Children who are close to 6 or already 6 when they begin kindergarten have several advantages over children who start school when they have just turned 5 or are not yet 5 years old. In some ways, the findings regarding age-related differences in cognitive and noncognitive skills are consistent with what many parents and teachers already believe, namely that older children tend to be larger and more mature than younger children and that children learn much before they come to school. In addition, the findings lend some support to the contentions of policy analysts who have questioned the practice of allowing parents to withhold their children from kindergarten for a year, because it gives these children advantages over other children who enter at younger ages (Zill, Loomis, and West 1997). The critics argue that this practice places other younger children at a disadvantage because they are not as fully developed as the withheld child. Developmental disparities between older and younger children are compounded by the fact that better educated parents are more likely than less educated parents to delay their child's entrance to school (Meisels 1992). The ECLS-K results showed that first-year kindergartners who are already 6 have significantly fewer family-risk factors than younger groups, although they displayed a higher rate of some developmental difficulties as well.