Kids born later in the year more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD: Study

http://www.torontosun.com/2012/03/06/kids-born-later-in-the-year-more-likely-to-be-diagnosed-with-adhd-study

by GiraffeNecktie • 14 years ago

32 24 14 years ago

tiernano• 14 years ago

I can agree with that... I was born at the end of November and.... Ohhh look, a squirrel!

drpgq• 14 years ago

I wonder if for elementary schools dividing up classes into kids born from January to June and July to December birth dates would help at all.

neilk• 14 years ago

I wonder if dividing kids into groups is even necessary.

I'm not the first person to say this, but lecturing is obsolete, and probably has been since the Xerox machine. Online video is just another nail in the coffin. We can do non-interactive information transfer cheaply.

It seems to me that you could get a similar, or better, education just by making materials available and then having in-class homework sessions with occasional individualized attention. Kids can proceed at their own pace relative to different subjects.

Some time synchronization might be necessary to have examinations to prove that you know the material. Otherwise I don't see the need for it.

tokenadult2• 14 years ago

I wonder if dividing kids into groups is even necessary.

It is not. There has been a FAQ about this issue up on the World Wide Web since the days before when most people had Internet accounts.

http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html

Dividing children into school classes by birth date is a distinctly bad idea and has never been supported by educational research, but rather is resorted to for administrative convenience.

ImprovedSilence• 14 years ago

Meh, I was born in December, and I was one of the oldest in the class. I think the age you start a grade varies state to state.

Rhapso• 14 years ago

It does, in Tennessee they only cared about age at day of enrollment, so August and September children would be the youngest.

turar• 14 years ago

I wonder if anyone with a child born in December can simply delay the enrollment until next year? Do schools have issues with that?

thejteam• 14 years ago

In Maryland it is a requirement to delay enrollment. Everybody born September-December has to wait until the following year.

Of course this means people born during the summer, in addition to not being able to bring cupcakes on their birthday, will now be the youngest, although not as young as the people born September-Deember would have been.

CaptainDecisive• 14 years ago

In Scotland there's an interesting situation like you mention where children born in Jan and Feb are able to choose which school year they start, either when they're 4.5 or 5.5. Children born from March onwards will start school the following year while those born in December or earlier will start school the previous year.

My older boy is a Jan birthday and we're dalaying him starting school till he's 5.5 for reasons that include those mentioned in TFA.

leeskye• 14 years ago

In California, if your child is born after December 1, their enrollment will be delayed until next year. However, the state is gradually pushing this date earlier and earlier in the year similar to Maryland's rules: http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/gs/em/kinderinfo.asp

gxs• 14 years ago

Yes, you can. In retrospect, I believe it was a good thing, but I remember in kindergarten my mom being pissed off that I'd have to wait until the next year to enroll (my bday is in dec)

rcthompson• 14 years ago

Ultimately, it doesn't matter where in the calendar year you put the cut-off date. Regardless of which date you choose, there will always be almost a full year between the eldest and youngest students in any grade.

Of course, it might matter to you, if you are expecting a child near the cut-off date for your region.

cbs• 14 years ago

The school system I went to allowed it for a friend of mine, but he was born within a few weeks of the cutoff line. It probably varies from place to place, that kind of educational decision is made at the state level or lower.

joshklein• 14 years ago

This reminds me of a story Malcolm Gladwell referred to as a guest on an episode of "Radiolab". He narrated a hockey match, substituting birth dates for names. It sounded a lot like "January 12 passes to January 15th, who drops the puck back to February 1st. January 8th leaves the game, replaced by February 27th. March 2nd on the other team steals the puck and slips it past January 4th. Goal!"

Malcolm Gladwell's science is always suspect, but the idea resonates with me that calendar year groupings strongly favor older members, and that those advantages snowball over time as older children are selected for as "better" than their "peers" (who are not truly peers).

Have there been any studies on the longitudinal effect on academic performance by delaying schooling for a year (thereby making the child one of the oldest in his class)?

hardtke• 14 years ago

Here's an article by the Freakanomics authors about the age bias effect. The most interesting bit is how European soccer players all tend to be born in the first few months of the year: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/magazine/07wwln_freak.html...

cg• 14 years ago

Not what you're looking for, but this article, which argues against the practice of delaying kindergarten enrollment, describes a study of 26 Canadian elementary schools: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/opinion/sunday/dont-delay-...

It argues that younger children benefit in that they make greater progress than their peers, but supports findings that they are at a competitive disadvantage compared to their older classmates.

Also interesting:

The benefits of being younger are even greater for those who skip a grade, an option available to many high-achieving children. Compared with nonskippers of similar talent and motivation, these youngsters pursue advanced degrees and enter professional school more often. Acceleration is a powerful intervention, with effects on achievement that are twice as large as programs for the gifted. Grade-skippers even report more positive social and emotional feelings.

The last sentence especially surprised me, as it contradicts what I thought to be conventional wisdom.

unfocused• 14 years ago

EDIT* My situation in Ontario, Canada: the cutoff date is Dec. 31. So if you are born Jan. 1 or later, you are the oldest. If you are born in Dec., you are the youngest.

