Re "parents know their child best," I sometimes feel that I disagree with this, especially re hothousing vs. not. I have sometimes felt that a neutral but observant outsider is better able to assess my child's abilities and motivations better than I can, because they lack all the baggage we carry (of course, some outside observers will be lazy and/or clueless-it has to be a GOOD outside observer). For one thing, the child is not responding to the emotional relationship. Our children do really want to please us.

When my DD was about 18-20 months old, she started picking up a few sight words. I thought this was super-gee-whiz cool, and couldn't resist making some cards with more words on them to see if she could learn them (insert wince here). She was happy to play this game with me and seemed to find it kind of fun. At one point, she had about 40-50 sight words. But I was already posting on a different gifted board and managed to pick up a bit of self-reflection. So I put the cards away to see if DD would ask for them on her own. She never did.

She actually did not learn to read for real till she was almost 5, despite showing all the signs of readiness from a very early age. I don't know what the deal was, exactly, but in any case, she went (on her own--just started to do it) from Hop on Pop to early chapter books in a couple of months--self-taught, no instruction. I'm sure I could have taught her to read earlier, but I made the decision not to sit around and instruct. I felt like doing so would have been for me, to see what she could do. Probably, she would have done it. But she wasn't CHOOSING to do it.

This stuff can be hard for parents to perceive. It is also probably more relevant at younger ages, but still comes up later on in other ways. I watch myself for "irrelevant flashcarding." It's not so much that I am tempted to do this because I want my kids to be SUPER #1 SUCCESS. I rarely talk about my kids except for here! It's more that I find them super cool and am sometimes tempted to make them into little experiments--like, gee, can you do this if I ask you to?