7 ms·

As a June baby in a state with a July cut off, I was always nearly a year younger than the majority of the class. It caused me no end of difficulty in school, t

As a June baby in a state with a July cut off, I was always nearly a year younger than the majority of the class. It caused me no end of difficulty in school, to the point I loathed school, barely graduated high school with a 2.0 GPA and more than the legal limit of skipped days, diagnosed with ADD, and went straight to career in the valley. It was only when I was close to 30 that I sort of realized I actually was smart and could do well in school, and quit my lucrative career to get highest honors at UIUC CS- a very difficult program where graduating with C’s was an achievement - but I pulled off a 4.0 (A+ at UIUC adds nothing to the GPA). When I had my daughter, born in late May, I held her back a year in preschool and put her in a private school that mixes multiple years in the same differentiated class. She is so happy in school, and I just hope that she doesn’t have to experience the years of misery and failure I experienced that led to an adult life filled with anxiety that I’ve only recently conquered. Public school in the US is not structured in a way that is adaptable to the various states of human maturation you see in kids that all mature in different ways at different rates. It’s factory education, and if you’re not a widget of the right shape it cuts you up.

travbrack 4y ago
Really inspiring story. Why did you pursue school so late in your career? Just to prove to yourself that you could do it?
owlninja 4y ago
What changed at 30?
brendank310 4y ago
Nice work, that program is no joke.
rconti 4y ago
Do you think there's something about the precise age (to within a few months) that a child begins school that drives this bias in diagnosis? Or would we have the same problem with a hard cutoff date, even if all kids started school an entire year later? Or is it largely a matter of how much development a child undergoes even in 1 month at such an age (eg, a combination of factors)? I guess I ask because there will always have to be a cutoff, even if it's a soft cutoff. As a non-parent, the best solution I can see is to give the parents the knowledge and freedom to make the choice, and to add this data to perhaps mitigate over-diagnosis (and any attached stigma). Of course, as I write this out, it occurs to me how much of a burden on parents an extra year without school could be
- em-bee 4y ago
  the problem seems to be the difference between the oldest and the youngest kid in a class. OP had problems through his school life as they were always the youngest. so starting the same process a year later doesn't seem to help. what would help is an adaption of the montessori model where an age range of three years is in a class, and the expectation of all kids behaving the same naturally disappears. doing that at least in kindergarten will at least avoid a mistaken diagnosis for ADHD. but my hope is that montessori kids will also fare better in a regular school because they learned to be more independent.
- alasdair_ 4y ago
  >I guess I ask because there will always have to be a cutoff, even if it's a soft cutoff. We could ditch the "academic year" idea entirely and just have kids join the classes when they are ready for them and not force a cohort to all have to learn and progress at exactly the same rate (one which, statistically, is either too slow or too fast for essentially every student).
  - johnchristopher 4y ago
    I don't understand how that would work and solves the "I am almost a year older or younger than others".
    - alasdair_ 4y ago
      You can teach a classroom with children from several years in it. Children then do the work that is at their level, whatever level that happens to be.
      - johnchristopher 4y ago
        I don't think it's as easy as that. Planning and managing different lessons for the same time slot is way harder than planning and managing one lesson for the same time slot. The more kids in the room, the harder it gets.
enobrev 4y ago
I have a November birthday and started school at four during the last year the "at-least five by September cut-off" was implemented. I generally felt like everyone was way ahead of me for most of my school years. I was never diagnosed with ADD, but I never tried to find out either - I certainly wouldn't be surprised. I did alright in school, but I think that was because I studied extra hard because I always felt so far behind. I can't imagine that will work for everyone. I appreciate your post. With a little one who is about to turn three, I've been thinking about school and the affects of going too early a lot lately. I worry about holding him back in case he'd end up bored and unchallenged. I've seen quite a few really smart people make some bad turns due to boredom. But, of course, I wouldn't want my kid to spend their life chasing all the "smarter" people either. That life has not done well for my self-esteem. Regardless, mixing multiple years in the same class sounds like an excellent way forward.
johnchristopher 4y ago
> It’s factory education, and if you’re not a widget of the right shape it cuts you up. That's a fitting description that matches a factoid I read about mandatory education early days: the goal was to have workers who could read and count to operate industrial machinery.
- rgrieselhuber 4y ago
  It’s even worse than that. John Taylor Gatto has written extensively on the problems with government schools.
- rumpelstinkin 4y ago
  it was also meant, like the army and later tv, to create a uniform national culture and erode local communities in favor of the newborn unnatural countries.
omnibrain 4y ago
I have the feeling that for me it's the exact opposite. Born end of June, cutoff is the June the 30th, but my parents insisted to to let me start a year later. This lead to me being up to a year older than anyone else. School stuff was always too easy for me (I might be also a bit smarter than the mean, but who knows?), so I never needed to really work for school and when the topics came where rote memorization and repetition helps I always fell a bit back. To this day I never really memorized the multiplication tables for example. Ask me what 7*8 is and I have to do math in my head. And this is only the most basic example. Because I never really pushed training the binomial formulas I later run out of time when I had to solve more complex formulas where having those ingrained helps "finding the shortcuts" instead of "brute force". We have a saying, that I "never learned how to learn". But it may also be that I suffer from undiagnosed ADHD (on top of that).
- dorchadas 4y ago
