Hacker News Reader

Comment by ip26 | Hacker News Reader

As a parent I’ve come to believe a lot of the stories about how so and so was playing golf or skiing or playing piano by 3 are very biased retrospectives. My kid was playing notes on harmonica at 18 months. Could he carry a tune? Of course not, but if one day he turned out to be a musical genius I could brag he has been playing instruments since he was an infant. See the careful embellishment?

A kid who has memorized some sight words or some books can certainly claim “reading”, with just enough truth there for the tale to take hold when they do well later in life.

View on HN

In many cases I'd agree with you. But in his case, he had come to the attention of researchers into high IQ by the age of 3, and the stories were recorded when they were still fairly fresh.

Yeah there's a considerable difference between "my kid is a genius among other kids" (probably what a lot of parents feel about their children) and "my kid is a genius even when compared to adults."

for the record I've got a son who is going on three now and I'm finding the developmental aspect fascinating. my wife is also studying some childhood development atm. I assumed he'll run risks of being my "problematically gifted" given his parents :P But i have a very skeptical mind, it pays the bills.

I've observed in my research (and in real life) many various impressive renditions of what i call "stupid toddler tricks". i saw a 1 year old count to 20. my own kids take books to bed at 2 and "reads" them to himself.

could the kid do math? could my kid read? No. of course not. you probe a little bit deeper and all the trappings of what we adults call cognisance fall away. the one year old has no idea what they were reciting. my kid repeats (albeit poorly) what he heard us say when . "reading",but a little bit of digging reveals the limits of his comprehension. kids use the pictures and other hints hints as cues, they're (the clever bastards),they have a brilliant verbal/aural ability at such an age, and they can have some kind of basic symbolic ability and rote repetition. And you can get them to do amazing things if you record them doing the trick but don't dig any deeper into their mental processes.

I'm guessing that people who are downvoting don't understand child mental development, have a vastly simpler definition of reading than myself, or don't understand how many layers of development are required to arrive at actual reading that have to be passed first. i do think you could quickly show such a trick to a well meaning person and get the legend started however...

If the two year old in question knows their alphabet, upper & lower case, knows most of the sounds the letters make, and can sound out unfamiliar words and sight read the rest, I don't really see what's controversial about calling that "reading". It's not a stupid toddler trick or a mark of genius, either.

If we're going to add comprehension requirements on top of that, then what passes as reading is pretty abysmal even for some adults.

To reinforce this: I remember feeling embarrassed by being described as a “natural” playing guitar.

I also remember feeling humbled by my humility when I took guitar seriously and picked stuff up or figured out technique that astounded people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com