COLUMN: A year’s wait can make all the difference for your child

We here at The Dallas Morning News do not, traditionally, consider it our role to dictate the details of your sex life.

But if you want your next spawn to rise to the top of his or her class, here’s a bit of advice: Listen to the mistletoe and snuggle up to your loved one some time around Christmas Day.

That should put your kid on track for a mid-September birthday – and a vastly improved chance at being high school valedictorian.

Confused? That advice is based on a little experiment I did recently on the connection between a child’s birthday and academic success in school. But it has larger implications.

In Texas, kids are supposed to enter kindergarten if they’ve turned 5 by Sept. 1. Individual school districts are allowed to sneak in younger kids, and parents can choose to hold their kids out of school for an extra year. But the vast majority of kids start school in that one-year window.

How do those kids turn out years later, when it comes time for graduation?

The News publishes a list of the area’s valedictorians. I pulled all 207 of this year’s into a spreadsheet and used driver’s license records to look up their dates of birth. (I found 165 of them.) […]

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