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What is the appropriate age to start your child in school?

Parenting

 

It is every parent's wish for their child to achieve academic excellence. After all, parents may be the sole purveyors of a child's fortune (or misfortune). In this case many factors play out. The time a child joins school – for academic purposes – is at least one side of the dice.

 In Kenya the official Standard One entry age is six. That would mean that at three years old, the child starts off in baby class. At four and five they will progress to pre-school. The question (in the Kenyan context) therefore begs: Is three the right age for your child to enter the formal education system?

Fiona Thande, a single mother, agrees. Her son, Jayden, went to pre-school when he was three. "He was ready," she says. "He could speak English and my mother tongue. I felt that he was ripe at that moment. He could not wait any longer." But was it merely a feeling? Was it intuition: a sixth sense that only a mother can explain?

Perhaps yes. But Fiona adds: "I believe that at three children have an idea of what school is. They can talk and express themselves. They will have absorbed enough of that which their parents exposed them to between zero and three years." She takes cognizance of the fact that for every child, their grasp of knowledge, is as unique as – if not part of – their DNA.

"There are children who will feel 'dumped' when taken to school at three. There are those who by the looks of things are ready for it. Every parent should understand their children," she says. Still, she insists, three is the best time. And so if a child is uninterested in school at three, it is for the parent to teach them how to be bold and face the world.

Expert opinion

From decades of practice, educational and child psychologist Professor Philomena Ndambuki of Kenyatta University has come to one conclusion: That a child is ready to start Standard One at age seven. She says: "Children grow in stages. It would be foolhardy to task that child with work that they should perform in their next stage of growth." Prof Ndambuki argues that at age three majority of children are in the pre-operative stage, "when they have no reasoning capability and can barely distinguish good from bad. They have little or no comprehension of their existence." At three she says, children should be learning basic life skills like sitting, going to the toilet, and feeding. They should be playing; having fun and getting to know their environment. And they should sleep too.

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"Between four and six years they can go through nursery school and continue learning basic life skills as well as simple concepts like colours and shapes," Ndambuki advises.

At seven, she says, a child enters the age of concrete operation: the point at which they can synthesise information. It is at this point that the child has the capability to handle simple arithmetic. Rose Kigen, a parenting expert and author holds similar views as Ndambuki. "At three, the child is still young. They still ought to interact with their parents and other children at home," Rose says. She also cautions parents not to – whether consciously or unconsciously – transfer responsibility to teachers. "The modern woman [who lives in the city] can be a mother and a career woman at the same time. In many such instances, the earlier a child moves out of the house and gains independence the better for them," she says.

And she is well aware of the unstable landscape of nannies and house helps that often brings parents to the brink, pushing them to enroll their children in school early. Rose, who is also a mother of three, bowed to societal pressure with her first two children: She took them to school at three years. "But my last born joined nursery when he was four. I wanted to get it right with him," she says.

Do what you're told

Call it conforming to the society. Or even fitting in. Sometimes, asserts Charity Katago–Kamau, it is necessary to do what the system dictates. "You have to be a forward-looking parent. It is sometimes better to fit in than to follow your own understanding and find that your child is lagging behind compared to his age mates," she says. She looks at it as a simple decision that a parent makes to give credence to the system that has been put in place.

But from her own experience, Charity believes that three is the best age to start off a child in formal academics. She too read the signs and implemented them fastidiously. "My daughter was so ready at three. There was every sign that she could not wait any longer. Had we delayed even by a term probably the effects wouldn't have been desirable. She is 14 now, in Form One, and doing very well," she says.

That is not to say that she would stick with three. If the system changes, requiring parents to take their children to nursery at age five, Charity would rather obey than chart her own path. There are children who are born sharper than average and such children may be introduced to school early, "if their grasp of ideas is fantastically good," Rose says. However, she adds, don't be too quick to follow the belief that taking a child to school early gives them a head start in the race to be academic prowess.

So what are the repercussions then of commencing school at too early an age? "It is equivalent to using a machine that is not suited to the job you are trying to do. The likelihood is that it will break down at some point. In the same vein, children who are taken to school too early may shutdown due to the complex material they are bombarded with. In the worst case scenario, they may regress," Ndambuki says.

 

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