  I think I got lucky. Late July with a school that (at the time) had a Sept 1 cutoff. There was only one person younger than me until middle school. My kindergarten teacher, who was also a family friend, requested I do it again because I wasn't mature enough. And she was right, honestly; I'd fight against nap time, and remember no end to problems in first grade with sitting still. However, while maturity played a roll, the problem was I was bored. I went in to kindergarten being able to add, subtract and read, and had already started doing multiplication with my mom (herself a high school teacher). Another year in kindergarten would've been torture for me. Thankfully I had an amazing first grade teacher who recognised the problem. Instead of insisting on ADHD, she gave me more challenging stuff and let me work on my own. She never called on me to read aloud, because she gave me other books to read behind the class's book. This lasted until my 4th grade year, where one of my teachers didn't like it. Thankfully by then I was mature enough to recognise what I needed to do, etc. So really, I wonder how much of this is a mixture between multiple things and how many times kids get given ADHD diagnoses when what they really need is differentiated education. Granted, this is difficult; I was a math/science secondary school teacher (and I think it's even harder for elementary school teachers, for various reasons ranging from standards to their own competency in the subjects they teach), and it was almost impossible at times. That said, maybe I do have ADHD. I went on an amphetamine for weight loss at one point, and there were times I noticed I could focus longer and easier. But I've always had a tendency to get bored of something easily, and I'm sure the Internet hasn't made it any better. So I avoid getting tested as it doesn't impact work or study or anything for me (anymore than the Internet itself does)
matsemann 4y ago
How does this article's findings correlate in countries with other cut offs? Like in Norway, everyone born the same year go to school together, even though the school starts in September. (Which confused me a lot when reading Harry Potter as a kid, as some dates there didn't "add up"). We segregate sports teams that way as well, making it often better to be a jan/feb kid, as you're always the biggest/strongest, and thus get the extra attention, training opportunities etc, so a bias towards those birthdays in our sports.
- krzyk 4y ago
  Same in Poland. There is also a strange statistics with baby borns in early January and late December. There is a high spike of births in early days of January and a strange hole in births in the last days of December. My daughter is usually the youngest kid in class (born middle December - here we put babys born in the same year in the same class) and usually has trouble because she is not as developed as kids born 11 months earlier - this difference will be less noticeable later in life, but know when she is 6 years old it is a bit sad.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    I wonder if there is delayed reporting by some people/hospitals to get a better “year”. I knew someone who came to the US as part of the Vietnamese boat people and his parents chopped a year or two off his age so he could start in kindergarten (and he didn’t know his actual birth year 30+ years later).
- CPLX 4y ago
  That’s also how New York City does things for what it’s worth.
- oldgradstudent 4y ago
  > How does this article's findings correlate in countries with other cut offs? The result appears to be consistent across countries with different cutoff dates. For example, British Columbia with a December 31 cutoff date. https://www.cmaj.ca/content/184/7/755 https://www.cmaj.ca/content/184/7/755
philliphaydon 4y ago
I was “diagnosed” with ADD and was put on ritalin which had 0 affect on me. Wasn’t until later in life I realised I didn’t have ADD I just wasn’t enjoying parts of school. Put me in physics class, technical drawing, cooking, math, I focused and did really well. Every other class was boring and non stimulating and so I acted up. ADD is over diagnosed.
- texasbigdata 4y ago
  The last line is logically ambiguous. In Europe, I believe in 2019, they found two effects: a significant _underdiagnosis_, offset by a tiny over diagnosis; now you could argue phones and screens artificially raise the genetic baseline, or that America is inherently different. But I will tell you ADHD meds calm me down, or when measured with a heart strap monitor over a full day fairly meaningfully lower my heart rate. It’s perhaps a meme now that adhd is over diagnosed, but I’d guess the majority is pill seeking individuals looking to compete at school or at work and less false positive diagnoses such as yours. Net net you seem to have solved it fairly quickly so at least that’s good: even when you get the diagnosis wrong if you can backtrack without significant cost then maybe it’s not absolutely horrible.
  - philliphaydon 4y ago
    Don’t get me wrong I’m not saying it doesn’t exist or the meds are pointless. Absolutely there are people with ADHD and meds work for them. But sometimes I think difficult children are automatically labeled ADHD and the solution is drugs without trying to find the cause. I reminded of this Ted talk https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_do_schools_kill_creativity?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_do_schools_kill_c...
    - adastra22 4y ago
      For people with ADHD though, the drugs are the cure. Stimulants are a miracle drug for those lacking executive function.
    - Melatonic 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Traubenfuchs 4y ago
What were your difficulties? As the youngest in both elementary school and high school (almost a whole year of difference to the oldest), I had no struggles specific to my age. In elementary school and early highschool I overperformed and in later high school I performed averagely.
astura 4y ago
OTOH, I was born several months after you so I must have been the youngest in my grade, my birthday was usually after the first day of school. My parents might have even fabricated by age for all I know. My best friend in highschool was almost an entire year older than me. It didn't bother me in the least. I didn't even noticed it until I was in highschool. This caused me ZERO difficulties. My cousin was born about a month after me and he was in a younger grade than me. We grew up together and I always felt bad for him that he couldn't get highschool over with a year sooner like me. He was jealous of me. He also got into a ton of criminal behavior and has been in and out of jail for the past 20+ years, so I could easily say that was caused by the trauma of him being a year back from me in school. Who knows.
gowld 4y ago
> I held her back a year in preschool This (or backing up a year any year) might have helped you too. > and put her in a private school that mixes multiple years in the same differentiated class. This might backfire, for the same reason that you had trouble -- differentiation is difficult to do in practice. And your childhoold school might have been less differentiable than a modern public school, which has the benefit of computerized material and automated adaptive tests. Of course, if the private school solves it by having a far lower student:teacher ratio, then of course that's better than a public school, all else equal. Another thing parents can do is, instead of switching to private school, put that money toward hiring PTA-sponsored assistant-teachers in the classrooms.

