These discussions need not start arguments - disagreements are not a bad thing. I have enjoyed this conversation. And when people challenge my assumptions, it makes me think. I hope this is one of the skills we are teaching our children when we give them a classical education. There is an end to this kind of education - meaning we want to get somewhere with it, not just say, "Oh, I'm classically educating my child." One of the ends should be to be able enter into public discourse without getting bent out of shape, and be able to make an argument for your position, change your mind if necessary, and to do so without calling names.

Thank you so much for this conversation. It is making me think and clarify some of my own assumptions. Even if I come to a different conclusion, this has proved fruitful. I disagree with this statement. I see nothing in pretend play that precludes the addition of directed early learning activities. Nothing, Unless I am missing something, in which case you should point that out. Pretend play or make believe, is something children do and not something we need to teach. It is often best done without parents. We ruin things for them. If you are talking about a particular philosophy of education involving pretend play ( i did not glean that from the link you gave) then you may indeed be right. I don't know. The following is interesting however: https://news.virgini...new-study-shows There are mistakes that EL parents may be prone to making with their children. There is a wonderful book called, "Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child". I think there are things in there EL parents are more prone to do, but other parents with other bents are more prone to make other kinds of mistakes. We are all prone towards making mistakes somewhere. That doesn't mean you quit just because you may run onto trouble down the road. On Giftedness: 1. If your is the definition of giftedness, then I don't think any EL parents I know are attempting to do that. 2. You can create gifted kids by training them if you go by the classical definition. Now if you want to assume the whole is different based upon how your child sees the world, then you can cater to that and I don't think you will get arguments from the rest of us that you can have all the problems that will go with it. However, even this definition does not preclude the development of giftedness. And I think everything I said earlier regarding giftedness stands. People who are advanced or above average or gifted do not remain that way for ever. Their proclivities towards certain behavior may last until adulthood, but that doesn't mean their giftedness does, especially if they do not continue to develop. This may not remain true for the profoundly gifted - the 180 or above. But for most of the gifted kids...in the 150 IQ and below range, the other kids will eventually catch up, especially if our gifted child is also lazy. The higher IQ kids that are my son's age have already caught up to him. In another few years the kids who are working hard will also catch up. My husband is a great example. His IQ is up there hovering between highly and exceptionally gifted. He never worked hard, Things came easily. He also had a hard time making friends. I suspect he is slightly autistic. By the time he was in grad school everyone else has caught up to him. We aren't taking about unchallenged hamburger flippers. Just regular kids who worked hard. He realized when he was in grad school that he wasn't anything special anymore. That was very hard for him to take. As he will tell you, "Work hard, you are not gifted forever." It may not fit with what you want to be true, but it is true. I recommend you to the Belin Blank Center at the University of Iowa. There is a ton of real research on this you may find interesting. Though, it is a little crushing I have to admit. While I appreciate that you feel that EL is best done through play, I still don't have any proof that it is harming to a child. I can produce quite a bit of research that suggests some kinds of Early Learning activities do produce a measurable change in IQ. These studies are admittedly, not ideal. Or at least it would be better to have long term studies. But so far, I see no reason not to do EL with your child which is the reason for this thread in the first place.

This still doesn't change much of my answer. It is not either/or it is both/and. And I don't think this changes anything. Are you suggesting that because I do early learning activities i cannot focus properly on pretend play? You might need to clarify this for me. Can you please define giftedness for me, as it may be true we are not talking about the same thing? Defining terms is always helpful especially as the term gifted is thrown around as loosely as ADD. This only matters in that this is the kind of thing that these programs, and Glenn Doman, may he rest in peace, advocated learning. Not all mom's on the BK site teach this kind of thing, they may teach other things. And so, it is really not so terrible. I am still waiting to see what all the fuss against early learning is about.

