School starting age

I’m confused. Every country you go to the age children start school is different. In Australia parents ‘ hold children back’. This means that they wait as long as possible before sending their children to school. Mmmm. Parents often send children to pre school but that’s only a few days a week. It appears that Australian education experts believe it’s better for kids to wait as long as possible before starting school. Living in different countries you soon discover it’s nowhere the same. Dutch kids are supposed to go to school the week they turn four. When they are four, it's not yet mandatory to send the children to school every day. That starts as of the age of five. I believe, similar to Australia, children in the US, also start school relatively late.

Because of the ‘holding back’ policy, my four-year old Julia, who will turn five mid July (she just made the cut off date of 31 July), has children in her class who are almost six. We’ll see what happens. Julia is very confident (this was confirmed last week by her teacher) and she goes happily to school everyday. No tantrums at school so far in Australia (knock on wood).

I really like the school timings: every weekday from 9.30 till 3.30 p.m. No Wednesday and Friday afternoon off as in Holland. Crisp and clear. In Holland, I had to get the kids from school at noon, take them home, let them eat and play, convince them to stop playing, clean them up and get them back to class at 1.15. Because there was so little time everything had to be done in a hurry. I’m not sure what the experts say about this but I personally think lunch breaks at home are not good thing. Everyone gets stressed out including the parents, usually the mums of course. The worst thing was that my four year old refused to go back to school in the afternoon. She just didn’t understand why she had to go to school again. She often threw a tantrum and I felt extremely embarrassed leaving her like that in the class room. Bad, bad mum.

We’ll see how Julia will be doing this year. As long as she is happy, I don’t have to worry about not ‘holding her back’. Children happy, mum happy.

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A typical bed time conversation in Sydney:
Marcel (trying to find something under the bed): 'Aaaaaaah!!!!!'
Me (scared): 'What is it, what happened?'
Marcel: 'A spider!!!!!'
Me (jumping on the bed): 'Aaaaaaaah, what kind of spider?'
Marcel: 'Don't know. It has a body and legs'
Me: 'Where is it?'
Marcel: 'Don't know. Get the vacuum cleaner, quick!'
Me (jumping off the bed to get our beast killer): 'OK. Aaahhhh!!!!!'
Marcel starts making a lot of noise under the bed with the vacuum cleaner.
Me: 'Did you catch it?'
Marcel: 'Not sure'
Me: 'Do you know what type of spider it was?'
Marcel: 'Not sure'
Me: 'Oh'
Marcel: 'Sleep well, have nice dreams...'
Me: 'You too'