What a really fascinating topic. I'm reading all this because I now have a 4 month old son (born in early November) and an older nephew born in early January of the same year. My nephew can walk now and my son just drools and hates tummy time - and they will be going to the same school and same grade! Eek.

I thought for sure my son would be at a disadvantage but I realized that both my sister and I were skipped 1 grade when we were 3 and 3.5 years old. (Side note: we did not attend a North American system.) We were always the youngest in class. She was physically the same as the other girls, but I was smaller, so I always lacked confidence growing up as I was always the smallest AND youngest. Thankfully in high school I hit a growth spurt and reached nearly 6 feet. Skinny, but still - I was tall.

Both my sister and I turned out just fine. We always had good marks and went to university. She even has more credentials. We are both extremely social, and she is very mature in the sense that she can negotiate and do business with people with far more experience than her. So no issues there.

All this to say, both of us were skipped grades and we turned out just fine, and we always tried to achieve more than others in our class, and we have more often than not. So if there are any parents out there with young children, don't worry so much about your child being the youngest in the class. Simply reassure them when they it looks like they lack self-confidence and they'll be fine. This is not scientific, nor can I really remember how I felt when I was 4 years old. Just wanted to give anyone else a point of view from a simple grade-skipper who gets bored easily :)

Maven911• 14 years ago

60 minutes recently ran a segment on making kids wait before going to kindergarden - based partialy on Gladwell's work

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7400898n&tag=cont...

dsrguru• 14 years ago

ADHD diagnoses in general are really scary. I know some people swear by d-amphetamine or methylphenidate prescriptions for children, but the author of http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/opinion/sunday/childrens-a... really seems to know what he's talking about and his conclusions make ADHD diagnoses almost seem like child abuse.

tokenadult2• 14 years ago

the author of . . . really seems to know what he's talking about

The word "seems" is the operative word in that sentence. I know many colleagues of that author, other professors at the University of Minnesota, where I participate in the weekly journal club on human behavioral genetics. The key fact to note is that the author of the New York Times opinion piece is a child development psychologist, so his professional disciplinary point of view is that parent influence in early childhood counts for almost everything, and genes or nonparental environmental influences (including medical interventions) count for very little. But that's not what the best research shows about ADD/ADHD. There is good-quality evidence, especially gathered by Russell Barkley, who has conducted several of the better longitudinal studies, that prescribed medications can be helpful for many persons categorized as having ADD/ADHD. There is a lot of intentional fear, uncertainty, and doubt spread around about ADD/ADHD by persons who don't have legal authority to prescribe prescription medicines to patients, who fear losing business for their approaches if psychiatrists treat ADD patients.

Most people who have attention problems may be helped by a both-and approach of taking prescribed medicines along with lifestyle approaches like getting adequate sleep and outdoor exercise in daylight, learning organizational skills, hiring a secretary, or other helps. I've read some very striking personal testimonials from HN participants, full-time hacking programmers, who found that their personal productivity enormously increased when they started taking prescribed ADD medications as adults. I can't advise anyone here specifically what to do (I am not a physician), but I can suggest checking sources of advice for scientific validity

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

and making sure to get a reality check from your own in-real-life friends and colleagues if you have this issue and want to treat it successfully. A successful treatment is likely to be noticeable to other people and wouldn't be deemed successful just based on your own personal observation not backed up by anyone else's observation.

AFTER EDIT: The journal club I visit most weeks just had a discussion about being older rather than younger when starting school. We may revisit that issue in a while. The short answer is that there can be bad academic effects, which show up in IQ test and achievement test scores, from delaying exposure to reading instruction and elementary mathematics instruction. Sometimes those disadvantages outweigh the social advantages of being taller or stronger than other children in the same school grade.

jawns• 14 years ago

In not really related news, having a summer birthday is correlated with being a soprano/tenor:

http://www.correlated.org/243

spodek• 14 years ago

Finding a problem is great.

Finding solutions seems more useful.

This article covers problems, as do the posts I've seen here so far. We're entrepreneurs and problem-solvers. Anyone got a solution?

The trend in this article -- like the hockey, soccer, and related effects Gladwell, Freakonomics authors, etc covered -- seem to give advantages to people for reasons most of us would consider unfair and counterproductive. Sports and academics want the best competition based on merit, not birth dates. Yet how else can we do things?

Again, can anyone think of solutions to what seem like unfair and counterproductive biases?

diminoten• 14 years ago

I don't think it's "unfair" necessarily, as that, to me, implies conscious choice. Is it "unfair" a person is taller than another person in basketball? Is it "unfair" you can see better than me when we're both competing for publication in Nature?

didgeoridoo• 14 years ago

This study was conducted just in B.C., which opens the door for the possibility of regional/seasonal effects. What if being born earlier in the year means that you spend more of a critical early-development window in a structured environment (e.g. preschool, kindergarten, etc.), which permanently affects how your brain is wired?

Kids born later in the year more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD: Study

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