Back to stupid parenting tricks, our DD was randomly reading words from signs by the time she was 3, and when she was 4 she was frequently surprising us with the complexity of some of the ones she was reading. Yet despite this obvious ability, and her habit of bringing a huge stack of books to DW or myself to read to her daily, she still refused to demonstrate her reading ability to us by reading a book aloud after her 5th birthday. By that time, we finally figured out that task-avoidant perfectionism was the culprit, not a lack of ability.
So, I pulled her aside and listed all the ways in which she's so much more advanced in abilities than I was at her age... except for one, because I was reading books to my mom when I was 4.
That same week, she read a book to her mom.
A few weeks later, she had taken over story time from her pre-K teacher.
