Alka Tripathy-Lang’s 5-year-old son is supposed to start kindergarten this fall, but her district in suburban Phoenix has already delayed its start and announced that classes, when they do start, will be online for at least the first couple of weeks.
What those lessons will look like is unclear, as are details about how much parental involvement will be required, and how or when the school is going to implement the dual immersion Mandarin program her son is supposed to begin. Tripathy-Lang’s current plan is to start him in an online-only option, but if it’s not working, she’ll pull him out to be home with her 3-year-old, who she and her husband have already decided not to send to preschool this year.
“I have this low-level anxiety about everything in the background all the time, and a substantial chunk of it is about how I am going to make sure that my kids are getting the experiences they need at this age,” said Tripathy-Lang, a geologist and science writer.
Across the U.S., families are filled with uncertainty about what school will look like in the fall, and those feelings are particularly acute for parents of rising kindergartners. At a moment of transition that can set the stage for the next dozen years, parents who have options are struggling to decide whether it’s worth beginning school if their children might have to wear masks, skip recess or experience kindergarten on a screen.
It’s yet another pandemic-related conundrum that lacks obvious solutions, said Diane Schanzenbach, Ph.D., an economist at Northwestern University and director of the university’s Institute for Policy Research. Although the current situation is uncharted territory, she and other experts said that prior research on kindergartners can help guide parents in their decision-making.
Now more than ever, they said, the right choice is going to vary based on an individual child’s needs, each family’s circumstances and local variations with the coronavirus.
The redshirt option
Kindergarten is a time when children often get their first taste of real independence as they develop skills such as conflict resolution, group interaction, focus and self-control, said Stephanie Jones, Ph.D., a developmental psychologist at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Major advances happen for most kids in the first few months of kindergarten, said Johanna Garcia Normart, who taught kindergarten for 12 years in Hayward, Calif., and now teaches transitional kindergarten, a form of pre-K. Between September and January, she said, most kindergartners learn to operate as functional members of a community.
“The primary importance of kindergarten is being able to love to learn,” she added.
But decisions about when to start children in kindergarten can be complicated, even in the best of times. In states where parents have the option to wait, about six percent choose to delay starting their kindergartner every year, especially for kids who will be the youngest in their class.
Parents tend to hold boys back more than girls, perhaps based on the perception that boys are less mature than girls at that age. And parents with higher levels of education are most likely to hold their kids back, Schanzenbach and a colleague found in an analysis of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010–11, a project run by the U.S. Department of Education. Among boys with summer birthdays in places with a fall cutoff date, those whose parents had college degrees were held back 20 percent of the time, compared with five percent of boys whose parents had high-school degrees.
Waiting can have benefits, particularly for children who have trouble self-regulating, said Thomas Dee, Ph.D., an economist who studies education policy at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education. Some research, including a study he conducted with Hans Henrik Sievertsen at the University of Bristol, suggests that holding off on formal schooling can give those children time to get better at controlling their behavior, handling emotions and pursuing long-term goals — as long as they spend the year in an intellectually engaging, developmentally appropriate, play-based environment, such as a high-quality preschool.
In one analysis of data on more than 407,000 children around the U.S., researchers from multiple institutions, including Harvard, reported in 2018 that the kindergartners whose birthdays fall just before the school cutoff date are 34 percent more likely to get an A.D.H.D. diagnosis than are their oldest classmates.
But redshirting isn’t necessarily the best choice for every kid, even when it seems like the right thing to do in the months leading up to kindergarten, Schanzenbach said. Because growth is not linear, a child who seems behind in June could be on top of things in October and bored of preschool, she said. And kids often step up and accelerate their learning when exposed to older peers.
“Downsides for everybody, but especially kindergartners”
Of course, the research on kindergarten redshirting was done before the pandemic, which has added a new set of pros and cons to consider.
As a growing number of schools announce plans for the fall that include online-only or a combination of online and in-person, the value of screen-based schooling for kindergartners is one open question. Studies of older students show that online learning is generally inferior to classroom learning. And anecdotal reports from earlier this year suggest that the experience is even worse for young kids and for children with special needs.
Rebecca Polivy’s younger child was supposed to start kindergarten this fall in Pasadena, Calif. He didn’t tolerate Zoom calls with his preschool class in the spring, and there’s no way he would have the patience to sit in front of a screen and talk to a teacher and classmates he’s never met, said Polivy, the director of an education nonprofit and part-time fitness professional. She’s decided he’s better off staying at the preschool they love for another year.
Educators are also wary of online school for little kids. Michelle Tween taught pre-K and kindergarten for 23 years at the Chapel School, a private school in Bronxville, New York. While teaching the first few cohorts of children born to digital natives, she noticed that the kids had more trouble resolving conflicts, waiting for answers to their questions at school and communicating their needs for help. In the classroom, she watched fine motor skills get neglected when children used index fingers to swipe on iPads instead of using their entire hands to manipulate Play-Doh, scissors or small objects. Referrals to occupational therapy went up, and kids became more fatigued while writing with crayons and pencils.
The Coronavirus Outbreak ›
Frequently Asked Questions
Updated July 22, 2020
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Why do masks work?
