Then one day, as I'm watching him trying to climb a fence at a playground, it occurs to me he was comparably better at intellectual, grown-up activities than actual kid-like activities like getting dirty, climbing dangerous stuff, balancing on rocks, ignoring grown-ups, playing with other kids, etc.
From that point, I tried to back off a little with the grown-up chatter.
I'm happy to say that our following children, although perhaps a little later with the speaking, have been better at the kid stuff. Our first-born did get after it, too. We put him in a Waldorf kindergarten.
So although well-intended, I don't think I had my priorities straight. If you do try to influence your children, you'd better make damn sure your influence is for the better.
Today I would never enroll in a 1000 books before 5 programme. The Waldorf kindergarten was helpful here - they've been thinking about these things for many years, and don't seem to fall as easily for the pseudo-scientific stuff where someone spends a year or two studying whether children respond to specific training (e.g. language), and surprise! yes, they do! Without considering what those children were missing when they had to attend those training sessions, and could have been digging up worms in the garden.
(And yes, I do read with my children, and we probably have more than a hundred books we've bought used over the years, but I consider reading inferior to playing or doing a meaningful activity, like peeling carrots and talking about that.)
I had the opposite experience, but maybe that's because I have decades of experience of talking to pets as if they're human adults...
I would feel stupid doing that, even if I see the benefits, but I enjoyed reading out loud to them, because then you have a script to follow. I wouldn't read "Dog - Apple - Ball" children books, but stuff I wanted to read anyway, just to get them used to hearing my voice, the speech rhythm, and the vocabulary.
The 1000 by 5 program seems very ... unambitious, that isn't even one book a day. We've read at least 3 books a day before bed to our child since the day he was born, so we're well over 2000 books before age 2, and that doesn't count his other readings. He's way ahead in other areas, but his speech is not advanced. He watches very little TV, especially compared to his peers, and I often wonder if that has had an effect. I'm not really concerned enough to think that he should be watching more TV, but it seems like hearing that many extra words per day could be a brighter side of a darker habit.
She was an exceptionally loud baby, just constant stream of (non-crying, mostly happy chatter) noise coming from her mouth and we encouraged it by talking to her like a normal adult, and eventually those sounds turned into syllables, words, then sentences, and she's entering teenhood now, and she literally has not shut up except to sleep.
I'm an extrovert myself so she probably inherited it from me, and maybe our engagement with her from infancy is only partially responsible, but spending an entire day with her is mentally exhausting.