I Didn't Redshirt My August Boy. Here's How It's Going.

In August of 2012, I gave birth to a perfect baby. He was the most beautiful thing my eyes had ever beheld. My daughter (born three years earlier) was beautiful too, but after having an awful trainwreck of a birth and not sleeping for 48 hours, I was in less of a mood to appreciate it. With this baby, though, there were literally rainbows in the sky as I achieved my perfect birth. I could not have been more stoked about how everything turned out.

But the funny thing about birth that no one really emphasizes is—there is a lot that comes after it. Like, they expect you to take that child home with you and actually raise him. This requires making very hard decisions. If you decide wrong you could ruin his life, or at least that’s what a lot of people will tell you in various corners of Parenting Substack. But none of this was covered in childbirth classes. WTH!

So in this essay, I want to talk about one hard decision that certain parents face: whether or not to “redshirt” a child — that is, delay kindergarten by a year so they aren’t placed in the class their birth date would normally dictate. Cutoff dates vary by district, but in mine, a child has to turn four by September 1st to join our district’s half day K-4 program, or five by September 1st to start full day K-5, meaning that a child born in mid to late August like my son will be the youngest in the class, and a child born in early September will be the oldest in the class.

Redshirting is most common for kids born in the summer months—let’s say June through August (though I have also seen May!)— and more common for boys than girls. The thinking goes that boys are less developmentally ready for school, and struggle more with things like sitting still, concentrating and staying organized. So holding them back a year presumably has academic and social-emotional advantages. As it turns out, it also has huge athletic advantages for kids who plan to participate in sports (we’ll talk about that later!)

This topic has gotten a lot of attention lately, in part due to publicity by people like Richard V Reeves. In his advocacy for boys and men, he mentions redshirting as a system-level policy idea to help close the achievement gap between boys and girls in school. While acknowledging that there are significant trade-offs and uncertainties, this proposal is one among many that might help counter some of the problems boys face throughout their school years. While I found his points thought-provoking and especially loved this podcast he did with Emily Oster, there was just one problem: all this came out long after my husband and I had already made a decision for our son.

What follows is a reflection on how we made that decision and how it’s going. So yeah, basically, it’s “me-search.” And as some very wise people (eg. Molly Dickens, PhD) have pointed out, “me-search” isn’t necessarily scientifically rigorous. So don’t worry—I’m not here to give you advice on this topic. And, respectfully, I’m not really looking for any either. No need to tell me that I made a huge mistake, that I should have quit my job and homeschooled, or sent my kid to a multi-age Montessori instead. Maybe there are downsides to my decision that will reveal themselves in fifteen years when my son is living in a van down by the river. Stay tuned for that essay if Substack is still a thing in 2041.

But for now, I just want to explore the pros and cons of this issue in a way that hopefully makes this decision slightly easier—or at least, lighter—for other parents. As you might have guessed from my moderate handle, my overall takeaway is that, like so many things in parenting, there’s no single “right way.” There are just a lot of factors: your child, your family, and your schooling options. And even after you weigh all that, there will still be some uncertainty and lack of control over the outcome that you just have to accept.

I promise, if I hint even once that my way is the right way, you have permission to immediately unsubscribe.

How did we decide?

Like any educated, data-driven parent, when I realized I’d have to decide whether or not to redshirt my child, I did my homework: extensively researching the topic and carefully reading articles that supported the decision I already wanted to make.

It’s been a while, so I’m struggling to find the articles I read back then, but they basically said that, yes, children who are the oldest in their class tend to perform better in school than those who are the youngest. These advantages were strong in early elementary but faded by high school—basically gone by 10th grade. In addition, the kids who started school earlier were further ahead in their careers and making more money in their mid-20s, basically because they started their education sooner. Not rocket science.

