When I had my daughter in April 2019, people kept congratulating me on her “good birthday.” They weren’t referring to pleasant spring weather in anticipation of celebrating her pandemic birthday outdoors (which we couldn’t—April 3rd was too cold for a party in Central Park, and to make matters worse, it overlapped with Passover, which complicated dessert options). No, they were celebrating something much more mundane: how old she’d be relative to her classmates when she started kindergarten.
New York City has one of the latest cutoffs in the country—January 1—worrying many parents of kids born late in the calendar year that their four year olds will be too young to begin kindergarten. Many parents of fall and winter babies are disappointed to learn that redshirting is not an option in the city, and, if they have the resources to do so, they send their kids to kindergarten a year later at private schools with flexible cutoffs. But my April baby would be among the oldest in her class. The peanut gallery was thrilled. “You can send her to public school!” they exclaimed, as if I’d won some sort of developmental lottery.
The reaction was decidedly different when I had my second baby in October of 2023. Not only would my baby be four years old for the first few months of kindergarten, but he’s also a boy, double-cursed in the eyes of anxious parents who believe their sons are doomed to develop more slowly than their daughers. “What will you do?” people asked, sympathy dripping from their voices as they assumed I had even been considering other options.
“Send him to public school on time,” I replied with a shrug.
I’m no historian, but it seems like this birthday hysteria really took off after Malcolm Gladwell published Outliers, introducing many parents to the “relative age effect.” The theory suggests that children born earlier in the year have developmental advantages that snowball into lasting benefits throughout their lives.
I hate to sound like a snob here, but Malcolm Gladwell is far from an expert on child development, and it’s frustrating that we’re letting a pop psychology book written by a journalist almost two decades ago influence major decisions we make for our kids. The actual research on redshirting is far from definitive. While there may be some short-term advantages for older kids in a class, most evidence suggests these benefits disappear by middle school. The developmental differences that seem meaningful at age five become negligible as children grow.
What’s clearer—and more concerning—are the broader societal effects of our obsession with school entry timing. The families most likely to redshirt their children are those with the financial resources to do so. They can afford an extra year of private preschool or childcare, and in districts like NYC, they can pay private elementary school tuition when public schools won’t accommodate their preferences. So the children who start kindergarten “late” are often from higher socioeconomic backgrounds, with adequate support to succeed academically regardless of their birthday. Meanwhile, when affluent families pull their children from public schools, they take their substantial resources and social capital with them, disadvantaging those who remain.
In districts that are willing to accommodate flexible cutoff dates, teachers bear the burden. Instead of managing a classroom with a typical 12-month age span, they’re asked to teach children with 15-month, 18-month, or even wider age gaps. This makes their job significantly more challenging and can affect the learning environment for everyone.
Rather than gaming the system or agonizing over birth timing we can’t control, we’d be better served trusting both our children’s ability to adapt and our schools’ capacity to teach our kids. Development is remarkably resilient. There will always be a youngest child in every classroom, and that child almost always turns out just fine.
So, parents, take a deep breath and chill. Your October baby isn’t doomed to academic failure, and your April baby isn’t guaranteed success. What matters far more than the month on their birth certificate is the support you provide along the way.
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Eight months after the Wicked movie was released, Eleanor is finally moving on to some deeper cuts.
Thank you for this post. As the mother of three boys (including an August baby in a town with a September 1 cutoff *clutches pearls*), I’ve heard it all—“giving the gift of time,” “boys develop later,” etc, etc. And since I only have boys, other parents tend to be a lot less delicate—and apparently, more honest—about just wanting their boys to be bigger and more physically adept among their peers. I once lost my patience with another parent and snapped, “Maybe I just don’t want my son to grow up to be the kind of man who derives his confidence from his size and ability to dominate others.” Not necessarily my finest social moment, but it stopped them in their tracks.