travbrack 4y ago

Really inspiring story. Why did you pursue school so late in your career? Just to prove to yourself that you could do it?

owlninja 4y ago

What changed at 30?

brendank310 4y ago

Nice work, that program is no joke.

rconti 4y ago

Do you think there's something about the precise age (to within a few months) that a child begins school that drives this bias in diagnosis? Or would we have the same problem with a hard cutoff date, even if all kids started school an entire year later? Or is it largely a matter of how much development a child undergoes even in 1 month at such an age (eg, a combination of factors)? I guess I ask because there will always have to be a cutoff, even if it's a soft cutoff. As a non-parent, the best solution I can see is to give the parents the knowledge and freedom to make the choice, and to add this data to perhaps mitigate over-diagnosis (and any attached stigma). Of course, as I write this out, it occurs to me how much of a burden on parents an extra year without school could be

em-bee 4y ago
the problem seems to be the difference between the oldest and the youngest kid in a class. OP had problems through his school life as they were always the youngest. so starting the same process a year later doesn't seem to help. what would help is an adaption of the montessori model where an age range of three years is in a class, and the expectation of all kids behaving the same naturally disappears. doing that at least in kindergarten will at least avoid a mistaken diagnosis for ADHD. but my hope is that montessori kids will also fare better in a regular school because they learned to be more independent.
alasdair_ 4y ago
>I guess I ask because there will always have to be a cutoff, even if it's a soft cutoff. We could ditch the "academic year" idea entirely and just have kids join the classes when they are ready for them and not force a cohort to all have to learn and progress at exactly the same rate (one which, statistically, is either too slow or too fast for essentially every student).
- johnchristopher 4y ago
  I don't understand how that would work and solves the "I am almost a year older or younger than others".
  - alasdair_ 4y ago
    You can teach a classroom with children from several years in it. Children then do the work that is at their level, whatever level that happens to be.
    - johnchristopher 4y ago
      I don't think it's as easy as that. Planning and managing different lessons for the same time slot is way harder than planning and managing one lesson for the same time slot. The more kids in the room, the harder it gets.

