, but speak their own minds.
• Get good grades but don’t just be “academic smart”.
• Your worthiness as a parent is dependent on the behavior of your children.

And no amount of reassurance that you love our kids will erase the death stare you give when they make a peep in church.

None of this compares with the ultimate parental responsibility: choosing school. A choice spurred by opinion and devoid of support and full of incredible pressure.

Preparing for school

Our daughter had time in daycare and a year in preschool. There was no doubt she was ready for kindergarten. It seemed her preschool teacher stretched to find reasons to mark her down.

We moved to Terre Haute, Indiana right at the age we’d start our son in preschool. There wasn’t the obvious choice: the “it” place in town or the preschool with the shiny new facility. We had to look harder than we did for our daughter.

We also needed an all-day preschool–something which gave us more flexibility than Monday/Wednesday/Friday mornings.

We found one. And enrolled our son. He took quickly to the place.

He had been there for most of the school year before we noticed.  We looked at benchmarks and preparedness expectations you read when you Google “is my child ready for kindergarten?” And we wondered what should his preschool teach him?

They helped him learn how to hold his pencil and write his name. But they didn’t teach him how to tie his shoes. And if they came untied, they wouldn’t tie them. We often picked him up when he was outside, running on the playground, shoes untied.

Apparently that’s for parents to teach. Glad to know that afterward.

He meets the benchmarks. The ones we knew about. He knows the difference between his imagination and reality. He can count. And he’s a stealth reader: he could read long before we knew it.

He is also tender and sweet, but can roughhouse and tease. He is generous and loving. And a quick learner.

In Michigan, he would’ve started Kindergarten with no question.

But we’re in Vigo County, Indiana.

Here the cutoff is three weeks before his birthday.

It bothered me at first, because the cutoff wasn’t what I expected. It wasn’t fall, it was summer. OK, fine. One more year. We’ll swing it.

Except that his school makes exceptions. For kids like him. They have a deadline, but we’re told they take all the August birthdays. He’ll be five years-old a few weeks after all the other five year-olds. So what. We decided to watch him and see if he would be ready.

It was then, when we decided to watch him progress and decide by the summer that we started to hear all about the virtues of waiting.

Our educator friends told us to wait.

We have many friends who are educators, active and retired. A retired principal, several grade school teachers, and an early childhood specialist. They all said to wait. This conflicted with the research I was doing about education outcomes with students who start at different ages.

Other parents told us to wait.

And of course, tons of parents and grandparents volunteered their thoughts. That so many told us to wait started to concern me.

I thought of my sister’s plight, as her children have fall birthdays. Her district has a Young 5’s option, which many in her community were using.

She also introduced to me the idea of voluntarily holding your children back. Many parents in her suburb of Detroit were all holding back their children, especially boys, so that they would have an advantage in sports.

They tell us to wait because he’s a boy.

The most disturbing idea to me is the idea that we would treat the start of kindergarten different for my son because he’s a boy. In many of our conversations, his sex is the tiebreaker.

Choosing to hold back a child for sports, or giving him another year just because he’s a boy bothered me in ways I couldn’t quite express.

The data on delaying kindergarten is mixed.

The data around age at start of kindergarten is at best mixed. The majority of studies seem to suggest there is virtually no difference in outcomes of children who start kindergarten at 5 and those who start at 6. There are outlier studies–some of which show better results for older starters, some show the opposite.

If there is virtually no difference, then what’s the big deal?

Perhaps it is our focus on present need rather than future outcome.

In the research, I found there are two significant points in development worth noting. How the child performs in early elementary and middle school.

The early elementary advantage

The most common reason to hold a child back is that they aren’t ready. But what does this mean? And how does this play out in practical terms?

It seems that the idea of “being ready” puts a primary emphasis on present ability. Are they there, now?

Giving our kids an extra year does seem to give individual children an early advantage. These children show fewer behavioral issues.  And given an extra year of preschool (that’s assuming there is preschool and parents can afford it), these students often show greater comprehension.

The studies all seem to suggest that this advantage disappears rapidly, however. And the accelerated start leads to a regression toward the mean. In other words, one’s 10 year-old will be more like the neighbor 9 year-old by the time they’re both in fourth grade.

There is also concern that some children with an extra year of preschool are too prepared for kindergarten. Many get bored. And those behavioral problems you’re avoiding start to come out. Because they aren’t learning enough in kindergarten or first grade to keep them focused.

Middle School troubles

We should know that middle school is tough enough. We normally focus on kids who are late bloomers or the challenge of being younger than everybody else. But what of the early-bloomers?

