Held back in school..... for sports?

I second guessed myself every year about my decision to not hold K back. She was youngish for her grade (late June b'day with a Sept 1 cutoff), socially immature and highly anxious. She had the smarts but I was concerned about her ability to keep up. I talked to her preschool teacher who suggested we not keep her back because she would have been "bored to tears" with another year of preschool.

We went with the recommendation and she started Kindergarten with the rest of her peers. And she struggled to keep up as we thought she might. She never really caught up and always "hated school" other than the time she spent in orchestra or art classes. As I said, I second guessed myself year after year as to whether we'd made the right decision but, from her perspective, it only would have delayed getting out of school by a year.

She was lucky in a way because she managed to get a good education by osmosis due to the quality of the schools she was in. She continued to struggle her first year of college and, in retrospect, she might have done well with a gap year. She transferred to a arts-based college after her freshman year and is now an A/B student in an interior design program. She'll earn her BFA next year and is looking to become a furniture designer before going on for a masters in restoration.

So --- to get back to the original question of holding someone back for sports. Yes, I've heard about it being done for that reason and I've heard it being done for development reasons. It's a decision we struggled with and ultimately chose not to pursue. In her own way, she held herself back by not succeeding as a college freshman. I wish we'd considered giving her a gap year - it would have been a whole lot less expensive than a year's college expenses - but even there, she learned a lot about being on her own. Skills that she's transferred nicely into her new education plan.

So many different factors to weigh. Sounds like it worked out overall for K. (Furniture designer, very cool!)

That's what happened to me.
So, I was always slightly older than my classmates, which was fine with me.

It was great in high school, I was one of the first driving.

there are probably good reasons, but i can't see sports being one of them, lots of career ending injuries can happen between age ten and a draft of some kind (if he even makes it), i hope they're keeping some kind education plan in mind for him

I read of an article from a local sports medicine doctor who was good at sports growing up but on the young side and was small for his age group. He said he wished he was held back because it would have improved his sports performance in school. I was shocked that someone so smart would have delayed his academic performance to play high school sports but I guess it's what you prioritize. It's a pretty expensive decision for children who are acedemically ready to advance since essentially extends their childhood for a year with little acedemic advantage. It could even be a disadvantage if it leads to boredom in the classroom. For acedemic or maturity reasons, I would hold my child back, but never to allow them an unfair advantage in sports.

Yes, yes - I've heard this and seen it as well.

It is crazy in my opinion because even if sports were so much more important than anything else, it would only help them while in school - once they older how would it help them?

And usually it is the bigger kids that parents tend to do this with. I suspect as something I was just discussing with my husband and what I've seen happened to our kids. Especially in younger sports teams the larger kids have an advantage and tend to do better. In the sense that the rules are different for the younger team which favors larger kids (rules like how long you can be in the paint in basketball for example) - it doesn't help increase their skills so in the long run many of these larger kids get lazy. The more skilled players - the ones that can dribble and handle the ball well end up overally surpasing the other players when they get older.

I've seen this first hand - so holding your kid back to me would be less beneficially if you really want your child to develop their skills better. I look for more competitive teams for my child just for this reason - it is good to play on team with those stronger than you - you are more likely to improve and play at a higher level.

On the other side of things - I'd hold them back if they were not academically mature or perhaps emotionally mature enough. I mean school basic purpose is to educate so you'd want them to get the most out of it.

Now if you were to hold them back because they were average academically thinking they would exceed by being a year older - seems twisted to me - same with sports.

This reminds me of Sir Ken Robinson's RSA talk where he questions why we educate children in "batches" -- "as if the most important thing about them was the year they were born".

Vicious circle for sure.

For those who haven't seen K.R.'s RSA talk:

I join osso in saying thanks for taking a trip in the way-back machine.

Speaking as a parent, and probably for most parents, we want our kids to succeed, even excel, in everything but we often forget what it's really like to be a kid and how hard it is to navigate through childhood. This is one of the reasons I find the other forum, and your response here, so useful.

After being so surprised what I read on that forum I really began to question my thinking, wondering if being persuaded by kids was wrong-headed and that my years of real world experience counted for nothing.

There is certainly more to life than getting ahead. Thanks for the reminder.

Your process sounds very much like mine! I'm glad to hear K is doing so well and I'm intrigued that she chose a creative field.

I'm probably all wet but my observation (not backed by any research) seems to be that kids that struggle a bit in school seem to be more creative in many ways. Maybe it's because they develop ways to cope with things that other's don't?

I wish it was more like that here.

In America it is very stigmatizing to be held back. I'm going to have to try to find that discussion I mentioned.... the kids that were held back, for whatever reason, really never did overcome it.

I guess it's almost the opposite of what Setanta experienced when his Aunt fought for him -- they felt like nobody believed in them and it eroded their confidence and caused problems within their family.

