The Case for Redshirting Summer Birthday Kids

I have a summer birthday, and I wish my parents had held me back a year.

I haven’t written anything about parenting in a while, probably because I’m willing to have incels and radfems yell at me about my relatively uncontroverisal beliefs on relationships, but being yelled at for my parenting is somehow beyond the pale. Anyway, today is a treat for those of you who initially followed me for parenting content only to open their email to see three articles in a row about “heterofatalism.”

CHH face reveal!

We are a summer birthday family. My husband and I both have summer birthdays (right now, he is 38 and I am still 35, soon to be 36…the month of the year when we are three years apart is so incredibly problematic and fraught with a dangerous power imbalance. Groomer much?) Anyway, our kids also have summer birthdays, so the upside of this coincidence is that our entire summer is full of birthday celebrations. It helps that we are the kind of people who have “birthday weeks,” not birthday-days or even birthday weekends.

But there’s one downside to the summer birthday. When I was little, my parents had to make the decision to let me be the youngest kid in my kindergarten class, or hold me back and have me repeat a year of Pre-K so I could be the oldest in my class. Not to do the whole insufferable “gifted kid” thing, but because I was already reading, writing, and doing basic math, they decided to have me join my slightly older peers and be the youngest in my class.

But my parents made a very forgivable mistake when they decided not to redshirt me. In an effort to make sure I was sufficiently intellectually stimulated, they hadn’t considered that my social and emotional development was still very much that of a preschooler (or maybe they considered it, but thought it was less relevant than my academic capabilities.) I entered first grade right after my sixth birthday. I didn’t struggle with schoolwork, but I struggled immensely with social stuff. You could say some of this had to do with my OCD or ADHD (neither of which had been diagnosed yet) but some of it seemed more developmental, like my propensity to cry easily, which dissipated as soon as I got a bit older.

The reason that I don’t think it’s all about my neurodivergence is that I know someone else who had similar issues growing up—OCD, ADHD, and dyslexia to boot. That person is my husband. And unlike me, my husband was redshirted because of his summer birthday. Our childhoods and even teen years could not have been more different—and it’s the reason I want to redshirt my two summer birthday children.