To K or not to K.

I will preface this post with the statement that these are my opinions and how they relate to my daughter. I am fully aware that every kid is different and every parent has to make decisions based on their individual situations!

I don’t know that Rick & I have ever struggled with a decision as much as we have with trying to figure out whether to send Mallory to Kindergarten this fall or not. I think Rick has struggled with lots of decisions this much (for instance, deciding whether or not to throw away his 30-yr old rusty Bengals garbage can), but for the two of us to struggle jointly – it’s unprecedented in our marriage. Kindergarten and Young 5s registration is this week so we had a deadline to make our decision.

Here are the facts: The cutoff in Michigan is December 1 to enter Kindergarten. Mallory meets this cutoff by 24 days. So she is allowed to start kindergarten as a four year old.

Other data: Mallory rocks pre-kindergarten. She loves to help her teachers (she spends time in the preschool classroom helping the 3-yr old kids with crafts). She loves to learn and is constantly showing off her letter and number writing skills. She loves to do workbooks and loves to have us read to her. She isn’t the smallest in her class. She isn’t lacking in self-confidence. She isn’t unusually shy. She is aware of rules, and follows them almost all the time. She’s been going to a daycare/preschool setting five days a week for 8-ish hours a day since she was three months old (and no, this doesn’t depress me – I think she learned WAY more from her teachers than I EVER would have exposed her to at home!)

I actually put it on Facebook – asking people’s opinion if they had a late birthday and started kindergarten at age 4. Lots of friends weighed in, and it was interesting that of my friends who had a late birthday – all but one said they enjoyed being the youngest and it wasn’t terrible being the last to drive or the last to (legally) get in to bars. But I got lots of “don’t send her” advice from moms: that we shouldn’t be in a rush, that the trend is to hold back kids (even though they *could* start because they meet the cutoff), that a lot of times kids can be ready now, but a gap starts to show up in 3rd/4th grade between the younger kids and the older kids. Another interesting thing I realized is that no matter what the cutoff is in a state, parents were hesitant to send their kids if they are close to the cutoff (whether its a September 1 cutoff or a July 1 cutoff) – so I think a big part of it is that parents don’t want their kids to be the youngest.

Our good friend is the principal of the school she’ll go to in the fall and he gave us the most compelling argument for keeping her back – if we start her this fall, she would be a full year younger than other kids taking the ACT and SAT (nationally) when the time comes, since Michigan is one of a handful of states to have such a late cutoff. That really stuck in my head and made us think the most.

But then I talk to my close teacher friends who have spent a lot of time with Mallory and they – along with Mallory’s teachers – think she is more than ready for kindergarten.

Rick & I went back and forth a million times. We literally changed our minds a million times – do we start her in kindergarten at age four? do we send her to young 5s? I’m sure my friends were sick of me talking about it.

Another good friend pointed out that if Mallory has problems in 3rd/4th grade or when she’s 15 or 20 – we will never know if it’s because of a decision we made in the spring of 2011, or did we screw something else up later on.

This same friend also pointed out that we have to OWN this decision and we can’t play the “what if?” game for the rest of her life. I’m blogging about our decision and the uncertainty we had going into it so when she’s the first female President of the United States in 30 years, we can look back and know we made the right decision. And if in 30 years she is a mess…well, let’s not talk about that.

All I want for my daughter is for her to have fun and enjoy learning and grow up to rule the world like she rules our house right now, albeit with a few less temper tantrums.

So…after lots of thinking and debating – we are sending her.

I’ll be honest and say that I’d rather have her be excited to learn and be challenged than doing a young fives program that would basically repeat what she’s done the past two-ish years at preschool, and start to make bad choices because she isn’t being challenged.

In conclusion – someone will have to be the youngest in the class, and this fall in our town, it will be my daughter. And she is BEYOND excited about it. Me – I’m terrified. My baby girl is starting KINDERGARTEN in five months. How on EARTH can this be?