Well, I can&#x27;t give you a peer-reviewed, n&gt;500, p=0.001 answer, but I can tell you that I&#x27;ve never regretted my mother teaching me to read at age two. Reading has given me a great deal of both pleasure and knowledge throughout my life, and I can&#x27;t think of a single time I&#x27;ve looked back and said &quot;Gosh, you know, I sure wish Mom had waited three more years to teach me to read, or just left the matter in the hands of the public school system.&quot;<p>Of course, that was thirty-odd years ago, before kindergarten-aged kids were expected to be familiar with English lit back to Chaucer and mathematics up to basic trigonometry. I can see how in the modern environment someone might react negatively to the suggestion that it doesn&#x27;t hurt kids to know how to read when they&#x27;re two, because letting on about it could well result in an environment where a kid who&#x27;s three years old and can&#x27;t yet read is either developmentally delayed or has bad parents, or of course possibly both.<p>Edited to add: It doesn&#x27;t help at all that the author of the article under discussion couches his reasoning in terms of improved educational outcomes -- he&#x27;s explicitly trying to turn his kids into highly performant overachievers, and that is <i>super creepy</i>. If that&#x27;s your only available perspective on the matter, I can&#x27;t blame you at all for being bothered by it, because I actually was taught to read at age two like he&#x27;s advocating and it bothers me too. He sounds more like an education researcher than like a <i>father</i>, and that&#x27;s disturbing.<p>But Mom didn&#x27;t teach me to read early because she had some kind of n=1 eugenics experiment in mind. She did it because she loved me and thought I&#x27;d enjoy being able to read, and she didn&#x27;t use the rather chilly and vaguely clinical-sounding methods this author describes. As she described it to me not long ago, she&#x27;d just read part of a story to me, showing me each word in turn and helping me sound it out and learn its meaning, and offer me as much help as I wanted in figuring the rest out for myself -- which I would, because I wanted to know how the story turned out. Evidently this method worked well enough, and as I said before, I&#x27;ve never regretted it. Make of that what you like, of course.