To the question of does she converse back and forth well. Yes she does for her - she can speak in 5-6 words sentences. Her speech and fine motor skills are above average for a DS child, not sure what that means, but I have no other way to say it. But she is not above average when it comes to her "normal" peers. She is advanced otherwise. I will chuck that up to hypotonia- there doesn't seem to be an easy way around the muscle issue. As far as play goes, I am not sure you have to pick. Why would you assume that people who do early learning are not letting their children play outside in the green grass? Hmmm. There are a lot of things in this world that are not either/or picks. They are both/and. I find this argument against early learning the most specious. It is appealing at first but there is no merit to it. And it is the default argument against Early Learning by "professionals". Most toddlers are awake 13 hours a day. I think most of them can spare 20-30 minutes on early learning. I am sure there are some parents who lock their children away in the dark with a computer and nothing else until they can read Hamlet, but I have yet to meet them. As far as making a child a genius, I'm not sure I am doing that either, we can cringe together if that makes you happy. But I do believe that I am placing tools in my child's toolbox. When he goes out into the world I want him to have the largest toolbox I can provide for him. My oldest son was born gifted. His IQ is between 148-152. That is on the high side of gifted. And so what? He was given a fast processing brain. I don't see how this is relevant to Early Learning. The truth is that he is a bit lazy. Children don't remain gifted forever. They are only gifted until their peers catch up with them. So, the practical difference between my oldest and his peers is that it took longer for his peers to get to the same place. And about the age 25 you will not notice the difference between my son and a person who just simply studied hard. Especially if my oldest son, now 17, doesn't continue working hard. Which as a gifted child, he is not inclined to do. You can raise the IQ of a child by stimulating the brain. It is simply untrue that you cannot. There are several studies that prove that you can. I can send you a list privately if you like. But that still doesn't seem to be the issue. Here is the bottom line: children who are born gifted, and I do think there are children who are born gifted, are less likely to graduate from college, remain in stable marriages, and land successful jobs. The children who learn to work hard carry that work ethic throughout their whole life. It matters not where they fall on the bell curve. There will always be those who are on one end of the bell curve, we are merely talking about narrowing the standard deviation, so that in effect, it doesn't matter. I'm not trying to make a genius, I am trying to put tools in my child's toolbox. As far as Doman style learning goes: Let's say you have a 2 year old who knows that certain critters are bugs and a 2 year old who knows that this particular bug is a squash beetle and is eating mommies pumpkins and that it is something to tell mommy about, Which child is better able to make sense of the world around them? If you have a 3 year old who knows that the sounds he hears come from birds and another 3 year old who can name that bird by sound, and then look for it by sight, which one will have a more enjoyable outdoor experience? And further more, if this child knows that this particular bird is only around for 2 weeks during migration and it is super rare to see one, do you think he will ever forget the experience? And do you think the 3 year old telling you it is a birdie only will have the same experience? There is no reason to make enemies of things that should be friends.

I think you are mostly right. However, these children were not orphans in the typical sense. They were orphaned because of WWI and their parents died. So I think we can assume that many of them came from decent homes but the stress of not having parents around and not getting attention would not be the same as a child from an intact home. This is why i am saying that there isn't any good evidence for this either way. It would be nice to compare apples to apples. It is interesting to note however that Dr. Wellman's children out-performed children from intact homes and many of her kids ended up in the genius IQ range. So I don't think this study should be ignored either. Also, University of California, Irvine did a study on children taking piano lessons. Those children who started lessons early, at 3, did better on intelligence related exams than children who started at 5. Children who had piano lessons at all did better than children who just took vocal and music appreciation type classes. There are quite a few studies like this. But none, either for or against, that deals with early learning and long term studies. However, you will be hard pressed to convince me that I am actually hurting my child. Which was the original statement. That it damages the brain. That does not appear to be part of the equation at all. How well does it work? Does it work for every child? Should we be using the computer as a medium for education? I don't have good answers to those questions. Especially the use of computers as a medium. I use them because it saves so much time on my part. I don't see an attention issue with my child. We use the computer for piano and music as well. It isn't long, but we still use it. However, if you have read the book, "Amusing Ourselves to Death" or as Marshall MacLuhan says, "The medium is the message." I tend to agree with both of them, So I keep our screen time to a minimum. And there is also controversy about that as well. There is a great TED talk about this very thing. The researcher was making the same point that has been made here about screen time. But, Mr. Roger's produces no visible changes to a brain scan. They think it has something about the number of times an image is flashed in a minute. So, my feet aren't planted too firmly here. What I do know is that I care for a 4 y/o little girl with Down Syndrome. We have been using flashcards and other Early Learning activities with her since she was 2.5. She loves the flashcards. She is also reading, able to do basic addition and subtraction, plays the piano with both hands and just started violin lessons. It's probably easier to chuck it up to her being atypical than it is to admit that maybe there is something to this stuff. She has one more year of preschool before she goes to kindergarten. She will be way ahead of her peers when she finally does get there. My 2 year old is reading at about the middle of 1st grade. The little boy I graduated from my care last fall entered preschool reading at about the 1st grade level. We started later with him, and he was much more difficult to teach. He had the attention span of a knat. If a child is resistant at all we stop. With him, we stopped for months at a time. We never used flashcards either, I just taught him to read when he wanted to be taught.