I remember my own middle school experience with the girls who developed first. A few looked much older than 13 and had high school boyfriends.

For many, being bigger, older, and developing before your friends can be just as difficult. That we are less likely to recognize this makes it a more challenging phenomenon. And more often missed.

One study showed the older cohort having more trouble than the younger at this age.

All this research and expectation-shifting worries me. For my children and for yours.

Choosing against sending children to kindergarten is creating an age gap.

I’m becoming concerned by the normalizing of an older kindergarten.

Rather than excepting some for their development, we’re moving more of our children to the exception. At the same time we’re moving our age cutoff earlier so our children have to be older.

We’re demanding greater performance before kindergarten and raising expectations for performance in kindergarten.

It feels like we’re giving our kids two first grades.

But worse, we’re putting near-fives, not only with fives and near-sixes, but with sixes and near-sevens.

We are upsetting not only the age-balance, but the development of the cohort.

And rather than serve the few who have genuine need for greater development, we are creating a mainstream funnel with a widening age gap. And disturbing differences in present ability.

Rather than giving our kids the best chance at success for the future, we are breaking the system all our kids depend on for success.

This is a huge problem.

And the age gap is worse because of gender.

Because we aren’t putting our boys and girls in the same age cohort, but into performance cohorts.

And as the girls loved to tell us boys all throughout school, girls mature earlier. Which I never thought was an actual sign of their maturity.

An age gap is enough of a problem, but if it also becomes gendered, then we have an even bigger problem we aren’t prepared to deal with.

While my son is a couple weeks younger than most of his peers, I also don’t want him older than all the girls.

I don’t want him pigeonholed as ignorant or immature. Just because he’s a boy.

And when my daughter is 15, I don’t want her dating someone from her own class with a legit mustache. It needs to be something hideous that we can make fun of him for. Because he’s 15.

The gender gap undermines our boys. It makes outsized expectations of five and six year-olds. Then prescribes how we treat them throughout their childhood and education.

So we enrolled our son in kindergarten this spring.

Despite the pressure to wait, we chose to go with early enrollment.

We heard all the arguments against, but none of them matched our son.

Lost in the cacophony of voices about what we should do for our son as a boy and what everyone else seems to be doing, there was the one glaring omission.

Is my son ready?

And is kindergarten still kindergarten?  Not First Grade 1.0.

All I have to go on is the boy I see. The boy who shares with his sister and checks on us to make sure we’re OK. Who read all the words as Rose was writing them–words she intended to post around the house to help him learn to read. Only he already could.

The boy who acts his age: an imaginative, thoughtful, stubborn, joyful, enthusiastic five.

The more I listened to voices, the more I doubted myself.

I knew all along that my son was ready. But the voices made me doubt it.

The boy I saw was ready to learn. But the voices made me think he had to be 5-going-on-15 to start school. He had to have that hideous mustache before they’d let him ride a bus, count, and write his letters.

All this pressure to choose–to make the right choice or else I would be ruining my son’s life forever.

It seems as if we are more concerned about my son than we are about our children.

Ultimately, our decision isn’t just about our son. It affects everyone else’s kids as well.

So I turned to my parents for guidance. And they reminded me that I already knew what to do.

He will rise to any occasion.

Whichever choice we would make, he would rise to the challenge.

He wasn’t challenged in preschool or encouraged to reach to new heights.

And I remembered the rule of parenting which has guided us for nearly a decade: Our kids communicate their needs. It’s our job to listen to them.

We don’t just believe in our son, we are doing what’s best for him.

In spite of it all. The research which reveal equal outcomes. In the hours of watching our son on the soccer field. And through those preschool projects and opportunities. Through all this, I’ve drawn the opposite conclusion from those around me.

Our son doesn’t need an extra year to mature. He needs to a challenge.

Being a couple weeks younger than most of his friends is nothing. I was months younger. It gave me something to strive for.

I rarely thought about being younger than my classmates, but when I competed with them, even when some were two years older than I was, I won.

My parents didn’t think I was incapable. They knew I could do it. So did my teachers.

I finished near the top of my class and didn’t turn 18 until halfway through my first year of college. I was one of the top players on our tennis team. I was social and survived school as well as anyone.

I don’t want it easy for my kids. And I’m not going to game the system to make sure they succeed. I want them to develop more grit than I have and more motivation than Rose and I combined.

And he will.

We sent our son to kindergarten because we believe in him. Who he is now. And who he will be years from now.