Tilting the playing field: ‘Redshirting’ kindergarten boys in the US and the competition for hegemonic masculinity

ABSTRACT

This study examines patterns in the kinds of discourses parents use to think about when to start their children in kindergarten in the US. Parents of three- to six-year olds were interviewed to gain an understanding of how parents make the ‘redshirting’ decision and the extent to which parental concern for sons’ achievement of successful masculinity plays into that choice. Focusing on the parents of male children, this analysis reveals parents employ two gender-related discourses: (1) the ‘failing boys’ backlash debate, surrounding the notion that schools are assumed to favour girls and how girls learn, and (2) a discourse involving the importance of hegemonic masculinity in competition with other boys.

KEYWORDS:

• Kindergarten
• school readiness
• parental choice
• masculinity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Heather Powers Albanesi is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs. Her research interests include gender, disability, parenting, privilege, early childhood education, and intersectional pedagogy. She is currently researching how veterans with service-related injury experience disability as they transition from the military to the university.

Notes

1. The rates of redshirting in the Bassok and Reardon study may also be low based on the definitional exclusion (2013, 289) of children who repeat kindergarten from the label redshirting. In my interviews, some pro-redshirting parents mentioned they planned (from before their children entered kindergarten the first time, not based on how they did that year) to have their children spend two years in kindergarten. This strategy had even led to a colloquial renaming among some parents of kindergarten as ‘K1’ and ‘K2’. Other names for the second year of kindergarten are ‘junior first grade’ and the ‘transition room’. Several parents also discussed (as part of this strategy) having their children attend a public school for their first year of kindergarten and a private or charter school (schools they suggested would be more academically challenging) for their second year of kindergarten. In my study, I included these parents in the ‘pro-redshirting’ camp as the repetition of kindergarten was not initiated by the teachers’ recommendation (i.e. ‘retention’) but as a parental strategy.

2. In the US, charter schools receive local, state and/or federal government funding based on enrolment, but are operated by a group of parents, teachers, community members or for-profit companies independently of the local public school system.