On Skipping A Grade: Back To School & A Whole Year Lost
Do you worry you're pushing your kids too hard in school?
Today was supposed to be the first day of fifth grade for my son.
Yet, just a few days ago, I found out his school wanted to move my sweet monkey boy Jackson to sixth grade. They were aware of his grades and his test scores, and felt he would be fully capable of moving to the sixth grade group and working with them. They felt he needed more of a challenge.
It was an interesting time for this to happen, having just read an op-ed by Madeline Levine in the New York Times entitled “Raising Successful Children.” Levine argues that many parents are pushing their children too hard, and helping them too much, in hopes they’ll be at the top of their class, perhaps attend an Ivy League university and be super-successful. The result? Depressed and miserable kids. Levine explains that, ” … it is the inability to maintain parental boundaries that most damages child development. When we do things for our children out of our own needs rather than theirs, it forces them to circumvent the most critical task of childhood: to develop a robust sense of self.”
As I read the piece in the plane on the way home from the BlogHer conference in New York City, I worried. Am I one of the parents to whom Levine is referring? Am I pushing Jackson too much to satisfy some subconscious need of my own for his success? The last thing I ever want is for him to be miserable and depressed.
Sitting in seat 20D, I started examining my motivations, and whether I push my kids too hard. I’m not a slave driver by any means. I don’t cart my kids to and fro from a million different lessons and extracurricular activities. I prefer they each have one, if at all, and I want it to be something they enjoy. I do, however, have high expectations for them in school. Respect your teacher. Pay attention. Be as silly as you want at lunch and on the playground, but don’t goof around in class. Be responsible. At the beginning of every single school year, starting in kindergarten and including this very morning, I’ve always told them, “Every year counts. How you handle yourself and how hard you work matters every single year in school. Do your best.”
I also look for outside activities that will enrich my kids’ learning. That’s why this summer Jackson attended the Summer Institute for the Gifted at Emory University. It was a three-week long program from 8:00am to 6pm every day, which I admit is a lot for a ten-year-old kid who wants to sleep in, play Xbox, and hang out at the pool in the summer, gifted or not. Hell, it was a lot for me having to get up at 6:30am and drive four hours each weekday to take him and bring him home. He wanted to do it, he said, and I thought it was a great opportunity. But now I wonder, did he want to do it for me or for himself? Was it too much? Writes Levine, ” … pushing your exhausted child to take one more advanced-placement course because it will ensure her spot as class valedictorian is not involved parenting but toxic overparenting aimed at meeting the parents’ need for status or affirmation and not the child’s needs.”
Toxic overparenting. Shudder. Is that what I’m doing? God, I hope not.
Levine’s article led me to have a talk with Jack when I got home from New York. I told him I wanted to make sure he understood he didn’t have to attend a program like that in the summer ever again unless he really wanted to. I told him that, while I do care that he gets a college degree, I don’t care from which institution. I told him that I love him no matter what. I looked into his eyes and told him his happiness counts.
Then, just a couple of days later, the school principal calls: “We think Jack should skip fifth grade.”
Are you kidding me? We just talked about having fun. Not pushing so hard that it’s stressful. His happiness matters. And now this? Suddenly, instead of just a ruler and some graph paper for his math supplies he needs a calculator and a protractor. Instead of just notebook paper, a laptop may be in order, yet my kid doesn’t even know how to type yet. Do I say no? Do I give him the option?
I told the principal I agreed that Jackson could use the challenge, but I wasn’t willing for him to be locked into this plan. He could try it out if he wanted, and if he liked it he could stay, and if he wanted to go back to being a fifth grader he could do that no questions asked. She agreed.
Then I talked to Jack. I told him he was being offered the opportunity to move to sixth grade, but we were just as comfortable with him being a fifth grader. I told him we didn’t care, which is the truth. The idea of suddenly having my son home with me for one less year is not particularly appealing. In fact, I’m really sad about it.
I searched his face so carefully, looking for any flicker that he hated the idea. Instead, he started beaming. He loves school. He was excited. Nervous, but excited, and also glad he had the option to switch back if he doesn’t like it.
