Another Reason to Freak Out

In the first chapter of Outliers by the ever-popular Malcolm Gladwell, he describes how children born in the first months of the calendar year tend to have a sizeable advantage when it comes to being chosen for sports teams, or being classified as "gifted" children in their first years at school. The reason is quite simple: as young children, they are significantly older than kids born in, say, October or November. And though the discrepancy in age narrows, obviously, as they get older, by being labelled as gifted or talented early on they are given special boosts that the other kids don't get, and are treated as special. This means that they come to think of themselves as special, and probably try harder because of it, and so on.

When Gladwell examined the rosters of many trophy-winning sports teams (where the cutoff date for age was at the beginning of the calendar year), he found, over and over again, that the majority of players were born in the months January-April. And apparently, studies show that the proportion of students labelled "gifted" who were born in the first part of the year is skewed in a similar fashion.

I cannot help but think: my god, yet another thing to stress about? What do the parents do whose children were born in November and December? (I was spared this one particular source of stress; my son was born in March.)

There are those who say, "talent will out." But the fact is that if someone is talented in a certain arena where the competition is fierce, this little advantage could make a huge difference down the line in whether someone's daughter receives a soccer scholarship to a prestigious university, for instance, or whether someone's son receives the math award in high school that gets him noticed by college recruiters.

There should be a staggered enrollment, with separate classes for students born in January-June and those born in July-December, at least until age ten. It's wrong to compare a five-year-old's performance to those of other five-year-olds who were born eight or nine or ten months earlier. Maybe this particular "revolution" could occur without much bloodshed, because I don't see why many people would be in disagreement with it.