I&#x27;m fascinated by this essay because a lot of the activities described by the author are what we have been doing with our 21-month old son. Not through any concerted plan, but mostly because my wife and I love to read and that love for books has been passed on to our son. I wouldn&#x27;t say he &quot;reads&quot; yet and he&#x27;s not able to recite the full alphabet yet (we read a lot of books, but so far I&#x27;m not into drilling him with flash cards and he&#x27;s not on any screens yet), but by comparison to his (daycare) peers, his vocabulary and verbalization skills are significantly ahead and I believe these activities are connected.<p>One of the most interesting developments from my point of view is that while my son most enjoys sitting beside us to read a book together, lately he also enjoys &quot;reading&quot; alone. To help us buy an extra half hour of sleep-in (he&#x27;s not a great sleeper AND an early riser) in the morning we will come to his crib when he&#x27;s calling for us and put a pile of board books in there. He will then sit there for about half an hour (those of you with toddlers will know that this kind of attention span is no small feat) and flip through them quietly. By the time he&#x27;s done, all of the books have been &quot;read&quot;, multiple times. Of course he&#x27;s not &quot;reading&quot; the words, but I do believe he&#x27;s reading the books and in his mind reciting the words that he remembers from when we read them to him.<p>To me, the above is just one example of how he keeps proving to me that there is a lot more going on in the minds of our little ones than we often give them credit for. I believe we (or at least myself) have a tendency to underestimate the intelligence and capacity for learning that these little people have, because we judge them based on their outputs, which lag behind their actual learning by quite a bit.