Well, I can't give you a peer-reviewed, n>500, p=0.001 answer, but I can tell you that I'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't think of a single time I've looked back and said "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."
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't hurt kids to know how to read when they're two, because letting on about it could well result in an environment where a kid who's three years old and can't yet read is either developmentally delayed or has bad parents, or of course possibly both.
Edited to add: It doesn't help at all that the author of the article under discussion couches his reasoning in terms of improved educational outcomes -- he's explicitly trying to turn his kids into highly performant overachievers, and that is super creepy. If that's your only available perspective on the matter, I can't blame you at all for being bothered by it, because I actually was taught to read at age two like he's advocating and it bothers me too. He sounds more like an education researcher than like a father, and that's disturbing.
But Mom didn'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'd enjoy being able to read, and she didn't use the rather chilly and vaguely clinical-sounding methods this author describes. As she described it to me not long ago, she'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've never regretted it. Make of that what you like, of course.
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't hurt kids to know how to read when they're two, because letting on about it could well result in an environment where a kid who's three years old and can't yet read is either developmentally delayed or has bad parents, or of course possibly both.
Edited to add: It doesn't help at all that the author of the article under discussion couches his reasoning in terms of improved educational outcomes -- he's explicitly trying to turn his kids into highly performant overachievers, and that is super creepy. If that's your only available perspective on the matter, I can't blame you at all for being bothered by it, because I actually was taught to read at age two like he's advocating and it bothers me too. He sounds more like an education researcher than like a father, and that's disturbing.
But Mom didn'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'd enjoy being able to read, and she didn't use the rather chilly and vaguely clinical-sounding methods this author describes. As she described it to me not long ago, she'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've never regretted it. Make of that what you like, of course.