"Time to live" for the purpose of "experiencing life" was found to be inconsistent with extracting profit and has been deprecated. In future versions of the iPeasant app, we hope to increase profit-seeking behavior and reduce pesky bugs like desire for freedom.

You can combine the two.

Paint letters onto toy cars, paint a car park with letters in the spaces.

Or paint letters onto rocks, and use a toy dump truck to load them up and move them around.

Use synthetic phonics and sound out the letters when the cars are parked or the rocks are collected.

(but in general I agree with you)

Up-voted for courageously (and beautifully) expressing a potentially unpopular opinion. Stay strong - it is hard not to feel guilty when other kids in kindergarten can seemingly write essays and do calculus, but in the end, it does not matter as much as it may appear to. And sometimes putting so much pressure may have unintended consequences. I know a few kids from affluent families in my town where their "early prodigies" are now college drop-outs.

Many early achievers burn out once they enter an environment where they are no longer the smartest person in the room all of the time.

I don't know, I think "burn out" is a somewhat loaded term. Personally during either secondary and (much later) tertiary education I simply found it hard to maintain interest in a dubiously presented, dry, fixed syllabus that was executed at the speed of the slowest person in the room by teachers with thousand-mile lecture stares. It was always clear to me that learning something by rote was not an effective use of time... the initial comprehension and applications were the only interesting portions. Thus, I turned to self-directed computing. When I finally went to college, I received a scholarship in the first semester, took a year overseas, then never returned. I'd like to study more, but feel the pedagogy is too alien to deliver solid results (in terms of time efficiency) versus competing life opportunities.

I "had a childhood" in the sense of going to high school. It damn near killed me, and quite possibly would have if I hadn't been fortunate enough to skip a year, or to do a few university-like courses. I look back on those wasted, miserable years and wish I'd had other options - or thought to seize them for myself.

Talk to your child, see what he actually likes. Make sure he knows that he always has a choice - years later my parents told me they thought about homeschooling but didn't think they knew enough to, and couldn't afford a tutor, but they never even mentioned these thoughts to me at the time.

First-time parent of a 4-month old, we're thinking the same way. Me and my wife are both engineering types, and do worry about being obsessively goal-oriented.