

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

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joshklein
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)?

~~~
cg
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-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/opinion/sunday/dont-delay-your-
kindergartners-start.html)

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
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 :)

------
dsrguru
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...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/opinion/sunday/childrens-
add-drugs-dont-work-long-term.html?_r=1) really seems to know what he's
talking about and his conclusions make ADHD diagnoses almost seem like child
abuse.

~~~
tokenadult
_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.

------
drpgq
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
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.

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

------
didgeoridoo
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?

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

------
spodek
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
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?

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

<http://www.correlated.org/243>

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

~~~
rcthompson
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.

