The "Gap" Year
My eldest daughter recently made a decision which goes against the typical high school senior's way of thinking. She has opted, with our encouragement, to take a gap year. Rather than continue without a break after 13 years of school (K through 12) and proceeding to 4 or 5 years of college, she has decided to take a full year off between high school and college. She is in the midst of this gap year right now. As she watches her fellow classmates of 2009 heading off to college, she will be traveling, working one of her many volunteer jobs, nannying, and bonding more with me at home when her younger two sisters are in school. Currently she is in Europe visiting London, Brussels and Paris (tagging along on one of my husband's business trips) and we hope to line her up for a trip to China with our church. She is able to design this year and stretch her wings in ways that she would not get to otherwise. In the scheme of things, this will be a blip in her formal education but a significant learning experience that will shape her life.
Initially she was going to take a six-month break but decided a full year would be more significant and worth while. Part of what prompted this is she is one of the youngest in her class of 2009, her birthday is in October and she is only 17 years old. Most of her friends are already 18 years old, able to vote, and have been driving for several years. She does not have her drivers license yet, and has a bit of maturing to do. So this opportunity is sort of like catching the delayed start of kindergarten on the back-end.
We talked to many relatives and friends who have college-aged children as well as parents who held their children back when it was time to enter kindergarten. When our daughter was of age to enter kindergarten we had no idea we could delay her start date and hold her back, we were just following the process of enrolling her in school at the right time based on age cut-off (which is December 2 in California). But as the years passed and we realized there were children 1 to 2 years older than our daughter, we considered that we may have done her a disservice. In a book called "The Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell, he discusses this phenomenon based on date of birth and the relationship to a person's success.
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