Today, my fifth grader is in his first day of sixth grade, and I’m worried, Madeline Levine. I want to do right by my boy, and yet I’m never sure what the rightest right is.
Photo credit: © Gennadiy Poznyakov – Fotolia.com
Don’t miss a moment – make sure you add Something Fierce to your RSS reader by using this link. If you’re a pregnant or new mom (or dad), be sure to check out Katherine at her blog on postpartum depression, too. And, you can follow her on Twitter as she tweets inane things about her day.
MORE ON BABBLE:
22 classic novels as explained by a 6-year-old
10 things you should never say to a mom
25 things EVERY kid should experience
18 questions all parents secretly ask
The 10 biggest lies we tell our kids
It sounds like a great school that recognizes your child’s abilities. I would probably do exactly what you did. I don’t think you are pushing him too hard if you are giving him the choice. Having high expectations for our children is so important, but you are also letting him know that if they don’t meet those expectations, it’s ok too. But the part about one less year with him almost makes me cry. Maybe he will choose a college close by and live with you until he graduates college! My son is six and he’s already thinking ahead to the day he will move out, telling my husband that he will miss us when he leaves. My husband said, don’t worry, you can live close by and we can still hang out. Milo was relieved and kind of surprised about that!
I skipped a grade (1st). I graduated from high school at 16 and college at 20. I had my MBA by 24.
I never, ever regretted it. If Jack wants to do it, let him. And bravo to you, mama.
I’ve been dealing with a similar issue for the past 2 years. My son just turned 9 and he will be starting 5th grade on Friday. It really started in second grade. He was literally coming home in tears because he was so bored, in math and reading especially. He already knew everything except a few geometry vocab words(knew the concept just not the word for it) that was in the 2nd grade math book. The new librarian was not letting him check out books from the older/harder section. The hardest books in the section that he was allowed into were the Junie B Jones books. He was finishing one of those in a couple of hours by February of first grade. He had long since moved on to Goosebumps and Roald Dahl and even Harry Potter. With the support of his teacher we got the school to allow him to take math and reading/language arts with the 3rd graders for the last 3 quarters of the year. Problems arose again the following year when they were gonna make him repeat 3rd grade math and reading/language arts because of a scheduling conflict and a new math program that was supposedly more challenging. He was again coming home in tears every day. He felt like he was punished for being smart(his words, not mine). We fought with the school all last year to just have him skip a grade. They did end up figuring out a way for him to take math with the 4th graders. I stopped making him do his reading and spelling homework. It was busy work, and a waste of his time. Plus my friends who teach in the district said that his 3rd grade teacher assigned way too much homework anyway. They finally moved him to 4th grade full-time after the ISAT testing. I never realized how unhappy he was, until I saw how happy he became after the skip. He has more friends(not a lot, but more) and is no longer coming home with a 98% or higher on every single assignment and test(he’s still getting all A’s they’re just no longer perfect ones), and he’s still getting bored by the end of a unit in math. I worry about how he’ll do socially as he gets older, but we’re just gonna take it one day at a time. For now, the decision to skip was the best choice available.
Excellent compromise. If the school is suggesting it, there may be other factors that they know that are coming into play also such as a low 5th grade class that may hold your son back even more or an excellent 6th grade teacher who will help the transition for your son even more.
I think that it is wonderful that you are giving Jack the choice, and an opportunity to give 6th grade a try. I myself skipped 2nd grade. In 1st grade I knew the entire times tables up to 15 and was reading 5th grade level books. I, however, was not given the choice; my father made the decision without asking me what I thought about it (he and my mother had just divorced and he had custody, I think it was more to show my mother that he was the superior parent). I now wish that he hadn’t let me skip a grade…socially, I was a year behind my peers, which was difficult for me, especially in middle school, when you throw in the teenage hormones and clique-y behavior.
[...] I could never have children. Another time I wrote about how worried I was about allowing my son to skip a grade, and later saw several people in a Facebook conversation about the piece say that I was obviously [...]