Retention and the Social Impact

Through personal experience I came to know the social impact of retaining a child. The school system my daughter was in recommended retention in grade three. She was a tall girl and socially immature. Her grades were low and she had trouble with friendships.. At the time, we felt this would be the best situation for our child and agreed with the school and kept her back.

We didn’t realize the devastating effect this would have on her and spent the summer trying to put her self esteem back together. We actually moved to a different town so our daughter could have a new start at a new school. Her height allowed her to tower over her new third grade classmates and the social impact started to sink in. Had we made the wrong choice?

We got her involved in sports right away to counter the ill feelings of being held back. Her grades were a little better but nothing to write home about. She continued to have trouble making friends. We had her tested for learning disabilities and to our surprise identified with ADD, Attention Deficit Disorder. Unlike many ADD children, she was never a behavioral and worked very hard to improve her grades. Grades four and five were uneventful but she managed to make the junior high softball team in fifth grade.

Through classroom accommodations and wonderful teachers in grade six, my daughter made honor every term. Near the end of sixth grade we decided to reverse the process and pushed to have her skip a grade. Girls especially have a tendency of leaping ahead in social maturity between the 6th and 8th grade and she found herself even more isolated from friends. The school was against moving her ahead, but after many meetings, having to be on the honor roll for the year, and hiring an advocate, they allowed my daughter to skip the 7th grade.

That was the best decision we could have made. Our daughter was able to maintain honor roll and be very successful in sports all through High School. We often wonder if we hadn’t worked so hard to have her moved ahead and she hadn’t had our support of her teachers if she would have continued her education and receive a 4 year college degree.

Retention in school is also called grade retention, being held back, or repeating a grade. This can be emotionally traumatic for young students and can cause irreversible damage. A major reason cited for the use of retention is that the child is immature and lagging significantly behind his or her peers academically and/or socially. I am not an advocate of social promotion, but I also have serious questions about retention. I believe that we must identify and apply solutions other than retention and social promotion when students are having significant struggles in school. The temporary benefits of retention are deceptive, as teachers do not usually follow student progress beyond a few years.

Regards,

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