Education and academic achievement are pretty important to both me and my husband, and we didn’t want to put our son in a situation where he would struggle or be at a permanent disadvantage. But he had already shown himself to be a bright and gregarious child. Besides, when it came to academics, we of course knew that our son was going to be a genius. I mean, his genes came from us. 😉

Another consideration was maturity and social-emotional ability. A lot of people decide to redshirt because they’re worried their child might not fit in well with older kids, might get bullied, or might struggle to make friends. But by some miracle, this child of ours had inherited a recessive gene that made him incredibly engaging, outgoing and well-liked by people of all ages, very much unlike his shy, quiet parents. I wrote about his unique sales acumen here—he had a talent for charming neighbors into buying tons of overpriced popcorn for his Boy Scout fundraiser.

Actually, Most People Really Like Kids

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Mar 27

I was in awe of my son’s sales acumen. It was starting to make me think he’d been switched at birth. Who was this smooth-talking, eye-contact making person?

The next consideration for us was money. Our August boy was the middle child, with a big sister three grades ahead of him and a little brother three grades behind. By the time he was eligible for full-day K-5, my husband and I had been paying up the wazoo for childcare for about eight years, often for multiple kids at once. For most of my kids’ early childhood, our childcare costs exceeded our mortgage by a lot.

Though I only worked part-time (three days a week), my schedule was all over the place: night shifts that wiped me out the next day, random weekends and therefore weekdays off—exactly the kind of schedule daycares are not designed for. We had a nanny for a while, and she was great, but we couldn’t give her enough consistent hours to make it worth her while, and she eventually left for a family who could offer full-time work. After that, it was back to daycare, where we were often forced to pay for care we weren’t even using (five days a week) to reserve a spot.

During the year our son was eligible for K-4, we still had a nanny on the days I worked, which made the half-day schedule manageable. But by the time he reached K-5 and was eligible for full-day school, she was gone and we hadn’t been able to find a replacement. And with only one child at home full-time, a nanny no longer made financial sense anyway. So we enrolled our youngest in full-time daycare and sent our middle son to full day K-5.

That’s when it really hit me: if our middle son had been born just a few weeks later, we would have been paying for another full year of daycare at the same time. So the fact that he was born in August and not September saved us a huge chunk of change. At the time, we paid about $250 a week for childcare—close to $12,000 for the year.

Ok, I know what you are thinking. How can you put a price on your child like that? But I’m not the only one considering this, and this is where the redshirting conversation gets messy. As Richard V Reeves points out in that podcast I referenced earlier, redshirting is more common among higher-income families than lower-income ones, which is probably the opposite of how it should work, since kids from higher-income families already tend to arrive at school with more advantages. In theory, the developmental benefits of being older in a class might matter even more for lower-income children, but those are often the kids least likely to access them.

The broader context is that childcare itself is really expensive! The national average for preschool-aged children runs roughly $10,000–$19,500 per year, with high-cost cities like San Francisco, New York City, and Washington, D.C. often closer to $18,000–$25,000. So you really can’t blame parents for factoring that into their decision about redshirting.

For me personally, public school is the only financial benefit I’ve ever received for my kids. We are the quintessential example of parenting with a minimal village: both sides of our family live far away. So after years of expensive childcare bills—and then paying thousands each year in property taxes, much of it going to school referendums (I’m not complaining! I voted for them every time!)—I don’t feel especially conflicted or guilty about sending my son to public school when he was eligible.

That being said, I want to acknowledge just how messed up it is that family finances probably have a significant impact on the decision about whether or not to redshirt. I also want to point out that people like my sister, who was a stay-at-home mom and didn’t consider childcare expenses in the equation, chose to redshirt her two October born boys (the New Jersey public schools had an ever later cutoff, meaning she could have sent them to kindergarten before they were officially five) in part because the financial calculus was a lot different to her.

How did it go in the early years?

At different points in my son’s childhood, I have felt we made the right decision, and at other times the wrong one. One example of the latter was an infamous parent-teacher conference. Keep in mind that when my son entered K-4, he had just turned four two weeks earlier—the oldest kids in his class had been alive 25% longer than him. This meant they were pretty much better at everything: coloring inside the lines, drawing, cutting, and sharing. In spite of that, he kept up with the class (or so we thought).

