Oh Shari, your post makes my heart sing! I have no one to talk to IRL who understands our situation with DS.
We also have a monster to feed and he is ravenous. We thought about fighting him for a little while but then decided he is much bigger than we are.
The monster is also very picky about what he eats and when
DS wanted States and Capitals at 20 mos. Farm animals would just
not do. DS is now 2.5 and since he reads so well mostly we just
have to supply what he wants and right now he is obsessed with
science. At this point I can't imagine denying him the opportunity learn about what he is interested in.
We get the hot housing comments from friends and family but
I have learned to just ignore them.
LOL-- agreed.
I call it
"I'm not driving this bus; I'm merely along for the ride." Sometimes it can feel like Mr. Toad's WILD RIDE, but that's another story...
After you've lived with one of these voracious kids as a toddler/preschooler, it seems CRAZY to think that you even could "prevent" them from learning. I mean, maybe you could, but wouldn't it require the use of a sensory deprivation chamber?? That seems kind of, uh...
wrong. 
(I also like what Polly was saying about teaching little ones using a limited number of naturally more stable phonemes.... after all, how many different sounds DOES "d" make in the English language? Not many... With a bilingual household, I'd just skip the magnetic letters stage of things, or plan to include multiple phonemes/languages when you do "what thing start with that sound?" using letters. The one that kills me with alphabet books is U. U doesn't say "
Unicorn" in ANYTHING but little girls' cute alphabet books. PHTTTTTH. And it sure isn't an YOOM-brella. LOL. I'd stay away from phonemes like "g" and "j" since those are less stable and/or because they are not the same in, say, Spanish and English, if I were working in both languages.)
Something else that is a very serious problem with very young, fluent readers, though...
vetting all that reading material. Because while some of them are content to read at a moderate rate, others rapidly begin to read in volumes that are nothing short of staggering. (We kept records of everything DD read-- she'd "put it in the book box" and I'd reshelve it after recording it-- the average was 1200-4000 pages a month when she was 6.)
My daughter was reading faster than my husband by the time she was seven, and was completely capable of reading adult materials at that point, probably sooner. Obviously, however, she was still seven.
At ten, she read darned near as fast as
I do (and that is REALLY saying something, as I can polish off most best-sellers in a long afternoon).
Anyway. My point here is that I
can't completely pre-read EVERYTHING that she reads. Just not possible-- and really hasn't been since she was about 8-9. I know enough to examine some genres very carefully (Sci-fi/fantasy and 'teen/YA' books in particular tend to have REALLY explicit content that is better suited to trashy romance novels. Not that there's anything wrong with trashy romance novels... but I don't think they're appropriate for my preteen).
I mine my friends' reading and my own for ideas. There
are authors writing in the adult genre that frequently do NOT include much explicit material in their work. DD has enjoyed some of those things. We just have to be somewhat cautious about turning her completely loose with a library card. So we have some house rules that apply to reading content for her. If it's YA or adult, she has to at least
ask us about it first, so that we can let her know if we give it a green, yellow, or red light for her personally. (This is individual and relates to a particular child's OE and maturity.)
Just wanted to give a head's up to those with toddlers/preschoolers that this journey can take you some very strange places. These are places that most parents never even know about, and so you might get "that look" even from librarians when you ask about appropriate content, or gently hint that you are "running out of" materials. Luckily for us, we have a children's librarian that has been a
gem over the years. I wish I could clone her and put her in every public library in the world.
Advice on that front, just in general terms, is to look for children's materials with a copyright date prior to 1980; those tend to be less explicit or "edgy" overall, and more appropriate for younger readers. (Do be aware that
violence or discrimination may be somewhat more open/accepted in those offerings, however.) My daughter burned through a lot of the pre-1970 Newbery books, L. Frank Baum's Oz series, Maud Hart Lovelace's books, The Boxcar Children, Trixie Belden, etc. As a bonus, they also tend to be written at a correspondingly higher literacy/Lexile level for the interest level. Lexile lists are useless for kids like mine. (Unless, of course, anyone truly thinks that Madame Bovary
might really have been a good idea for my then-4th grade seven year old. Didn't think so. LOL.)
