by Kyle Garrett

In sports, it’s no big deal when a player is held back a year or two to make the most of his years on the team. So why is it taboo for kids to be held back in school? Perhaps it’s because people think you aren’t as smart as everyone else, or couldn’t adjust to the social situations as quickly. For some kids, being “red-shirted” in the academic world can be damaging to their self-esteem. They feel overwhelmed by humiliation and embarrassment. “They feel like a failure and they don’t appreciate that the reason they’re being held back is so they either can catch up with the learning or catch up socially. They just know that everybody else did something and they’re doing something different,” says Nadine Kaslow, professor at Emory’s School of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and chief psychologist at Grady Hospital. However, other kids seem to suffer no negative impact whatsoever. According to Kaslow, many children actually begin to settle in with their new peers and find themselves catching on better. Instead of struggling at the bottom of the class, they suddenly find themselves comfortably in the middle, and they can actually feel good about being held back.

Dealing with teasing from peers is one of the most difficult aspects of being held back, notes Kaslow. “I think that to some extent, unfortunately, kids need to develop a little bit of a tough skin to be able to handle this. I think that you need to let them flay back with some of the teasing without getting mean and aggressive,” she says.

There are a few ways to help keep teasing and its effects to a minimum for your kids. Kaslow suggests a candid admission of the issue itself. When confronted with questions or teasing, kids should admit that they were held back so they could learn better and remind their peers that everyone learns differently. If honesty doesn’t stop the teasing, another option is to get adults involved. But while adult help may be suitable for kids in kindergarten and lower elementary, Kaslow warns the strategy may be counterproductive for upper elementary-aged kids and older. A final recommendation is to make sure your child stays connected with the kids in his former class. “That can help them out so they can have two peer groups,” says Kaslow.

Extracurriculars allow your child to excel in areas other than academics, and just as importantly, they allow his peers to witness it. So don’t cut out this important social network as punishment for your child being held back. “Sometimes if their child doesn’t do well academically, parents will take sports or music away from them,” says Kaslow. “But that might be the thing that makes the child feel best about himself, so you don’t want to take those things away.”

In the Georgia public school system, most elementary-aged kids who face retention failed the CRCT (Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests) in third or fifth grade. Based on the Georgia Promotion, Placement and Retention Law, if kids fail the third-grade reading portion of the CRCT or fail the fifth-grade math or reading portions, they are automatically retained. When children are retained, though, they’re eligible to go to summer school and retake the CRCT. If they pass then, they are promoted to the next grade level. If they fail the CRCT in both the spring and the summer, they still have a chance to move to the next grade. The parent can appeal the retention, in which case a committee would meet and discuss the child’s progress before making a final decision.

Unless they must retain a child based on the letter of the law, many schools are reluctant to hold children back. “The research typically says that retention is really not an effective means of improving student achievement,” says Tony Wilcher, principal of Fulton County’s Evoline C. West Elementary School in Fairburn. “There usually is a reason behind being retained other than just this kid didn’t do well, let’s give him a second shot at it. It typically is not that plain and simple. Although it was done a lot in the past, it’s not done as much now.”

However, if retention does look like the most effective solution with a certain child, the implementation of an “alternative plan” can help ease the transition back to the previous grade level. “If a child is held back, we try to come up with the weak areas of that child and form a plan with different instructional materials,” says Wilcher. “My philosophy is not to put them in the same classroom again, but have a different teacher with different instructional materials than last year and look at what modifications might be needed for that child to be successful.”

If your child gets held back, should you give him a break over the summer or should you load him down with classes and tutors? It depends on whom you ask. According to Kaslow, having a break like all the other kids will keep him from feeling even more separate from his peers. “If we don’t give those kids a break when everybody else is getting a break, that just makes them feel like, ‘Oh gosh, all I do is go to school, what’s wrong with me?’ What happens is they spend all year fighting with their parents and teachers about school and feeling badly about themselves, and then they have to do it in the summer too. I don’t think incrementally they learn enough to make the stress of that worthwhile,” says Kaslow.

Wilcher disagrees: “If they’ve been retained, there’s not much time for a break.” According to Wilcher, retained children should use summer break as a time to strengthen areas of weakness. He also suggests that the retained child undergo testing to ascertain any latent learning problems. “Psycho-educational testing involves testing your child’s ability level, how he thinks and reasons, looks at academic achievement, and also looks at what we call processing, which observes how he processes things visually as opposed to processing things that he hears, to try to pinpoint what might be the weakness.”

Whether the child has a break over the summer or not, it’s critical for parents to build a sense of motivation and self-confidence as he begins with a fresh start in the fall. “The reality is that the best way to build confidence is by positively reinforcing the child,” says Kaslow. “You really want to convey to children that you love them even though this is going on. Kids are worried that they failed not only themselves but their parents, and I think it’s important for parents to repeatedly convey that’s not the case.” For Wilcher, kids have plenty of pressures and anxieties as it is, so it’s important for parents to give them encouragement.

Even when children aren’t forcibly retained, many parents consider holding their children back for a variety of reasons that range from academic achievement and social development to physical size and maturity level. For Amy Ney of Lilburn, a combination of factors influenced her to voluntarily hold back her daughters, Catalina and Cambria. “I wanted to give them the best advantage that I could academically and socially, and all answers pointed to retaining them,” says Ney. Now ages 7 and 6, Catalina and Cambria attended a private kindergarten for a year, then repeated kindergarten at a public school.

For Ney, the decision to hold the girls back was made with their futures in mind rather than by looking at the girls’ current development. “I feel like that year really helped them mature socially,” says Ney. “To me, the social thing was as big of an issue as the academic thing, because you can always do tutoring, but you can’t make up social issues – there’s no tutor for that. To me it’s a bigger issue when you get to middle and high school and they can’t drive, they can’t date and they physically haven’t developed like all their friends have.”

As far as Ney can tell, being held back hasn’t affected the girls’ self-esteem in the least. “With such a young age, they go with whatever – especially when you lay the expectations out. And I think the older one was a little bit sad because she had such good friends that went on, but you know, kids are resilient. They bounce back quickly.”.