I have to agree with madeinuk and say my DS was not that much of a puller, but in his case more of a negotiator.
We did online schooling for K-12 because I believe in letting him learn at his own pace, but I'm not a big supporter of skipping material. So when he would zoom through some classes and drag others out, he would eventually get too far out of sync and I would offer the "insistent nudging" to get him back in sync.
This worked until he started college (at age 13, his choice) at which point he decided that he wanted complete control of his life. I couldn't dictate, I couldn't nudge, I got extremely frustrated, but my wife would back me off and over the last 4 years our relationship has changed to a mentor/mentee relationship.
Now he's 17 and graduating next month in Computer Science from one of the largest public universities. Not with the perfect GPA that I wanted but with a pretty good GPA considering his active club and student government activities. I wanted him to go straight to grad school, he decided to take a job with grad school later. But, overall I'm extremely proud of his decisions even if they're not the decisions I would have made in his position.
I think what we have to understand is that these children do have the ability to comprehend the results of their education at a much earlier age. While we can nudge them in the beginning at some point they will become independent and decide what is important to them. To stay in their lives we have to make the adjustment or we'll lose out on staying close to them.
