I'm not an expert on education, I'm not going to speculate on the psychological effects of having a year without school on a kid. I don't think I'm qualified to

I'm not an expert on education, I'm not going to speculate on the psychological effects of having a year without school on a kid. I don't think I'm qualified to do that. Outside of developmental effects though, by the time you get to college does it really matter if someone is one year older than another person? Is anyone going to get rejected from a first job interview just because they're 26 instead of 25? Plenty of people take gap years before they go to college, so my concern with taking a year off school wouldn't be, "but how will they ever catch up?" It would be about the resources that parents are relying on, the developmental effects of having a routine interrupted to that degree, the ability of parents to keep working, early socialization, etc... I think those are all valid concerns, and (again) I'm not going to pretend that I can speak on them. But I'm not worried about, "some other kid will be one year ahead."