JBDad,
We have similar thoughts going on here off and on. DD6 is an incredible reader, inquisitive and loves to learn informally through discussions at the breakfast table, or in the car, or in the bath, etc. DH and I feed these questions and love doing it, but when people start talking about how much we're pushing her and we should just let her be a kid and whatever else they can say to make us question what we're doing, we double guess ourselves.
But, as teachers, and scientists DH and I can not stop answering her questions - we love to see how her brain works and what she comes out with. We have noticed this summer that some of her best days have been when we've "played school." All this week, for example, we've been learning about ancient Greece. (lol I say we because I knew very little about it before the week started.
) She is making a book about the Greek alphabet, we had a Greek feast one night, she and DH made a Greek house and she wants to make clothes for her dolls.
Her school wouldn't show me what the NWEA test said her holes were because "we're afraid you'll go home and teach it all to her this summer." What they don't know is that she's been asking about the stuff she saw on the test that she doesn't know how to do, so we're still teaching her stuff that will fill in the holes without knowing the specifics.
So, after all of this rambling, I guess what I'm saying is that I think all of us on this board experience the same thing at some point in time, and all have to come to the realization that it is not our child rearing techniques, but our childrens' "parenting techniques" that makes us do what we do. (
if you think of it as them training us as much as we're training them.)
