If you didn’t cry on the first day of kindergarten, chances are you were born after 1980
Why the first day of school stopped being such a thing
New book bags, shiny shoes, and snot. Rivers of snot. The first day of kindergarten traditionally meant wailing five-year-olds being ripped away from their mothers. At lunch, they’d eat their PB&J sandwiches between sniffles, avoiding eye contact with the teacher. When the bus dropped them off at home, they’d run to the door, convinced an eternity had passed since morning.
But today, the river of tears is not quite as dramatic, since most kids have already been in school for a couple years by the time kindergarten rolls around.
President Lyndon B. Johnson opened the first publicly funded preschool in 1965 to help prepare lower-income students for primary education and combat poverty by improving children’s likelihood to succeed. But when record numbers of American mothers entered the workforce in the 1980s, families of all socioeconomic profiles began enrolling kids in preschool. That structured childcare created a transition to elementary school where one hadn’t existed before — which means fewer tears on the first day of kindergarten.
‘’It is less of a big deal. Children have only been with Mommy for two and a half years instead of five years, so the letting go, the change, is not as dramatic,” Donna Gentry, whose six-year-old son was a preschool vet, told The New York Times in 1986.
Teachers during this time found their first days slightly more lighthearted. They didn’t need to comfort as many students. Kids had been in “school” for a couple of years already. They were pros.
Mothers also stood to benefit from preschool. When they were expected to act as primary caregivers 24 hours per day until a kid turned five, “those bonds could become awfully strong. It could be more painful to give up the child to another caretaker,” said Dr. H. Paul Gabriel, professor of clinical psychiatry at New York University Medical Center, in 1985.
Experts have generally agreed preschool can fast-track development, “culminating in a child who can function independently and competently, and begin the major occupation of childhood — attending school,” writes pediatric physician Dr. Paul Dworkin in 1988 in the medical journal Current Problems in Pediatric and Adolescent Health Care.
But some more recent studies suggest that cognitive results of preschool can be mixed, depending on factors like income level, ethnicity, and family structure.
There is also some concern about overstimulation in the years before schooling. Kids are more connected to the outside world than ever, from infancy on, and research shows exposing babies and toddlers to media in particular can lead to adverse developmental effects later on. (The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no media exposure prior to age two, though further research is needed.)
Five years is a long time before kindergarten starts. A lot can happen between preschool and YouTube sessions. But at least the first-day-of-school ritual is a little less traumatic for everybody.
