Is Your Child Ready for First Grade? 1980 vs. 2022

The shocking differences revealed by a 1981 checklist. A look at what kids should be able to do and what pursuits do more harm than good.

Hello good people!

The world has changed considerably in the last few decades. Just look at this Is Your Child Ready for First Grade checklist from a prominent 1981 human development text:

Is Your Child Ready For First Grade - 1980 Edition

1. Will your child be six years, six months or older when he begins first grade and starts receiving reading instruction?

2. Does your child have two to five permanent or second teeth?

3. Can your child tell, in such a way that his speech is understood by a school crossing guard or policeman, where he lives?

4. Can he draw and color and stay within the lines of the design being colored?

5. Can he stand on one foot with eyes closed for five to ten seconds?

6. Can he ride a small two-wheeled bicycle without helper wheels?

7. Can he tell left hand from right?

8. Can he travel alone in the neighborhood (four to eight blocks) to store, school, playground, or to a friend's home?

9. Can he be away from you all day without being upset?

10. Can he repeat an eight-to ten-word sentence, if you say it once, as "The boy ran all the way home from the store"?

11. Can he count eight to ten pennies correctly?

12. Does your child try to write or copy letters or numbers?

Wow! Nothing about sight words, but first grade teachers of the early 80’s expected Johnny to come to them biking without training wheels and with the ability to balance on one foot with his eyes closed (you should try this too—there is a tremendous link between balance and memory and brain function). Of particular note, just a few decades ago we expected six-year-olds to travel freely around the neighborhood and to be able to go to the store on their own. 

I’ll discuss this last item (#8) more next week, as it is probably the most controversial. But today I want focus on the underlying philosophy which unites these 12 benchmarks and points to a very different common sense than our current one.

You’ll note that the above checklist is almost entirely focused on development milestones, rather than academic. The collective wisdom of the time was that children could not learn well until they were ready and that, rather than fit square pegs into round holes just for the sake of “keeping up” or “getting ahead,” academic training should match developmental readiness. There seems to be a broad recognition that, particularly in the younger years, the most important lessons come from exploration, play, and self-reliance. 

Despite our cultural shift towards exhaustingly long academic checklists and standardized tests for kindergartners, the evidence continues to support this past wisdom. 

Shocking Results from a Ten–Year Pre-K Study

For ten years, Dale Farran watched the progress of 3000 low-income Tennessee students. Of these students, about half had “won the lottery” and gained admittance, by lottery, to the free state-run pre-k program. The other half weren’t chosen and, for the most part, lost out on their only opportunity for a pre-k education. 

Everyone assumed that the group who did not get access to the state’s pre-k lost out. But by 6th grade it was the pre-k kids who were doing worse: “Worse on reading, math and science scores, more learning disorders, and more discipline problems….” The group with access to the free pre-K were doing worse by every metric.

According to Dr. Peter Gray, these shocking results should have been expected, given the Pre-K’s focus on academic preparation. In a psychology today article about the Tennessee study, Gray recounts a similar German experiment from the 1970s. The German government set up a controlled experiment with 100 kindergarten classes in order to determine whether they should incorporate academic skills into kindergarten. In 50 kindergarten classes they focused on academic training and in the other 50 kindergarten classes they intentionally did not. The results:

“The graduates of academic kindergartens performed better on academic tests in first grade than the others, but the difference subsequently faded, and by fourth grade they were performing worse than the others on every measure in the study. Specifically, they scored more poorly on tests of reading and arithmetic and were less well-adjusted socially and emotionally than the controls.” 

What can possibly account for these counterintuitive results?

In short, passion. Its absurd to think we can teach students everything they need to learn, or that they should all learn in the same time span, or in the same way. We have our entire lives to learn. Thus, the desire to learn is what matters most. Those whose natural passions for learning were not squelched—those who were not treated like short fourth graders in desperate need of Ritalin—were far more likely to willingly engage in their education later on.

How Did You Teach Your Son to Talk?

The greatest developmental psychologist, Jean Piaget, created an experiment where he showed a battery of kids two identical glasses of water with water poured to the exact same height. All of the kids identified that the glasses contained the same amount of water. Then, right in front of the children’s eyes, the experimenter took one glass and poured it into a tall thin glass. The water rose to a higher level on this tall glass. Nearly every child under age six or seven said that the tall thin glass now had more water. Their brains couldn’t grasp the conservation of volume. However, somewhere between ages seven and eight a switch flipped and, suddenly, every kid knew that the glasses were poured to the same height. 

Source

In Setting the Bar, I draw out some of the practical implications of this study: 

“As Piaget showed, it is futile to try to teach young children concepts like the conservation of volume. Their minds won’t understand until a certain stage of development and at that point they will figure it out naturally... I can’t help but think of this every time I see a three-year-old being subjected to T-ball hitting lessons or flashcards. Parents grow frustrated prodding the little guy to “focus!” They’ll push a task for months, accomplishing no more than they could have in three-minutes had they just waited a year. Other children will naturally bridge the modest gap when they are developmentally ready.

I should qualify all of this by acknowledging that my five-year-old and four-year-old both love matching games, flash cards, puzzles, books, and hitting a ball off of a tee. The crucial distinction is that my wife and I try to leave the pressure out and just provide elements for our kids to freely explore (as well as the conditions that promote exploration). This can be surprisingly hard. Competitive people, like my wife and I, can’t help but want to focus in and train skills up. But that impulse warrants restraint.

Students have their entire lives to learn. They will learn best if we respect their developmental stage and foster a desire to learn. The best way to do that is: 

1. to allow them freedom to play and explore. This is where they develop confidence (because activities are suited to their skills), passions, essential relational skills, emotional regulation, and self-reliance. AND…

2. to be a learner yourself. Kids naturally want to mimic the adult models in their lives, which could be a problem…

If You Learn, They Will

The shift in our culture isn’t born so much of an increasingly scholastic culture. On the contrary, adults are less likely than ever to read books or to be able to pass a citizenship test. Rather, this shift is the result of a misguided modern anxiety about our children falling behind. That anxiety drives all sorts of bizarre trends. 

For example, adults 50 and above almost certainly think it is crazy to put pre-k kids (much less, kindergartners) in organized sports. But a Millennial or Gen Z parent will feel the need to justify it if they haven’t started their three-year-old in soccer or gymnastics. And here, again, the research is clear that our former wisdom was better. 

Your Select T-Ball Coach is Wrong

Source

Young children need much more “free play,” which Dr. Gray defines as play that is “…freely chosen and directed by the participants and undertaken for its own sake...” Children NEED time to explore, play freely, and mediate their own playground disputes. They need more time in spontaneous play at the park… 

BUT (and this is a big old but) they need much less structured play…

As the LTAD model has made clear, this freer, more stage appropriate approach fosters passion and, actually, tends to create greater athleticism in the long run.

But, for a constellation of reasons, the vast majority of our children are deprived of free play. We will look at those reasons and more next week!

---

Thank you so much for reading today! Please share with other parents, teachers, or conscientious citizens who would find this information valuable!

Also, if you want to dig into the causes of reduced play now, I’ve released a free audio version of Setting the Bar chapter 4, which is titled: The Danger of Overprotection.

Life is too short to be normal,

Shane