When our boys are little, micromanaging their influences can feel white-knuckle doable (if not practical). “I’m raising a tender little Ferdinand!” we say with bright eyes and new-parent idealism, determined to single-handedly shield them from the harms of traditional masculinity and buck the trends. As they get older, for most of us, it quickly becomes clear that the dominant culture has a way of seeping in. Before you know it, you spend half your time begging your son not to default to hitting and kicking on the playground every time he’s even slightly irritated by another kid. When you’re not reffing a wrestling match, you’re sobbing in the Nerf-gun aisle as you tell your son for the 15,000th time that you know that Aiden has 26 Nerf guns but different families have different rules and no, we’re not going to buy a gun (but honestly, you are this close to giving in because you see now that it’s all a losing battle). In the few precious moments when you are not playing culture war with your 4.5-year-old in the toy aisle of the grocery store, you are stressing about how your kid — who, despite the jarring physical outbursts, actually seems pretty sensitive and sweet — is going to handle sitting still all day in kindergarten. Will he be nurtured? Understood? Or just in trouble all the time? Will he be able to learn? Particularly if you’re white and higher income, this is the time you might find yourself in a stress-Googling spiral that will lead you to the idea that you should redshirt your boy.
Conversations about “redshirting” — a term borrowed from athletics that’s now often used in the context of academics to refer to starting kindergarten a year late — in certain parent circles, are a perfect microcosm of our general anxiety about boys. It doesn’t hurt that we usually first encounter redshirting right around the time we confront the hard reality that the insidious, omnipresent influence of our culture’s conflicting, confusing, and, yes, sometimes toxic messages about masculinity is simply a fact of life here now. We can try to insulate, prepare, and resist it in small, important, daily ways, but we see, eventually, that we can’t really protect our sons from it.
Therein lies the allure of redshirting. We can’t fix all of culture overnight, but we can try and put off our own sons’ exposure to it. We hear about redshirting, and we think to ourselves, That!
American parents are worried about their boys, and they may be right to worry. The headlines and statistics that bolster them can be scary: Men are lonelier than ever; the highest risk factor for suicide is being a man. Studies show that teenage boys’ mental health needs are chronically underserved, so much so that, in 2019, the American Psychological Association issued meticulously researched, official guidelines for practitioners working with boys and men. In it, the APA asserts that the pressure to conform to traditional masculinity “has been shown to limit males’ psychological development, constrain their behavior, result in gender role strain and gender role conflict, and negatively influence mental health and physical health. Indeed, boys and men are overrepresented in a variety of psychological and social problems.” Ruth Whippman’s recent book, BoyMom — which could have been subtitled “how not to raise an incel” — expresses exactly the multi-faceted anxieties that plague parents of young boys today.
Questions of nature versus nurture persist, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that parents hoping to raise mentally healthy boys in our culture may face an uphill battle. Redshirting sounds like a particularly easy solution when advocates like Richard V. Reeves, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institute and president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, talk about it. In his 2022 book, Of Boys and Men, Reeves argues with soothing simplicity that there isn’t even a decision to be made: All boys should be redshirted. Boys mature more slowly, take longer to master impulse control, suffer from a “gender achievement gap,” and are currently less likely to go to college than girls. Give your son an extra year of social-emotional development and brain development, he says, and they’ll be more ready to succeed in kindergarten and beyond. You’ll see higher test scores, fewer behavioral issues. Plus, studies show that boys from lower-income households — currently the least likely to be redshirted — benefit the most from redshirting, so we really should make it universal.
Of course, it’s not that simple, argues Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, an economist and professor of education and social policy at Northwestern University. She has frequently engaged in friendly academic debate with Reeves on the topic and authored the very study about lower-income boys and delayed kindergarten entry that Reeves includes in his arguments in favor of redshirting boys.
“We spend so much time worrying about those first couple of months in school, but that’s what kindergarten’s designed for; to help them get acclimated to school. A good kindergarten teacher knows how to do that. It’s developmentally appropriate to have a hard time controlling your hands sometimes.”
