Kindergarten Fret-iness

Is this little girl ready to start kindergarten in the fall?


You'd think I would know. I am, after all, her mother and a kindergarten teacher, which means I should know exactly where she's at, what's best for her, and whether she has what it takes to be successful in half-day kindergarten (and beyond) if we start her this coming fall, at age 4-almost-5. Sadly, however, I haven't the slightest idea what we should do.

We'd planned on enrolling her this coming fall and hadn't thought twice about it, until a fellow kindergarten teacher Facebooked me to ask what I thought she should do about her son, who's a month younger than Keira. As we messaged back and forth, I realized that if Teacher Me were talking to Parent Me, I would have said exactly what I've said to lots of other parents before: "There's no harm in starting them later. If you start them too soon, sometimes you don't find out until upper elementary, or beyond, that they just weren't mature enough to keep up, and then retaining them at that point is tough." So why did I somehow skip over that reasoning when it came to Keira?

And then the second-guessing, pondering, polling everyone in the universe, and general confusion began.

Here are the facts:

• Keira was born October 2nd.
• The cut-off in our state to start kindergarten is currently Dec. 2nd, but they're gradually moving it back over the next few years, so that kids will have to be 5 before school starts in order to qualify for kindergarten. So, she qualifies now, but if she'd been born a few years later, this entire issue would be, as Joey Tribbiani would say, "moo"--she'd have to wait until next fall.
• Academically (and, as I said to my future principal, that feels like a silly word to use in reference to someone who wears Fancy Nancy underwear), Keira's set. She's starting to read, meets a pretty big chunk of the end-of-kindergarten standards already, and learns quickly. Bear and I aren't the least bit worried that she'd do great in kindergarten this year or next.
• Maturity-wise? Aye, there's the rub. Her preschool teacher says Kiwi is "definitely the most emotional" in her class. She still cries when Bear leaves for work in the morning. A few days ago, she randomly got teary-eyed and told me, "Mommy, you're gonna need to buy me some, um....big, um....human clothes, because I'm gonna keep getting bigger and none of my clothes will fit me!" Besides the irony of my underwear-clad daughter fretting about having clothes to wear, this incident really made me start thinking about whether she's not quite mature enough to handle big-kid school without crying at the drop of a hat. Then again, a friend of mine remarked that if she'd held her 8-year-old out of school on account of crying easily, the child would still not be in school! So, is this a maturity issue or a personality (a.k.a. Drama Queen) issue? Shrug. We have no idea.
• Her preschool teacher is on the fence, saying Keira may or may not be mature enough to start kindergarten in 6 months--it's too soon to tell.
• The director of the preschool strongly urged us to keep her there another year, and told me about a little boy who fluently read her verses from the Bible but still needed to stay another year for maturity reasons. Then again, she also cleary has a vested interest (to the tune of $230 a month) in keeping Keira around for another year!
• My future principal is strongly in favor of starting Keira this fall, and says she cannot imagine it being a problem. She, and many other successful adults we know, started kindergarten at 4 and went on to be very successful...and entered the workforce a year earlier, if we're keeping score on how this decision will impact Keira's overall lifetime earnings. (Are we??)
• Starting kindergarten at 4-almost-5 means she'll start high school at 13-almost-14, instead of 14-almost-15. Does this matter? Well, she'll be there with 18-year-old boys men, who have beards and drive cars and can legally smoke and get tattoos. Insert Psycho music here! Maybe being among the oldest in her class, rather than the youngest, would make her more likely to have the maturity to make decisions that won't land Bear and me in jail and/or an asylum before she graduates. Or, maybe not. Maybe being the youngest, and not being able to drive sophomore year or sign herself out of school all of senior year, are good things (from our perspective, at least--they'd definitely be a drag for Teenaged Keira). And we'll no doubt be freaking out when she hits high school regardless of how old she is, because have you been to a high school campus lately?! I haven't, but I know someone whose daughter witnessed a kid freaking out on Ecstacy in the middle of her art class; and Bear's brother heard an earful about STD's when he subbed in a high school class recently. Give me tantrums and diaper blowouts any day--I'd rather keep my girls little forever than send them there at all!

So, what to do? As with everything else, my first instinct is to research the bejeezus out of the issue, and this article and this article make a pretty convincing case for starting her this year. I couldn't find much reliable research showing that "redshirting" (a term I'm not even sure applies to Keira when she's so close to the cutoff date--it's not like we'd be waiting until she was 7 to start kindergarten or anything) has any long-term benefits for children, and most of what I've been able to find shows that the age at which kids start kindergarten has a much lesser effect on their future success than other factors (behavior, parental involvement, quality of schools/teachers, etc.).

Our own state's push to change the kindergarten entry age is supposedly based on loads of evidence (which I cannot locate) that doing so will increase test scores (heil, the all-important test scores!), especially for economically-disadvantaged kids, and reduce the budget (because fewer students who qualify for kindergarten = fewer teachers to pay). Those benefits don't really apply to Keira, though, because we're not terribly worried about her academic future--with two involved parents, including a teacher and a Really Smart Dude, we figure she's going to be okay in that department. I can't find anything about the long-term social/maturity difference in kids who start earlier vs. later. So, thanks a lot, research! I'm still on the fence.

Registration for both preschool and kindergarten start next month, so we have a few more weeks to decide. What to do??