I’m soon about to go crazy with my now 2,5 year old daughter, and it all started out so well… She learnt to read with Little Reader, loved Little Musician, Dino Lingo and other software, could point out quite a lot of countries on a world map, and so on. Now, because of obstinate age, everything has turned into a nightmare. She doesn’t want to do a thing that we want anymore, crying, fighting and screaming in a louder pitch than an ambulance, no matter whether it’s potty training or Little Musician. The worst thing of all seems to be Soft Mozart and piano, which she really HATES. We have been trying all kinds of approaches: Everything from reward-based incentive schemes such as: “We’ll play the piano for 5 minutes first, then we’ll go to the toy store!” to kissing her, hugging her and letting her drown in our love but, shortly speaking, it is almost impossible to have her sit in the chair in front of the computer anymore, and her attention span is shorter than ever. And still we try to do it all at 6 o’ clock in the morning, which is her best time.
I should add that she is raised in a perfectly stable, happy environment, where they even said at daycare recently that it is noticeable how safe and self-confident our daughter feels.
Now, if you read the posts on this forum, the commercials of Brillkids or something else about EL, it almost seems as if your kid would be Einstein at age 5, provided you just stimulate him/her with Doman cards from 6 months, then with Brillkids’ products, and so on. There is just one tiny problem in between: obstinate age. What the heck does one do in terms of EL when your little “monster” is 2-3 years old and behaving like mine?
Could it be a cultural thing? Could it be that, simply, our daughter is a spoiled, Western child, getting everything she wants from her economist father and medical doctor mother? Could there be a correlation between the fact that countries such as Singapore, Russia, and China are not only more prone to EL but also tend to have more authoritarian ways of raising children, and the fact that they also score better on PISA, TIMMS and other indices than do Western countries?
Since this is an international forum with participants from all over the world, I think we could have quite an interesting discussion about this. Or at least about how some of you parents who managed to survive obstinate age were able to integrate it with EL. If your children really wrote their first composition at age 5, or something like that, how were you able to bridge the obstinate age “gap” in EL between age 2 and 4, when the brain of the child even tends to develop the most? Did you perhaps tell them: “DO NOT play the piano!” or “DO NOT read that book!” so that they would instantly run away and do just that, only to defy you? 