When we met with his teacher for a conference in March of his K-4 year, she showed us some squiggly lines on a paper.

“This is your son writing his name in September,” she pointed out. “This is in December. And this is in March.”

The results were clear: somehow, our son’s penmanship had gotten worse over six months!

This K-4 teacher had also taught my daughter, consistently calling her “bright.” She is May-born, so also not the oldest, but not the youngest—and, well, a girl. It was very clear to us that the teacher was hinting at something very different about our son. She also showed us some shapes she had asked the kids to cut out. Turns out, my son was also very bad at cutting.

She didn’t say it outright, but you could tell from the “some parents decide to have their kids repeat K-4” undertones that she didn’t necessarily think he was ready to move on to K-5. This was hard for us to hear. And as we’ve realized now, if cutting or neat handwriting were important for advancement, certain members of our family (including my husband and brothers) might still be in kindergarten.

At that point, we hesitated a bit. We talked to our son, who resolutely swore he was ready for K-5, and that he would work hard. When we considered our family situation—my husband working out of town a lot, me trying to balance part-time work with a one-year-old at home and an older child who was not without her own needs—we realized we hadn’t been giving our middle son much individual attention. So basically, we chose to ignore her hints, spend some more time working on our son’s (obviously lacking) hand-eye coordination, and move him up to K-5 with the rest of his class.

Other than those first few years—maybe kindergarten and first grade—he’s felt at grade level, if not above. Then the Covid pandemic came along and our public school district went fully virtual for the 2020–2021 school year, a decision we just couldn’t abide for our son, who was a third grader at the time. In addition to both being essential workers who had to go to work in person or quit, we did not feel competent to homeschool (tried that March through May 2020 and it did NOT go well). So we sent our boys to a private Catholic school for that year, which turned out to be a really good decision.

By the time my middle son returned to his public school class in fourth grade, any differences from his classmates had largely disappeared. I’m still not sure if this was just due to increased maturity, or if a year of in-person school while his peers had done everything at home on an iPad basically leveled the playing field. Either way, he had caught up, and in some subjects (like math, where he skipped a grade) was performing above grade level.

How’s it going now?

My son is going to graduate 8th grade this year, and he is very excited. When I talk to him about the redshirting decision, he tells me he is very glad we didn’t do it because he is so sick of middle school and ready to move on to high school. I’m happy for him, and it’s great.

But one area where this has been less great is athletics. While he’s a good athlete, he has almost always been at an age disadvantage relative to his peers. And this is something no one really spelled out to me when we were making this decision: unlike academic differences, which tend to even out over time, age differences in sports don’t fully disappear, especially for males, who apparently do not reach peak strength until their late 20s or early 30s. And these athletic differences become more pronounced as kids go through puberty!

Even when he eventually becomes one of the oldest students—a senior in high school—he will still be competing against athletes who are a year older than him, either because they are the oldest in their cohort, or because they were redshirted. In other words, he may never actually experience the advantage of being one of the oldest in his cohort in the same way some of his competitors will.

A great example is Bo Bassett, a Pennsylvania wrestler who is widely considered one of the best high school wrestlers in the country. He won a state title in 8th grade, has already beaten college national champions, and will graduate high school at 19—meaning he was essentially one of the oldest kids in his class for his entire high school career. It doesn’t take anything away from how good he is, but it does put things in perspective. When he won a high school state championship in 8th grade, he was the same age my son will be as a sophomore. And even as he’s beating NCAA college athletes while still in high school, it’s worth remembering that he is doing it at 19—an age when many athletes are in college wrestling programs already.

That being said, my kids were probably never going to be Division I athletes, and I’m not sure I would have done anything differently. It’s just something worth noting: many of the top athletes tend to be among the oldest in their age groups. Athletics, after all, is where the word “redshirting” even comes from.

Malcolm Gladwell popularized this idea in Outliers, pointing out the “relative age effect” in youth hockey: in elite Canadian leagues, a disproportionate number of players are born in the early months of the year (January through March). The idea is that those kids are the oldest in their cohort—bigger, stronger, more coordinated—so they get more attention, better coaching, and more opportunities. Over time, those small early advantages compound, making it more likely that they will reach the highest levels.