One of the first issues with any conversation about redshirting, she tells me, is that, most school districts across the country do not allow it. Perhaps because of this, or because most of us are counting the days until we can stop paying for preschool, the number of people who actually choose to hold back their their children an extra year is quite low, making the whole debate a bit of a tempest in a teapot: “If you look at the data amongst boys with summer-born birthdays, fewer than 1 in 5 is being redshirted,” Whitmore Schanzenbach says. As an economist, too, she adds that it’s worth noting that starting your academic career a year late also means joining the workforce a year later, which represents a year’s worth of lost potential income.
For all the buzz around redshirting — at least among parents of preschool boys with summer birthdays — only about 12 % of parents have reported holding back a child. Though that number is slowly going up, Whitmore Schanzenbach argues that it really shouldn’t be — Reeves and other advocates of redshirting have jumped to conclusions about the long-term benefit of redshirting. Some studies have even shown that any academic advantage that starting your kid later may offer will be the largest in kindergarten and diminishes every year, dwindling to a degree that is essentially not measurable by middle school.
Still, you know your kid best. If your district allows redshirting, and it’s something you’re considering, she urges parents to remember that your child is growing and changing rapidly. “When you’re making these decisions in the spring before the kindergarten year, you’ve got a pretty weak signal of what your kid’s going to be like in September,” she reminds. “As moms, part of our job is to worry, but sometimes we need to take a step back. We spend so much time worrying about those first couple of months in school, but that’s what kindergarten’s designed for; to help them get acclimated to school. A good kindergarten teacher knows how to do that. It’s developmentally appropriate to have a hard time controlling your hands sometimes.”
Parents should also consider the fact that being the oldest kid in class can come with its own challenges, she suggests. Choosing to have your summer birthday boy be the oldest in class may mean that they are more likely to be bored, and bored or disengaged kids can be just as likely to act out as younger kids who are still working on impulse control. This was the reason that Whitmore Schanzenbach herself did not redshirt her summer-birthday son.
When I reached out to my extended community of parent friends and acquaintances to see if I personally knew anyone who’d held their summer-born boys back a year, I was struck by a few things. First, that a lot of people who have done it do not particularly want other parents to know that they’ve done it. Second, that many people who do it — at least in my extended circles — are doing so because of neurodiversity, whether autism spectrum disorder or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder or other sensory challenges. And finally, I was struck by the fact that the parents who were up for sharing their experiences with me were all absolutely certain that it was the right choice for their family, one that they often had to really fight to be able to make and one they would make again in a heartbeat.
As opposed to asking “When should I jump into the system?” perhaps the question should be: “How can we fight to make it a better place for our child, whatever their age may be when they start?”
Considering the broader question of the way the pressures and cultural expectations around traditional masculinity may impact our kids’ behavior, and fears about our boys’ ability to perform in an academic environment in the context of these pressures, Christopher Reigeluth, Ph.D., clinical psychologist at Oregon Health & Science University and author of the The Masculinity Workbook for Teens, says that while redshirting may be right for a few kids, for most parents who are worried about their boys, the question of when to start kindergarten is beside the point. Rather than your child’s age, his ultimate success or failure will depend on the schools’ ability to meet their needs, he says. As opposed to asking “When should I jump into the system?” perhaps the question should be: “How can we fight to make it a better place for our child, whatever their age may be when they start?”
As for parental anxieties about boys in particular, Reigeluth stresses that research has shown that “schools are the chief socializers of boys,” but that doesn’t mean that parents are powerless once their child starts school. Whenever your boy starts school, he says, just having a clear-eyed understanding of the ideas about masculinity that your boy will encounter there is one way parents can help their boy navigate it all. “They’re going to start to get messages to repress vulnerable emotions, to keep sensitive things to themselves, to get more teachings about the importance of power and aggression right from the start,” Reigeluth explains. Parents can play an essential role in helping insulate our sons from the impact that these messages have on their well-being. Bearing in mind, he says, that “masculinity is a flexible, fluid thing,” parents can counter harmful messages about masculinity by giving boys permission and encouragement to be vulnerable and by modeling healthy habits, like talking about feelings and communicating openly. Redshirting may not be the cure-all we wish we had for our kids, and particularly our boys, but Reigeluth agrees that our boys need and deserve a more supportive culture, both inside and outside of the classroom. Parents, researchers, and clinicians who hope to find a way to make boyhood healthier for the next generation agree on one thing, Reigeluth says: “The stakes are high.”
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