The Family Dynamic by Susan Dominus

Author:Susan Dominus [Dominus, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2025-05-06T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

Suppose that it’s true that parents hold oldest children to a higher standard, knowingly or not, in the hopes that the oldest child will then set a high bar for the younger ones to meet. That theory makes sense from an efficiency standpoint but puts a high burden on parents hoping to see all their children thrive academically: It’s up to them to figure out how best to elicit the oldest child’s high performance, which is known to be a complicated, elusive, and potentially fraught project.

Researchers have found one way of improving school performance that seems more reliable than so many that rely on execution or have very short-term effects or sporadic results. It does not demand the effort of daily decision-making—how much to punish, how much to enforce—but instead involves one simple fact, which is the age at which a child starts kindergarten. That timing, it turns out, is not meaningful just for that child—it can also be meaningful for that child’s siblings. Many parents see the age at which their child starts school as a matter of chance: When did they happen to be born? But others see how they manage that variable as a matter on which they should bring their own agency to bear.

In his 2008 book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell famously highlighted research that showed that a disproportionate number of elite hockey players in Canada, which has an eligibility cutoff date of January 1 for age-class hockey teams, were born early in the calendar year, which meant they could be almost a year older than kids on the same team with birthdays in much later months. Older children are simply stronger, bigger, and more coordinated than younger children. Hockey coaches noticed them, gave them more attention, and put them on teams with other equally strong players, and a virtuous cycle evolved, in which these children benefited from all the positive responses that their already considerable physical advantages gave them. Gladwell pointed to research that showed this phenomenon applied to academics, as well—that older children in fourth grade scored significantly higher on key standardized tests than younger peers in the same grade.

The body of research on a child’s birthday and its relationship to school-start cutoffs is expansive, with that factor often found to be consequential for many aspects of a child’s life beyond sports and even grades. Kids who are old for their grade are more likely to test well, some research suggests, but also to take on leadership roles in high school. Children who start school on the young side of their grade have been found more likely to experience, in the case of females, teen pregnancy; the younger children in a grade are more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD and receive medication for it (one concern being that perhaps they are being misdiagnosed and are simply developmentally a few months behind their peers as a reflection of their younger age). Other research has found that the younger children in a grade are

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.