And honestly, this has absolutely matched my experience.

In Wisconsin, the state wrestling tournament uses two-year age brackets. In his older year, my son qualifies for state; in his younger year, he sometimes doesn’t (this year: woo hoo, he did). And when you look at the kids who make the podium (top 6 out of 24 state qualifiers), they are almost always on the older side of the bracket.

For example, this past year in his 2011–2012 bracket, four of the six medalists were born in 2011 and only two in 2012. That’s striking, because that age group spans roughly 16 months of birth dates for 8th graders—only four of those months fall in 2011, while twelve fall in 2012 (not counting the redshirted 8th graders!) You might expect a more even distribution, but instead, the winners are clustered among the oldest athletes in that window. In other words, a relatively small slice of the oldest kids is overrepresented on the podium.

And this makes perfect sense when you consider puberty. A year or even several months can translate into meaningful differences in strength—especially in a sport like wrestling.

Here’s another example: our middle school wrestling team includes 6th through 8th graders, and matchups are based on weight. My son is on the bigger side for his age and pretty athletic. But in 6th grade, even though he made the varsity lineup at 117 lbs, he was often wrestling 8th graders of the same weight—sometimes two, or even three years older if they had been redshirted.

I remember watching in quiet horror as he wrestled an 8th grade state qualifier and podium finisher who could pick him up and throw him around like it was nothing. My husband later said it was “like watching a boy wrestle a man,” and he wasn’t wrong. When your prepubescent 6th grade son—the youngest in his class—is going up against an 8th grader with a mustache who’s already placed at state, the odds are not exactly in your favor.

One of our proudest moments was watching him not get pinned by a really good state-qualifying older wrestler. He still lost—by tech fall—meaning the opposing team picked up five points, not six. It felt like an accomplishment at the time.

Given that I’m sharing all this, you might think we regret not redshirting our son. But the truth is, nah, we don’t. We care about sports because we think they are good for him, but we know they’re not the most important thing.

And in a weird way, I think him always being the underdog has worked in his favor. He’s used to throwing himself into the ring, losing and then picking himself up off the ground. He’s developed a certain immunity to it, and it makes his wins even sweeter. If one of the benefits of redshirting is giving your kid the confidence that comes from always being at the top of the class—or the top of the podium—then one of the benefits of not redshirting is raising a humble kid who can maintain some sense of self-esteem in spite of all the losses. Cue the music: 🎶I get knocked down, but I get up again. No you’re never gonna keep me down.

Did not redshirting our son make it less likely that he will be recruited into a D1 wrestling program? Quite possibly! But even if that’s the case, we think he’s gained other things that might matter more.

Conclusions

If I’m honest, I have to admit that I sometimes judge redshirters—mostly because I worry they made the right decision and I made the wrong one, and that my kid’s life has been irreparably harmed because of it. But when I step back, I see there are very good reasons for redshirting, and also some downsides. So either choice can make a lot of sense depending on your circumstances.

Having already made this decision, I can’t go back—and of course there’s a fair amount of confirmation bias at play. I want to believe we made the right call, so I’m probably more alert than I should be to evidence that supports our choice. When I look ahead, I do see some advantages for him, like being able to potentially take a gap year after high school or college without feeling behind, or starting his adult life and career a little earlier than some of his peers.

On the other hand, while I was very ready—possibly too ready—for the early years to be over and for the free (or at least, paid for by my taxes) help of public school to kick in, now that I think about him turning 18 and then immediately leaving home to go to college, I feel a certain pang of sadness. I would have actually liked to have him around one more year! He’s kind of a cool kid.

I assume anyone who has made the decision to redshirt also has plenty of valid reasons, research, and anecdotes to justify their choice. And honestly, good for them. What about you? Have you experienced redshirting or not redshirting? Any pros or cons I missed? Feel free to share them in the comments.