A recent New York Times Magazine piece unpacked the increasingly common practice of "redshirting" kids who would be young for their grade, sitting them out for another year so they'll be the oldest in their grade.

An interlocking set of motives are guiding this trend:

• Parents are increasingly concerned with self-esteem as a primary goal for their children.

[According to one development psychologist,] "We used to revere individual accomplishment. Now we revere self-esteem, and the reverence has snowballed in unconscious ways - into parents always wanting their children to feel good, wanting everything to be pleasant." So parents wait an extra year in the hope that when their children enter school their age or maturity will shield them from social and emotional hurt. Elizabeth Levett Fortier, a kindergarten teacher in the George Peabody Elementary School in San Francisco, notices the impact on her incoming students. "I've had children come into my classroom, and they've never even lost at Candy Land."

• With high-stakes testing in 3rd grade occupying the minds of parents, teachers, and school officials alike,

many parents, legislatures and teachers find the current curriculum too challenging for many older 4- and young 5-year-olds, which makes sense, because it’s largely the same curriculum taught to first graders less than a generation ago...

...In a report on kindergarten, the National Association of Early Childhood Specialists in State Departments of Education wrote, "Most of the questionable entry and placement practices that have emerged in recent years have their genesis in concerns over children's capacities to cope with the increasingly inappropriate curriculum in kindergarten."

Some states are considering countering this trend by pushing back their kindergarten age cutoffs so that all kindergartners will be older. But this is not a solution, because it highlights one of the primary troubling effects of this trend:

one serious side effect of pushing back the cutoffs is that while well-off kids with delayed enrollment will spend another year in preschool, probably doing what kindergartners did a generation ago, less-well-off children may, as the literacy specialist Katie Eller put it, spend “another year watching TV in the basement with Grandma.” What’s more, given the socioeconomics of redshirting — and the luxury involved in delaying for a year the free day care that is public school — the oldest child in any given class is more likely to be well off and the youngest child is more likely to be poor. “You almost have a double advantage coming to the well-off kids,” says Samuel J. Meisels, president of Erikson Institute, a graduate school in child development in Chicago. “From a public-policy point of view I find this very distressing.”

Education bloggers Alexander Russo and Joanne Jacobs both commented on this article, and Russo even introduced me to a neat tool to see what all the bloggers out there are saying about it.

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