Originally Posted by Zen Scanner
I think it is also a question of effort and return. If it takes ten times more effort to teach/train a concept at one age than it would at a later age maybe that is hothousing. Like if you spend two hours a day for two weeks to teach a kid the letter A.

On that principle, I wonder that kindergarten isn't functionally hothousing for a significant portion of kids attending.

Wow-- LOVE this.

I was trying to formulate something coherent here, and I think that Zen Scanner just nailed it.

That, along with Val's post-- I know that what we encountered with our DD was that people assumed, just as with other parents up-thread, that we MUST have been drilling relentlessly, or pushing really hard or something. Well, or that we had the recipe for some secret sauce-- being educators.

I honestly have no idea how my DD learned phonemes by 15-18mo old. But we deliberately did NOT expose her to learning materials so she wound up holding about 3/4ths of the tools for literacy for several years. I think that with the same "instruction" that we offered at 4yo, she COULD have probably learned to read at 2. She was ready. We were uneasy about following her obvious lead at that age. Seriously.


Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.