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At what age of kids do parents typically start? I know some who started prepping their kids as early as middle school. Is that common?

• uberman 3y ago
  For some things, no age is "too soon". Typically this would be for certain competitive sports programs. If a child waits until grade 9 to pick up a sport they are going to be well behind the curve. Typically though for most kids grade 7 or 8 begins school course tracking. You want to be able to take AP courses that can lead to GPAs above 4 and whenever that tracking starts in your school system you want to be aware of the choices you are making and when some choices will close doors in grade 11 and 12. To be clear, every kid does not need to track into every honors option and overloading a kid so they can't get high grades is worse than taking courses they can master. From my own family, getting volunteer hours out of the way in middle school was relatively painless as other time commitments like club sports, homework, and free ranging were still easy to accommodate at that age. Note though that there are a good many who start in high school and better late than never.