Originally Posted by ColinsMum
Let me pay devil's advocate for a moment. Caricaturing a little, people have been suggesting it's hot-housing, i.e. undesirable, if

a) the child would learn whatever it is faster or more easily later...

Posit one sliding scale here of ratio of effort... one end is 1 to 1 the other is 100 times the work. Somewhere on the path to 100 it gets fuzzy. I was comfortable with 10x being in the "too far" zone; not so confident that 2 or even 5 is.

Originally Posted by ColinsMum
b) the child has any reluctance to do the work required. But doesn't everyone go through a process of learning that you don't dissolve if you do something that's hard work, maybe even to the point of being mildly unpleasant, and that sometimes the result is worth pushing through the hardness and unpleasantness for?
I'll let you know when/if I learn that. But I'll again suggest a sliding scale here.

Let's toss in a nebulous additional sliding measure:
Trained or learned? At one end the product is empty repetition... say a kid who successfully says "Stop" whenever they see the word stop (and receives their animal cracker treat,) but doesn't even have a guess at "Slop."