Kids born later in the year more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD: Study
torontosun.com
torontosun.com
Malcolm Gladwell's science is always suspect, but the idea resonates with me that calendar year groupings strongly favor older members, and that those advantages snowball over time as older children are selected for as "better" than their "peers" (who are not truly peers).
Have there been any studies on the longitudinal effect on academic performance by delaying schooling for a year (thereby making the child one of the oldest in his class)?
It argues that younger children benefit in that they make greater progress than their peers, but supports findings that they are at a competitive disadvantage compared to their older classmates.
Also interesting:
The benefits of being younger are even greater for those who skip a grade, an option available to many high-achieving children. Compared with nonskippers of similar talent and motivation, these youngsters pursue advanced degrees and enter professional school more often. Acceleration is a powerful intervention, with effects on achievement that are twice as large as programs for the gifted. Grade-skippers even report more positive social and emotional feelings.
The last sentence especially surprised me, as it contradicts what I thought to be conventional wisdom.
What a really fascinating topic. I'm reading all this because I now have a 4 month old son (born in early November) and an older nephew born in early January of the same year. My nephew can walk now and my son just drools and hates tummy time - and they will be going to the same school and same grade! Eek.
I thought for sure my son would be at a disadvantage but I realized that both my sister and I were skipped 1 grade when we were 3 and 3.5 years old. (Side note: we did not attend a North American system.) We were always the youngest in class. She was physically the same as the other girls, but I was smaller, so I always lacked confidence growing up as I was always the smallest AND youngest. Thankfully in high school I hit a growth spurt and reached nearly 6 feet. Skinny, but still - I was tall.
Both my sister and I turned out just fine. We always had good marks and went to university. She even has more credentials. We are both extremely social, and she is very mature in the sense that she can negotiate and do business with people with far more experience than her. So no issues there.
All this to say, both of us were skipped grades and we turned out just fine, and we always tried to achieve more than others in our class, and we have more often than not. So if there are any parents out there with young children, don't worry so much about your child being the youngest in the class. Simply reassure them when they it looks like they lack self-confidence and they'll be fine. This is not scientific, nor can I really remember how I felt when I was 4 years old. Just wanted to give anyone else a point of view from a simple grade-skipper who gets bored easily :)
The word "seems" is the operative word in that sentence. I know many colleagues of that author, other professors at the University of Minnesota, where I participate in the weekly journal club on human behavioral genetics. The key fact to note is that the author of the New York Times opinion piece is a child development psychologist, so his professional disciplinary point of view is that parent influence in early childhood counts for almost everything, and genes or nonparental environmental influences (including medical interventions) count for very little. But that's not what the best research shows about ADD/ADHD. There is good-quality evidence, especially gathered by Russell Barkley, who has conducted several of the better longitudinal studies, that prescribed medications can be helpful for many persons categorized as having ADD/ADHD. There is a lot of intentional fear, uncertainty, and doubt spread around about ADD/ADHD by persons who don't have legal authority to prescribe prescription medicines to patients, who fear losing business for their approaches if psychiatrists treat ADD patients.
Most people who have attention problems may be helped by a both-and approach of taking prescribed medicines along with lifestyle approaches like getting adequate sleep and outdoor exercise in daylight, learning organizational skills, hiring a secretary, or other helps. I've read some very striking personal testimonials from HN participants, full-time hacking programmers, who found that their personal productivity enormously increased when they started taking prescribed ADD medications as adults. I can't advise anyone here specifically what to do (I am not a physician), but I can suggest checking sources of advice for scientific validity
http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
and making sure to get a reality check from your own in-real-life friends and colleagues if you have this issue and want to treat it successfully. A successful treatment is likely to be noticeable to other people and wouldn't be deemed successful just based on your own personal observation not backed up by anyone else's observation.
AFTER EDIT: The journal club I visit most weeks just had a discussion about being older rather than younger when starting school. We may revisit that issue in a while. The short answer is that there can be bad academic effects, which show up in IQ test and achievement test scores, from delaying exposure to reading instruction and elementary mathematics instruction. Sometimes those disadvantages outweigh the social advantages of being taller or stronger than other children in the same school grade.
I'm not the first person to say this, but lecturing is obsolete, and probably has been since the Xerox machine. Online video is just another nail in the coffin. We can do non-interactive information transfer cheaply.
It seems to me that you could get a similar, or better, education just by making materials available and then having in-class homework sessions with occasional individualized attention. Kids can proceed at their own pace relative to different subjects.
Some time synchronization might be necessary to have examinations to prove that you know the material. Otherwise I don't see the need for it.
It is not. There has been a FAQ about this issue up on the World Wide Web since the days before when most people had Internet accounts.
http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html
Dividing children into school classes by birth date is a distinctly bad idea and has never been supported by educational research, but rather is resorted to for administrative convenience.
Finding solutions seems more useful.
This article covers problems, as do the posts I've seen here so far. We're entrepreneurs and problem-solvers. Anyone got a solution?
The trend in this article -- like the hockey, soccer, and related effects Gladwell, Freakonomics authors, etc covered -- seem to give advantages to people for reasons most of us would consider unfair and counterproductive. Sports and academics want the best competition based on merit, not birth dates. Yet how else can we do things?
Again, can anyone think of solutions to what seem like unfair and counterproductive biases?
Of course this means people born during the summer, in addition to not being able to bring cupcakes on their birthday, will now be the youngest, although not as young as the people born September-Deember would have been.
My older boy is a Jan birthday and we're dalaying him starting school till he's 5.5 for reasons that include those mentioned in TFA.
Of course, it might matter to you, if you are expecting a child near the cut-off date for your region.