I taught my 3-year-old to read like a 9-year-old

Genetics and a bit of dice rolling. That's the biggest part of the equation it seems. I have only one specimen to work with (and I am not inclined to create more), but he was reading at 4 and currently at 6 reads at a 3rd or 4th grade level, despite still being stuck in kindergarden until September.

Sure, we read to him, and we make him read aloud to us too, but we're really just catalysts. He can make himself comfortable in a chair or on a sofa and read comics (Donald Duck, Asterix, etc.) for hours without any prompting (which, honestly, is a really nice feature to have on a child). I expect we'll be able to coerce him onto autonomously reading suitable books in addition to comics by next year too.

I do strongly believe that him seeing us read, and being surrounded by (actual paper) books helps. It means he grows up in an environment where books are normal, not just something you must grapple with because of school.

I don't like the heavy training implied by the article though. I want to raise a kid who likes reading, not one who will resent being pushed to read.

I did read it pretty closely as someone with a 3 year old who's working on reading.

> The details for anyone who wants to replicate this can be found in a series of guides [with 3 links]

But those are basically all "go buy my course" style posts.

This was the hook, the links in the quoted section (you know the actual "how") are basically just "pay for the course".

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Overall - it's an okish post, but this is 100% marketing material to make money.

Learning to be bored will be of great value once AI takes over all our jobs.

If the kid is bright they'll be bored anyway. This is something you cannot avoid, so teaching them to behave in a boring environment is more productive.

Our kid effectively taught himself to read very early. We had been reading to him at every opportunity, and I think he teased out what was going on and, on some level, decided to learn on his own. He's been reading well above his age level for years now. As the OP mentioned, one of the primary short term benefits is that this child is, comparatively, a breeze to parent. If he gets frustrated, he goes and reads. If he gets bored with playing a video game, he goes and reads. He appears to be a well-adjusted kid with a close and functional friend group--within the limits of the COVID generation anyway--and he gets on fine with kids who aren't big readers. It's his thing, his intellectual space.

One thing OP didn't address directly is that the most significant lesson of watching our kid on this journey has been learning on a practical level how early individuality and complex reasoning show up. Before I was a parent, I thought kids were blobs where parenting unlocked skills. Since becoming a parent, I've learned that kids, on some level, are experiencing frustrations and joys that are shockingly similar to adults' and that a lot of their development isn't just bits and pieces turning on over time but affirmative effort on their part. I don't know why that should be surprising given we're the same species, but it really struck me that this little person on some level realized he couldn't read, wanted to, and learned. That affected other areas of our parenting, e.g., addressing his frustration as if it were a rational human response to a challenging situation from his perspective rather than irrational childhood reaction. (Note: He's still a child and we don't parent him as if he's an adult, but we have subtly adjusted our approach to be more ... I don't know, respectful of his individual motivations as a thinking, feeling person with comprehensible goals and desires, even if the underlying support infrastructure is still a bit in flux.)