She is a submissive and sensitive child by nature, and often defers her own desires to please others. I suspect she has some pretty pronounced gifts in intuition and empathy. This is wonderful, of course, but it does present challenges in knowing who "she is".
This is really to do with who your child is vs. the environment in which she is placed. We have one child who is very reflective of their environment, a second who is very assertive, and a third who is highly intuitive and empathetic. As a toddler the third child broke down in tears when watching the Ugly Duckling in Mandarin (which beyond numbers and colors they did not speak). Children like these do tend to go with the flow and avoid disruptions.
We taught our very gentle child first to protect themselves by asserting "stop" or "no" or more complex statements to defend themselves. Then we gradually taught them to proactively ask for what they want. Even now these requests are often very gentle, but they are usually persistent and end up getting what they want :-)
If it's reassuring, our quite assertive 2 yo is more academic at home than at school. At school she is drawn to practical life activities, art, listening to stories, singing, and group work such as doing large puzzles. There are more academic works available which she will choose but she is not deeply drawn to them. At home she likes the movable (magnetic) alphabet, demands to have words deciphered, likes premath games, etc. Her teachers recognize that she is capable so do make works available but follow her lead on whether she chooses to engage with them. This may be as formal as an official work, as simple as emphasizing the sounds in words when reading, or as spontaneous as counting popsicle sticks stuck into playdoh. Even though she is not as hellbent on consuming all information available and structuring the world as her older brother was, she is tracking pretty closely with his milestones at a similar age.