I'm going to pretend that we can have a civil conversation. If not for your sake, then for the sake of others who are reading this. This was listed as a "hot thread" so I looked at it. You made statements referring to my response. I am not up in arms. I am attempting to have a discussion, there is a difference. I put your words in quotes, as I was hoping, that without making a big deal of it, you might realize that ad hominem attacks do not an argument make. If you are only interested in sarcasm, I'm sorry I responded at all. However, if you have a decent study for me to look at, then I am willing to look at it. As far as I am aware, there aren't any. If you are talking about studies regarding screen time, then there are many and you may or may not have a point as there is conflicting evidence. However, I am on your side with this. And I don't need to google it. I have read multiple books on the subject. But we don't own a TV and my children get less than 15 minutes of screen time every day. Most days less than 10. That argument is not specifically about early learning but about the nature of modern media - especially rapid flashing (think fast moving images on TV and in movies - even just rapid changing of camera angles) and making the brain dependent on it, in some people it causes seizures. I don't think those studies are referring to what we do in my home..There are those on the BK forum that disagree with me on this, but we are capable of managing polite and civil discourse. Which is evidently is a strange occurrence over here. Second, this does not answer the issue of flashcards. As far as I know, there aren't any studies regarding flashcards. There have been no long term studies on children who were intentionally brain trained as babies/toddlers that I am aware of save for Dr. Lucy Beth Wellman from Iowa State University in the 1930's. Her work was well known in the early part of the century. President Truman used her research as the foundational reasoning behind implementing the Head Start program. It is sad that Head Start did not implement her methods as well. Her studies were on orphans in the quad-city area of Iowa. She found that with intentional brain training, they could raise a child's IQ by up to 35 points. Those results stayed with the children at least until the teen years. That is when she quit following them. She also found that the earlier the child received intervention the higher the IQ jump. There are others who have done work as well, but I don't think I can give you anything even close to the work of Dr. Wellman. It seems, that while this thread did not involve me, these threads are here for others to read and glean information from. Otherwise we would close a thread down as soon as the original poster got their answer. Whether or not you are right, (again if you have studies I want to see them) It is not the way to engage in civil discourse. One of the end results of a Classical Education should be to intelligently engage in argument.

I'm not looking to get in a fight, but I would be interested in looking at any research you have that "those crap programs where parents force babies and toddlers to memorize sight words" are actually bad for them. Especially since I used one of those "crap" programs and I didn't feel I was forcing my child into anything. I am quite certain that he didn't feel forced either. Since he doesn't want to use the program anymore, we don't. But if I am damaging the brain I would like to know. But I haven't found any credible studies that prove this, so I am wondering where you found your information. As to whether or not they work, the particular program I used worked for us. My son knew about 1000 words by the time he was 2. This made switching to phonics super easy. He loves phonics instruction. He likes to take words apart and put them back together. It is like finding pieces to a puzzle. He has no trouble blending. Do they work for everyone? No, But that should not be a surprise. To have that expectation would be ridiculous. We certainly don't expect every homeschooling program to work with every child.

I have a 17 y/o son and now a 2 year old son. We believe in spacing. I taught my oldest to read at 3. He was sure that a library card would solve all his problems. I have a two year old now that is much further ahead than my oldest was at this age. if they want to learn you probably should let them. We always make it a game and we never make an issue out of it. Right now we are working on reading using various methods. We use readingbear.org. It is free. We also use Brillkids Little Reader, though not as much as we used to. And once a child is around age 2 it is probably best to switch to a phonics only method. We also use readingeggs. And Sidney Ledson's Teach Your Child to Read in Just 10 Minutes a Day. He will go through periods of wanting certain games and programs, and then he won't want to do anything for a long time. We also use Little Musician for music and Soft Mozart for piano. He's been using these for a year. More consistently now, as he has better muscle control. He begs to practice piano. I don't think it is a terrible thing to teach them at this age. We spend about an hour or so a day in "lessons" of some kind. The rest of the time he is playing outside and "eating dirt". I don't understand why we think it is fine to teach different animals and their sounds, names of the things in their physical world, but we think it is too academic for a 2 year old to learn to read. Why is that information different than the information that, "That is a pig and it says 'OINK'." They are too young for formal lessons, but I think 6 year olds are also probably too young for what we think of as "formal lessons." But that is not the same as saying they shouldn't have any lessons. It is important to feed your child's curiosity where ever it goes. My youngest spends much of his day with a stick in his hand standing on a box conducting orchestra movements he is either listening to or hearing in his head. He can name about 30 different pieces of classical music by just listening to the first 20 seconds. I didn't actively teach him this. He just picked it up through casual interaction with the things he loves. We offer lots of opportunities for engagement. he picks what he wants to learn.

Thanks for answering this question. I had the same one.

I can't edit my profile. It says that I am not allowed to edit some or all of my profile. How do I get permission?

Where in Iowa? It's not a huge state, but it is big enough. I used to live in the Okoboji area and now in Pella.

I've been homeschooling for 10 years. Just joined the forum. I have a 17 y/o about ready to graduate and one about to begin. Trying to get ahead of the ball so I can correct some of the mistakes I made the first time around. I tried to edit my profile but can't, I get a message that says i don't have permission for that. Anyone have any ide