[ExI] Starting school too early

[Stuart LaForge]

So a new shot has been fired in the perennial debate between the  
nature and nurture folks in educational psychology. According to a  
massive corroborative study between Stanford University and the  
government of Denmark, students who start school closer to 6 years of  
age when they start school suffer from more ADHD/inattention, and  
other mental health issues and difficulties in school than students  
who don't start kindergarten until age 7.

Interestingly, this corresponds to the transition between Piaget's  
pre-operational stage where kids are prone to cognitive and social  
emotional errors such as difficulties with concepts like number,  
amount, centrism, conservation, animism, and egocentrism and his  
concrete operational phase where children develop the ability to  
logically reason in an accurate multidimensional fashion regarding  
concrete objects and people (as opposed to imaginary friends). Sadly,  
however, the study article does not reference Piaget.

Could starting school too early be stunting a child's social and  
emotional development by ending social play before the child has fully  
worked out boundaries between self and others? Could this be at least  
partly responsible for the world-wide epidemic of autism and ADHD that  
antivaxxers are attributing to childhood vaccines?

What say you psychogeeks, aspies, and parents?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/10/07/delaying-kindergarten-until-age-7-offers-key-benefits-to-kids-study/

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w21610/w21610.pdf


Stuart LaForge