A question of instinct

By Phil Stott
 

In conversation with a friend recently, I came across a child-rearing issue that many parents will have to face: when should a child start school?  My friend wants his 3-year-old son to wait until he's almost 5 before starting kindergarten.  The child's mother, meanwhile, thinks he'll be old enough to start just under a year from now, when he'll be almost 4. It's a situation, unsurprisingly, that has left the two at loggerheads.
 

The child in question is a bright boy, and would likely have no problems keeping up academically with his peers were he to start straight away.  His dad, however, worries that starting him too young will put him at a disadvantage not just now, but throughout his entire school life. Physically, he's likely to be smaller and less developed in things like motor skills than other boys around him-a point his mother seems less worried about but one that, as a male who started school young, I can empathize with.

Sporting ability is important among boys, and can serve as a sorting mechanism in social situations. From being able to hit a tee-ball as well as your peers in kindergarten, to being developed enough to compete with them physically in high school (not to mention being able to perform without embarrassing yourself in a lunchtime pickup game in your 30s), sport matters to many males, and can play an important role in our relationships with one other. Sure, there are plenty of guys out there for whom it's not important, and many who grew up just fine without being good at sports.  However, there are also many who still bear the scars of not being able to compete with their peers, to say nothing of the unspeakable horror of being the last selected for playground games.  (By the way, I know someone has to be the last pick, I just don't want it to be my kid.)
 

In weighing all of that, it seems to me that starting a child at school and effectively handing them an age-group handicap places a significant barrier in their path to becoming a confident, well-adjusted adult.
 

Overall, the situation raises several issues, each of which could feasibly serve as their own separate topic on this site: Given their different needs and maturation rates, should boys start school later than girls? Or be educated separately altogether? At what point does trying to do what's best for your kid morph into "red-shirting" them (consciously delaying your child's entry into school to give them a better shot at success in their age group by pitting them against slightly younger kids)?

For me, though, the main point about the situation my friend is going through is what happens when a child's parents each hold diametrically opposite views on what's best for that child. That's something that's hard enough to deal with in any relationship, but in this case, there's one point I haven't mentioned yet, and that complicates the situation even further: they're divorced.
 

In any relationship, there are likely to be conflicting points of view, and none more so than with a couple that have split but are forced to continue to interact.  There is an imperative in any disagreement to find a way forward, a situation that most of the time leads to one side agreeing to accommodate the other. In some situations, though, there's a danger that seeking to accommodate can cause as much harm as not doing so, and in those circumstances, parental instincts come into play.
 

While maternal instinct is something that is often mentioned in advice and publications on child-raising, very little is said of the instincts of the father (if indeed the father is mentioned at all in said publications-but more on that in a later post).  The truth, though, is that male instincts are every bit as sharply honed as those of their female counterparts, but just in different ways. (One quick example-how many times have you known all along that a female you know is dating or married to a douche, long before the truth becomes apparent to
womankind?)
 

Tough as it may be, there are times when the savviest thing a daddy can do is to trust his own instincts. In the instance of my friend's son, the mother's instinct is that her child is academically able for school, so he should go.  The father's instinct, however, is that he's not ready socially, and will gain great benefit from waiting a year.  In weighing the two instincts, then, the question comes down to which side needs to accommodate the other.  In this instance, as in most cases, the answer to that question is simple: the one whose instinct will do the child the most good in the long term.