enobrev 4y ago

I have a November birthday and started school at four during the last year the "at-least five by September cut-off" was implemented. I generally felt like everyone was way ahead of me for most of my school years. I was never diagnosed with ADD, but I never tried to find out either - I certainly wouldn't be surprised. I did alright in school, but I think that was because I studied extra hard because I always felt so far behind. I can't imagine that will work for everyone. I appreciate your post. With a little one who is about to turn three, I've been thinking about school and the affects of going too early a lot lately. I worry about holding him back in case he'd end up bored and unchallenged. I've seen quite a few really smart people make some bad turns due to boredom. But, of course, I wouldn't want my kid to spend their life chasing all the "smarter" people either. That life has not done well for my self-esteem. Regardless, mixing multiple years in the same class sounds like an excellent way forward.

johnchristopher 4y ago

> It’s factory education, and if you’re not a widget of the right shape it cuts you up. That's a fitting description that matches a factoid I read about mandatory education early days: the goal was to have workers who could read and count to operate industrial machinery.

rgrieselhuber 4y ago
It’s even worse than that. John Taylor Gatto has written extensively on the problems with government schools.
rumpelstinkin 4y ago
it was also meant, like the army and later tv, to create a uniform national culture and erode local communities in favor of the newborn unnatural countries.

omnibrain 4y ago

I have the feeling that for me it's the exact opposite. Born end of June, cutoff is the June the 30th, but my parents insisted to to let me start a year later. This lead to me being up to a year older than anyone else. School stuff was always too easy for me (I might be also a bit smarter than the mean, but who knows?), so I never needed to really work for school and when the topics came where rote memorization and repetition helps I always fell a bit back. To this day I never really memorized the multiplication tables for example. Ask me what 7*8 is and I have to do math in my head. And this is only the most basic example. Because I never really pushed training the binomial formulas I later run out of time when I had to solve more complex formulas where having those ingrained helps "finding the shortcuts" instead of "brute force". We have a saying, that I "never learned how to learn". But it may also be that I suffer from undiagnosed ADHD (on top of that).

dorchadas 4y ago
I think I got lucky. Late July with a school that (at the time) had a Sept 1 cutoff. There was only one person younger than me until middle school. My kindergarten teacher, who was also a family friend, requested I do it again because I wasn't mature enough. And she was right, honestly; I'd fight against nap time, and remember no end to problems in first grade with sitting still. However, while maturity played a roll, the problem was I was bored. I went in to kindergarten being able to add, subtract and read, and had already started doing multiplication with my mom (herself a high school teacher). Another year in kindergarten would've been torture for me. Thankfully I had an amazing first grade teacher who recognised the problem. Instead of insisting on ADHD, she gave me more challenging stuff and let me work on my own. She never called on me to read aloud, because she gave me other books to read behind the class's book. This lasted until my 4th grade year, where one of my teachers didn't like it. Thankfully by then I was mature enough to recognise what I needed to do, etc. So really, I wonder how much of this is a mixture between multiple things and how many times kids get given ADHD diagnoses when what they really need is differentiated education. Granted, this is difficult; I was a math/science secondary school teacher (and I think it's even harder for elementary school teachers, for various reasons ranging from standards to their own competency in the subjects they teach), and it was almost impossible at times. That said, maybe I do have ADHD. I went on an amphetamine for weight loss at one point, and there were times I noticed I could focus longer and easier. But I've always had a tendency to get bored of something easily, and I'm sure the Internet hasn't made it any better. So I avoid getting tested as it doesn't impact work or study or anything for me (anymore than the Internet itself does)

matsemann 4y ago

How does this article's findings correlate in countries with other cut offs? Like in Norway, everyone born the same year go to school together, even though the school starts in September. (Which confused me a lot when reading Harry Potter as a kid, as some dates there didn't "add up"). We segregate sports teams that way as well, making it often better to be a jan/feb kid, as you're always the biggest/strongest, and thus get the extra attention, training opportunities etc, so a bias towards those birthdays in our sports.

