Child psychiatric disorder and relative age in school year: Holding back may cause more harm than good

doi:10.1136/bmj.327.7426.1286

BMJ 2003;327:1286 (29 November), doi:10.1136/bmj.327.7426.1286

Letter

Child psychiatric disorder and relative age in school year

Holding back may cause more harm than good

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR—If the increased psychiatric stress in the comparativelyyounger students in the study by Goodman et al is the resultof inappropriate teacher expectations, holding back studentsmay have no net benefit.¹ The held back student becomes oneof the older students, raising expectations and increasing stressfor those younger. Some held back students will be resentfuland increase stress on everyone.

View larger version (32K):
[in this window]
[in a new window]

Comparison of parents (top) and teachers (bottom) in detecting psychiatric disorder by children's relative age (bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/327/7413/472/FIG1)

American schools have a conflict of interest. Holding a childback increases the number of years that the child spends ina particular school. This increases the total government fundingthat school receives. I have witnessed students denied earlygraduation for just this reason.

Held back students are injured in at least one way. They arestuck in an extremely lengthy educational process for one moreyear, having . . . [Full text of this article]

Thomas Radecki, private practice psychiatrist

705 W Oregon, Urbana, IL 61801, USA c4tf@hotmail.com

CiteULike

Complore

Connotea

Del.icio.us Add to Digg

Digg

StumbleUpon Add to Technorati

Technorati What's this?

Relevant Article

Child psychiatric disorder and relative age within school year: cross sectional survey of large population sample: Robert Goodman, Julia Gledhill, and Tamsin Ford
BMJ 2003 327: 472. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]