- The coronavirus clings to wetness and enters and exits the body through any wet tissue (your mouth, your eyes, the inside of your nose). That’s why people are wearing masks and eyeshields: they’re like an umbrella for your body: They keep your droplets in and other people’s droplets out. But masks only work if you are wearing them properly. The mask should cover your face from the bridge of your nose to under your chin, and should stretch almost to your ears. Be sure there are no gaps — that sort of defeats the purpose, no?
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Is the coronavirus airborne?
- The coronavirus can stay aloft for hours in tiny droplets in stagnant air, infecting people as they inhale, mounting scientific evidence suggests. This risk is highest in crowded indoor spaces with poor ventilation, and may help explain super-spreading events reported in meatpacking plants, churches and restaurants. It’s unclear how often the virus is spread via these tiny droplets, or aerosols, compared with larger droplets that are expelled when a sick person coughs or sneezes, or transmitted through contact with contaminated surfaces, said Linsey Marr, an aerosol expert at Virginia Tech. Aerosols are released even when a person without symptoms exhales, talks or sings, according to Dr. Marr and more than 200 other experts, who have outlined the evidence in an open letter to the World Health Organization.
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What are the symptoms of coronavirus?
- Common symptoms include fever, a dry cough, fatigue and difficulty breathing or shortness of breath. Some of these symptoms overlap with those of the flu, making detection difficult, but runny noses and stuffy sinuses are less common. The C.D.C. has also added chills, muscle pain, sore throat, headache and a new loss of the sense of taste or smell as symptoms to look out for. Most people fall ill five to seven days after exposure, but symptoms may appear in as few as two days or as many as 14 days.
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What’s the best material for a mask?
- Scientists around the country have tried to identify everyday materials that do a good job of filtering microscopic particles. In recent tests, HEPA furnace filters scored high, as did vacuum cleaner bags, fabric similar to flannel pajamas and those of 600-count pillowcases. Other materials tested included layered coffee filters and scarves and bandannas. These scored lower, but still captured a small percentage of particles.
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Does asymptomatic transmission of Covid-19 happen?
- So far, the evidence seems to show it does. A widely cited paper published in April suggests that people are most infectious about two days before the onset of coronavirus symptoms and estimated that 44 percent of new infections were a result of transmission from people who were not yet showing symptoms. Recently, a top expert at the World Health Organization stated that transmission of the coronavirus by people who did not have symptoms was “very rare,” but she later walked back that statement.
Those concerns were amplified when schools shut down in March. “What you saw online was, for many students, scenarios of crying, tantruming, not wanting to go on Zoom, not wanting to see their friends because that wasn’t the way they played with their friends,” said Tween, now director of early childhood education at the Chapel School.
The current situation offers challenges no matter what happens, Tween said. If school buildings open, she worries about how well kindergartners will be able to stay physically distanced and wear masks all day. She also has concerns about how the lack of cooperative play will affect their learning.
But if the school year starts online, she questions how teachers will build trust and rapport with students and how they will manage to recreate the real-time fun typical of kindergarten classrooms.
For parents who are deciding whether to delay kindergarten, it can help to consider what their kids will do instead, Dee said. Among those kids who are still working on self-regulation skills, waiting a year is most beneficial when the alternative is stimulating and engaging — either in a preschool setting or at home. But that might not be possible for many families. And for kids with special needs, opting out of school may deny access to services offered by the school system.
Educators are also concerned about the equity implications of large numbers of people opting out of school systems. Because schools get funding for each student enrolled, low attendance will undermine public schools at a time when they need more funding than ever, Garcia Normart said. And because students aren’t already connected to a particular school, parents may be more likely to keep their kindergartners home as opposed to, say, their second-graders. At Eden Gardens school, the public school in Hayward where Garcia Normart works, this year kindergarten enrollment is currently half of what it normally is, she said.
Based on the demographic differences that already exist, disparities may grow even wider if redshirting surges primarily among families who have the resources to keep kids home or pay for nannies or private schools. “People who have the economic wherewithal to be with their kids and the resources to create safe and developmentally richer environments are going to be hugely advantaged to the parents who aren’t able to do that for their kids or who may have to go back into the labor force in some capacity,” Dee said.
Even if parents do have a choice, Garcia Norman hopes that people will enroll their kindergartners to support school systems. Making the best of a bad situation can help children become resilient problem solvers during a challenging time when no one can control or predict what will happen next.
“Failure and success define our lives,” she said. Garcia Norman thinks of what her mother told her before she died when Garcia Norman was 16: Life is like a rubber ball and you have to bounce back. “That’s what I try to teach my kids and my students, as well.”
It might also help to recognize that there are no perfect choices right now, said Schanzenbach, who said there were a lot of tears in her house during distance learning with her 8-year old, who had a much tougher time working independently than her 11- and 13-year-olds did. “Kindergarten via Zoom is going to make a lot of people cry and probably not teach them that much,” she said. But if the alternative is having a 5-year-old home with two full-time working parents and no school? “I’m not sure which one is worse. They’re both pretty rough, right?”
Given that there’s no right decision, there may also not be a wrong one, she said.
Kids tend to be resilient, Jones added. She suggested that parents with kindergarten-age children make sure to discuss feelings with them as a way to help them develop the skills that will set them up for success when they get to resume in-person school. Playing school can be another fun way to practice routines and learning habits until school buildings can operate normally again. “Children can learn these skills all the time,” she said. “The window doesn’t shut.”
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