Should my children be sent into kindergarten as early as possible?

1.  There must be rationales why some parents prefer signing their children for kindergarten at such a young age. Virtually, this pre-school education does provide a host of advantages for children. Social interaction is probably the first and foremost soft skill that children will learn in kindergarten school. Preschool is not just merely a place of academic learning, but indeed is also a conducive environment for children to be seasoned with social skills obligatory for getting along with others well, expressing own ideas and feelings, handling conflict and fostering closer relationship with others. All these skills should be mastered well enough for children’s future social development. Children who learn to interact with groups of kids of their same age during their preschool years will find the transition to elementary school to be less stressful.
2. Apart from that, another appealing advantage for parents to send their children to be nurtured at kindergarten is that this preschool education can be taken as a foundation in academic learning for children. Children who enrolled for preschool education will have a solid foundation for the next stage of their school years. In other words, they will undergo the transition to next stage of academic learning in primary school much seamlessly. In kindergarten, children will be taught pre-literacy skills, basic math concepts, fundamental matching and sequencing skills. Extensive exposure to different materials and activities in kindergarten like listening to poetry and playing with blocks can actually furnish children with a wide spectrum of age-appropriate learning experiences which cannot be reaped at home.
3. Nevertheless, by looking at the flip side of coin, there are also a handful of disadvantages of sending children to kindergarten at such tender age. One of them is the ill-effect of stress. It has become a fact that stress is one of the dreadful element which associates with today’s kindergarten environment. Somehow, kindergartens have changed dramatically since past couple of decades from places where love is thoughtfully cultivated into “pressure cooker” where kindergarten teachers are compelled to follow syllabus and gauge children relentlessly on their performance. In short, kindergarten has been degraded from a “garden of jollity” to “place fraught with stress”.  The pressure to do academically well exerted on young children who are still mentally and physically vulnerable often causes young children to be overwhelmed, ashamed and even clinically depressed. The stress may contribute to headaches, stuttering and insomnia as well.

In a brief, everything has both sides which means that everything has its own pros and cons. In this case, it is actually barely for me to decide whether the advantages of sending young children to kindergarten is outweigh the disadvantages or otherwise. After getting clear of its advantages and disadvantages, it is ultimately up to the parents to decide whether or not to send their 3 years old child to kindergarten. However, personally, I hope that parents will wake up and say “no” of hurrying their children through kindergarten.