krzyk 4y ago
Same in Poland. There is also a strange statistics with baby borns in early January and late December. There is a high spike of births in early days of January and a strange hole in births in the last days of December. My daughter is usually the youngest kid in class (born middle December - here we put babys born in the same year in the same class) and usually has trouble because she is not as developed as kids born 11 months earlier - this difference will be less noticeable later in life, but know when she is 6 years old it is a bit sad.
- bombcar 4y ago
  I wonder if there is delayed reporting by some people/hospitals to get a better “year”. I knew someone who came to the US as part of the Vietnamese boat people and his parents chopped a year or two off his age so he could start in kindergarten (and he didn’t know his actual birth year 30+ years later).
CPLX 4y ago
That’s also how New York City does things for what it’s worth.
oldgradstudent 4y ago
> How does this article's findings correlate in countries with other cut offs? The result appears to be consistent across countries with different cutoff dates. For example, British Columbia with a December 31 cutoff date. https://www.cmaj.ca/content/184/7/755 https://www.cmaj.ca/content/184/7/755

philliphaydon 4y ago

I was “diagnosed” with ADD and was put on ritalin which had 0 affect on me. Wasn’t until later in life I realised I didn’t have ADD I just wasn’t enjoying parts of school. Put me in physics class, technical drawing, cooking, math, I focused and did really well. Every other class was boring and non stimulating and so I acted up. ADD is over diagnosed.

texasbigdata 4y ago
The last line is logically ambiguous. In Europe, I believe in 2019, they found two effects: a significant _underdiagnosis_, offset by a tiny over diagnosis; now you could argue phones and screens artificially raise the genetic baseline, or that America is inherently different. But I will tell you ADHD meds calm me down, or when measured with a heart strap monitor over a full day fairly meaningfully lower my heart rate. It’s perhaps a meme now that adhd is over diagnosed, but I’d guess the majority is pill seeking individuals looking to compete at school or at work and less false positive diagnoses such as yours. Net net you seem to have solved it fairly quickly so at least that’s good: even when you get the diagnosis wrong if you can backtrack without significant cost then maybe it’s not absolutely horrible.
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  Don’t get me wrong I’m not saying it doesn’t exist or the meds are pointless. Absolutely there are people with ADHD and meds work for them. But sometimes I think difficult children are automatically labeled ADHD and the solution is drugs without trying to find the cause. I reminded of this Ted talk https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_do_schools_kill_creativity?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_do_schools_kill_c...
  - adastra22 4y ago
    For people with ADHD though, the drugs are the cure. Stimulants are a miracle drug for those lacking executive function.
  - Melatonic 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Traubenfuchs 4y ago

What were your difficulties? As the youngest in both elementary school and high school (almost a whole year of difference to the oldest), I had no struggles specific to my age. In elementary school and early highschool I overperformed and in later high school I performed averagely.

astura 4y ago

OTOH, I was born several months after you so I must have been the youngest in my grade, my birthday was usually after the first day of school. My parents might have even fabricated by age for all I know. My best friend in highschool was almost an entire year older than me. It didn't bother me in the least. I didn't even noticed it until I was in highschool. This caused me ZERO difficulties. My cousin was born about a month after me and he was in a younger grade than me. We grew up together and I always felt bad for him that he couldn't get highschool over with a year sooner like me. He was jealous of me. He also got into a ton of criminal behavior and has been in and out of jail for the past 20+ years, so I could easily say that was caused by the trauma of him being a year back from me in school. Who knows.

gowld 4y ago

> I held her back a year in preschool This (or backing up a year any year) might have helped you too. > and put her in a private school that mixes multiple years in the same differentiated class. This might backfire, for the same reason that you had trouble -- differentiation is difficult to do in practice. And your childhoold school might have been less differentiable than a modern public school, which has the benefit of computerized material and automated adaptive tests. Of course, if the private school solves it by having a far lower student:teacher ratio, then of course that's better than a public school, all else equal. Another thing parents can do is, instead of switching to private school, put that money toward hiring PTA-sponsored assistant-teachers in the classrooms.