Maybe it's that school isn't intended to create diversity of thought, though there is a lot of suggestion given to the idea that there is. Maybe those kids that struggle are actually being held back by the sheer boredom, the inanity of a lot that is presented in school. They then come away with the idea that it's their fault.

I'm going to batch some replies together so I don't get the message that I'm spamming my own thread....

I agree, hawkeye, that it is a form of cheating and indicative of the "win at all costs" mindset. I think education is crammed full of that right now, not just in sports though.

Yeah, dijjd, a LOT can happen between 10 and pro-sports. Like I said though, they have their eye on him attending an elite, private high school that heavily recruit for sports. He definitely has a shot at getting in (this school scopes out all the kid leagues looking for prospects). It really is an amazing school in all regards, not just sports.

I read something not long ago, engineer, about how we moved from the idea of the scholar/athlete to the idea of the dumb jock. The idea of the dumb jock is pretty new. Also, most athletes have to keep their grades up in order to play on the teams. I'm going to look for that article again.....

I hear you loud and clear, Linkat, about size and skill and how these come into play when making these decisions. I was thinking about this last night and I think that Friend's age is probably what sparked this. Friend is right at the cusp of moving into the bigger leagues where he'd surely do more bench sitting. By holding him back a year he gets an extra year to hone his skills (and to grow) and that might make him more valuable when he does move up a league.

We once played this team that prevented my daughter's team to go to the finals in the state. The girls on the other team were huge. As they walked in my husband even said are these girls really 12 years old? I reminded my husband they only have to be in 6th grade, age doesn't matter. And where they were located from I certainly wouldn't be surprised if many were held back just for this purpose. The thing is - in same areas that all the kids have (or at least seem to think they have) is the potential to get some where through sports.

My daughter's team was better skilled, but oddly the taller girls on her team get intimidated by bigger girls. The smaller girls nothing seems to phase them. So our bigs played weak and our quick small players did great and almost won.

Well I could certainly go on a rant about how I think the current school model prepares kids to be obedient, never question the "boss", wage slaves but I'll save that for another time.

I have thought a lot about "boredom". I think most people think that kids who are bored in school are the super smart ones who work above the level being taught in the class. There is no doubt that those kids exist.

But I think there is another kind of boredom too. The boredom of the uninspired. I think Mo falls into this category. To him school is very fragmented and random, there isn't much context so it all seems pointless and boring.

We played a baseball team like that this season -- huge kids with lots of skill and experience. This is where I learned about "team stacking".

The baseball league here does a draft. All the kids show up for a skill assessment, are assigned a ranking, then the coaches pick out their teams. Sounds fair right? So I wondered how one team seemed to end up with all the really good players.

It turns out that if one of your parents is a coach then you can be on their team. Want a certain kid to be on your team? Claim their parent as an assistant coach. Or a kid can claim that "so-and-so" is their ride to practice and games so they need to be on the same team. Done.

It was so lopsided and unfair. The entire season was awful for every team but this one. I will seriously question whether to all Mo to play in this league again.

I think this brings up the whole nature/nurture thing which probably ends up being partly both. K was always much more artistic and creative than academic. She excelled in drawing what she saw under the microscope, for instance, but struggled with test taking and rote memorization.

Our schools gave a lot of lip service to alternative ways of learning but I never saw much in the way of allowing a child to concentrate their learning within a method type. It was more of a bombardment of multiple methods with the idea that at least one of them would stick. The problem, then, is that she felt lost 4/5 of the time.

In Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, he discusses why an oddly large number of
pro hockey and soccer players are born in January, February and March.

It's worth a read.

I don't have a problem with my daughter's situation - it is AAU basketball - so you try out for a team and the best supposed to make it. It is a city thing - it is regional so you can try out for any time basically that you can make the practices to. My daughter's team was just as skilled - I think the big girls on her team get scared when they have kids bigger than them. The smaller ones are more feisty - they gotta be - most of the kids are bigger than them whoever they play.

But I do think some areas, because economically the kids are not as advantaged that sports play a greater role - they think this is the only way to get scholorships or to get a head even in girls' sports. So they try every advantage they have and holding them back a year is one of them.

If you have supportive parents and have to struggle in school it is not bad for you.
I think what is bad is mobbing by kids or teachers, parents who are too cencerned about "good grades" and not the personality of the kid.
I went to a rather strict grils´school. We had art and in 5th (?) grade when I was around 10 we were supposed to make a large card for Mother´s Day. I did my best just as everybody else. My teacher told that I was not supposed to make one as I had no mother. I was making one for my grand aunt as she was for me my mother and no teacher could ever stop me doing a card for mother´s day. And as long as she lived she got something that day - as a punishment for that teacher - even if she never knew about it.