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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35549 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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My wife and I have already decided to hold back our November kids a year so they can be the oldest instead of youngest. I've observed this phenomenon but never realized there is actual data to back it up (though it was always pretty much true on it's face). The older kids always seemed to be better behaviorally, academically, socially (first one to drive, confers status).

I would just say watch out for this if they are very academically inclined. I was always the youngest in my grade (I was technically accelerated a year, but I only missed the age cutoff by a few days so I basically just went from being the oldest to the youngest in my grade) and I was always extremely glad for that fact. School was always easy and boring enough as it was even with advanced classes, it would have been so much worse for me to be learning everything a year later. While I’m sure there are advantages on average to being older, to me it would have been a big negative.

It's a fair concern - our boys (twins) were born 5 weeks premature and have always been noticeably behind on milestones. Not something we're super concerned about, but our biggest issue is that one of the twins is a little bit behind the other. Tough to decide if it would be worth it to put them in separate grades...i think that would just cause more issues.

Tough to decide if it would be worth it to put them in separate grades...i think that would just cause more issues.

That just sounds pretty awful from a social perspective if nothing else, the lower-year twin would forever be tagged as the "dumb twin". Yeah, they might get some of that effect anyway if that twin performs worse on tests, but it'd be much less obvious than "actually in a lower grade".

And also it seems that twins have a special bond that might be spoiled a bit if they were forced apart.

We had a pair of mismatched male twins in different grades in high school. They literally just put the smaller boy a grade behind to separate them, which worked ok for him. But the taller twin was definitely behind everyone else in our grade.

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