Fair enough. What I was saying was I don’t care if they’re super geniuses or not as long as they’re mentally and physically intact with decent grades and know how to work hard. Of course, if they do happen to be super geniuses, that’s just gravy!
Leave her alone and make sure she’s got stuff that interests her.
And I hate to say it but don’t set your expectations unrealistically high. Children will explode, intellectually, at different ages, but in the long term it often has nothing to do with their aptitude. I was reading at 3, and my sister didn’t read until 6, but we ended up being readers and writers of equal skill; the age at which we started reading turned out to be irrelevant. My math was also quite advanced at an early age, but the rest of the kids caught up to me and many passed me around our early teens. I struggled with math in high school.
My kid barely read a year ago, at age 5 and a half. A year later she’s advanced three grade levels in reading with no more effort on anyone’s part than was ever the case before. Why? Dunno. Just, suddenly, explosive growth in reading interest and skill.
At 3 you just don’t have a really good handle on what your child will be like intellectually. So relax. Provide her with books, and let her have at it.
And make her read as much as possible now, because if the current generation of college students is any indication, she won’t be interested in picking up a book by the time she’s 19.
My daughter was the opposite case, and it kinda freaked me out. When she was 8 months old her pediatrician said “she’ll be the intellectual type”, and I don’t think that was a compliment. ![]()
While she has always been a bright kid, her motor skills were behind her peers for a long time (fine motor skills were OK). She was more interested in books (even if she didn’t know how to read) than learning how to walk or run. In fact she never crawled, when I was about to start the process of taking her to a therapist on the pediatrician’s advice, she decided to start walking. She’s much better now, but her brain is running faster than her body.
My cousins daughter was like that and didn’t walk until two. But had a huge vocabulary for that age. She’s fifteen now, and bright (she should be - she has the genes for it and the family socialization) but not scary bright.
Attempting to make the kid read will have the effect of making them not want to read.
I should’ve used a smiley. I was making a comment on the reading habit of college students, not giving actual advice about raising a kid.
My daughter was perfectly bilingual by the time she was 2 1/2. Not that that’s unusual in a multicultural family, but she was already talking like a freakin’ adult at the age of one and a half!
She lived separately with her Russian mom and her sister’s family for a year and a half after we split up, then came to live with me. Her spoken English was very poor then; after two months, she was speaking it as well as she spoke Russian.
What really freaked me out was that she taught herself how to read (Russian) when she was three. Neither I nor my ex knew about it until I heard her reading aloud one day to herself. Not only could she read Russian, she read it with absolute fluency.
She started learning French at age six and got tutoring in how to read English before she moved to Canada at age ten. She immediately outperformed all the other fifth-graders at her Toronto middle school, in both languages.
She’s 17 now, and recently had her IQ placed at 120, though I personally think it’s higher.
Get your child in the best possible preschool you can find (and afford). Ours went to a terrific Montessori (challenging and diverse) and it paid dividends in preparing him for his current schooling.