Name change for this. DS was due in September but arrived a few weeks early at the very end of August. Throughout my pregnancy people constantly said how great it was to have a September due date for my child’s outcomes, and many told me how much they now regretted having had their kids in the summer. Even the first thing the midwife said to me when I went to the hospital in labour was that it was a shame DS would now be the youngest in his year. All these comments really messed with my head and upset me as his Sept due date wasn’t “planned”, it was just where we landed after ages trying and failing to conceive, and I knew there was a chance he could come early which of course he did..
Maybe postpartum hormones but I still feel really upset by all this some weeks on, like I’ve already failed DS from the outset, and tbh it all really negatively impacted the birth experience :/. I know of course it depends on the child (and I was a summer born with many summer born friends and this wasn’t a thing back then, and it didn’t impact us at all!)- but the constant narrative and comments around it have been weighing me down.
I’ve looked into some of the stuff around deferrals to try and understand the options for summer borns and put my mind at rest from this stuff. It seems our local primary would allow deferrals, but what I don’t understand is the knock on impact for secondaries. From what I can tell, all the secondary grammars and private schools in our area (and probably in most areas) state that children cannot be out of year. So basically if you defer your child at primary level, then if you wanted to move them to a private or grammar school at secondary (or earlier), you’d be messed up because they’d then have to skip a year forward. So by making that deferral decision at 3 you’d be limiting your child to a potentially very narrow range of schools later on (in our case, maybe only one comp secondary which has a very poor rep) as presumably skipping forward a year at 11 is very difficult. And even if you did manage to keep them in the deferred year in their secondary, they’d still face other issues eg not being able to compete in their years sports team (I don’t fully get this but it seems to come up).
Is that right? How do people manage that risk later on - do they just accept a limited range of secondaries will be available? Or are eg private schools more flexible than their websites suggest? Everyone on these forums seems to extol the merits of deferring but I just can’t understand how it practically works in the long run. Any advice from people who have gone through this would be very helpful. I know I probably sound crazy to be worrying about this so much now but given how crwp I’ve been made to feel, I just want to rationalise the options in my head :(