Trying to get an edge, NYC parents are waiting until their children turn six to send them to kindergarten. This from today’s New York Times.

He has a lot more self-confidence if he tends to be the older one,”
said his mother, Charlotte, 37. “I wanted him to have an easier time.”

Jack
acquired his confidence and abilities thanks to an extra year of
preschool, or perhaps simply an extra year of life. He is not alone:
From Bronxville, where he lives, to Manhattan and beyond, parents are
strategizing more than ever to keep their children out of kindergarten
until they are nearly, or already, 6 years old.

Children who turn
5 even in June or earlier are sometimes considered not ready for
kindergarten these days, as parents harbor an almost Darwinian desire
to ensure that their own child is not the runt of the class. Although a
spate of literature in the last few years about boys’ academic
difficulties helped prompt some parents to hold their sons back a year,
girls, too, are being held back. Yet research on whether the extra year
helps is inconclusive.

Fueled by the increasingly rigorous nature
of kindergarten and a generation of parents intent on giving their
children every edge, the practice is flourishing in New York City
private schools and suburban public schools. A crop of 5-year-olds in
nursery school and kindergartners pushing 7 are among the most striking
results.

“These summer boys have now evolved to including
girls and going back as far as March,” said Dana Haddad, admissions
director at the Claremont Preparatory School, in Lower Manhattan,
referring to children who turned 5 in those months but stayed in
nursery school. “It’s become a huge epidemic.” In some corners, the
decision of when to enroll a child in kindergarten has mushroomed from
a non-issue into an agonizing choice, as anxiety-generating as, well,
the private school kindergarten admissions process itself.

“It’s
kind of crazy to hold them back,” said Jessica Siegel, 40, whose
daughter, Mirit Skeen is back for another year at Montclair Community
Pre-K in New Jersey, although she turned 5 in late August and the
public school cutoff there for kindergarten is Oct. 1. “Someone’s going
to be the youngest. Someone’s going to be the smallest.”

Ms.
Siegel and her husband considered the decision for months, waiting
until the week before public school started before making it final in
case Mirit “suddenly had some kind of huge emotional shift.”

“I
felt like her whole experience is about being the smallest and the
youngest, and I wanted to change that experience for her,” Ms. Siegel
said, adding, “The more people do it, the more people do it — partially
because you don’t want yours to be the last.”

To stave off
preschool fatigue, some city parents send their children to public
school kindergarten for a year, hoping to transfer them to a private
kindergarten the next year. Columbus Park West Nursery School on the
Upper West Side is considering opening a “junior kindergarten” to
accommodate children who in the past would simply have headed for the
real thing.

In the New York City private school world,
demographics play a role. Because so many children have applied for
kindergarten slots in recent years, schools can be picky. While most
city private schools maintain an official policy that kindergartners
must turn 5 by Sept. 1, many routinely ask children born in August,
July, and in some cases June to wait a year. Nursery school directors,
mindful of the trend, may also encourage immature 5-year-olds to wait.