Okay, there's going to be a number of "early readers" here.

[TinaMigarlo]

in another thread, it dawned on me (duh!)
that what i thought were my unique "reading too early" funny stories, are going to be familiar.
@Bayleyrockstar @CharlesEBrown , there's more of us, I'm just sure of it.

When I was old enough it clearly dawned on me I was weird for this, I quizzed my mom about it.
My mom was one of those"annoying flash card" moms, for a reference point.
She said she was reading to me like you do to any baby on your lap, and I just started reading all at once.
She said it was a weird and scary moment, seemed slightly supernatural was how she described it. (I was too young, lol)
Mom says she at first recovered her composure, and "realized" it was just a trick. Of course. I was memorizing her telling the easy story.
some kids do that, but I digress. So mom made sure she bought a new childrens book I couldn't have memorized, and...
she said I read it to her. Which freaked her out.

So she's laughing telling my dad about her "creepy moment" with me.
but Dad was apparently telling his own "creepy" story similar.
he said I was a little baby and I still slept in the "moses basket" we called it. Bassinette, I guess.
mind you, dad is one of those guys that will "address" a dog, cat, baby... toaster, houseplant... as if talking to another human.
its his thing to be funny.
so he said it was "creepy" when he asked me if my diaper needed changed.
and he said he was sure I babbled out a pretty clear "No Raymond".
But no one b-e-l-i-e-v-e-d him and teased him about this moment.
(he swore my "babbling" was discernible speech, he could "interpret" it.

Then the funny family story was that mom confided in Dad her weird feeling with me reading to her,
then dad reminded her that he thought I was talking English instead of baby babbling.
so I guess I just spontaneously knew how to talk and read, and no one knew why.

But then they both tell the funny story of the newspaper.
My parents were both "read the newspaper" people and the Sunday paper came in the wee hours of the morning.
so I guess I'm a toddler. I wanted the funny papers, the comics section. I'm a little kid.
But that lasted an annoying short time, I I started grabbing at sections of the big Sunday paper. Annoying my dad.
I demanded "coffee", so my mom had to make me hot chocolate in a mug.
and they thought I was imitating them "reading the newspaper" like they were doing.
They both said it freaked them out I could read the newspaper section article for article, story for story.

So my whole young life, there's a parade of adults visiting, and I have to read the newspaper out loud.

Like i'm a performing monkey, I now realize as an adult.

I have a whole roster of "reading too much" funny stories, they pretty much define my childhood and young adulthood.

 

[JHarp]

"reading too early"

This'll involve a bit of jumping around, but I was originally born into my native language, for about 2 years before; for reasons, I had to go into foster with godparents.

Before this, my mum; who is a masters in teaching, taught me baby sign language, which I picked up really quickly.

As a result going into fostering, I chose to not speak till I was like mid 3 years old, but I could clearly read, understand and respond.
I also had a really really early diagnosis of autism because of how actively happy I was to sit and read alone in a room for hours on end.

No 'creepy' part of it, just a precocious kid who happened to get overloaded at all the stress other people gave me, to I sought silence and quiet places.

Eventually I was brute forced into learning english as my 'first' language, even though it wasn't the first one I could speak in, functionally it is at this point because I wasn't given the option for both.

When I left my godparents care, I was with my grandparents for a while, who had all the books of all levels from my mother and uncle, so I pretty much read what was interesting, which was generally some kids books but I did grab a few teenager demographic books a bit early, especially when I joined secondary education at 13~ where I started working in the schools library for a few years, eventually using my grasp on tech to help them moderate the computers others used in the lab while checking out books people wanted on the side.

I actually failed my english exams, mostly through no fault of my own. I've always had a scribe ever since I was a kid; issues with my nerves in my hands and pain + ADHD
But they decided to give me, the AuDHD kid, 4 hours to sit alone in a room with the scribe and the invigilator, the person scoring the exams.
I fell asleep on the desk for both my math and english exams because even with breaks there was no chance I'd focus for that long, given they gave me extra time on top of the 2.5 hour exam, making it 4 whole hours.

Was I a strange kid? Sure, but I don't believe anyone in my family who looked after me, expected much less, I could still laugh and have fun, and I was generally compliant, not kicking up a fuss unless I straight up couldn't handle a situation. Otherwise there aren't too many stories of me being 'weird' outside of the unique I already was.

 

[Bayleyrockstar]

Mine aren't nearly as supernatural. Apparently, I might have a newly recently coined symptom of autism called Hyperlexia, or an above-average reading ability, despite all of the early brain damage I most likely suffered.

My dad worked IT, so we had computers in the house. And being 2000, videogames were a big thing, with being able to download videogames from the internet being relatively new. Guess what this child latched onto? Well, it was hard playing videogames when you didn't know how ot read, so I apparently taught myself somehwere between 1 and 2 to read so i could know how to play.

This only became extremely apparent when my dad offered to read the instructions to a really hard puzzle adventure game, and I said i already could read it. Then read it.

My life didn't really change, but by 5 I was interested in reading EULAs, a clear indication I was craving longer reads than children's books and videogame instructions. Otherwise, I think I was pretty normal, interested in dinosaurs, puzzles, and computer videogames and toys.

Then kindergarten comes on by, and I learn the english alphabet. It all seems more like I was learning a new way to read. Which was to write. I still have memories of being confused why the other students struggled to learn how to spell.

Then the weekly visit to the school library happened, and I fell in love with books. It was like magic to my six year old brain. I still have never returned one of those library books to this day.

Two years later, I began learning sentence structure, and all my brain could think of was... "I can make books!"

it took another two years for me to get deep into reading, such as The Thirteenth Child, Inkheart, and other adventure fantasy books.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

My parents were always reading - both had been teachers and dad was a reporter, then editor, then ... a bunch of things for a local newspaper group, while mom became a librarian and substitute teacher once I was old enough to be left on my own. When I was around, they read aloud. I was exposed to the usual kids' stuff, plus the "cleaned up" version of "The Wind in the Willows" (shorter, focusing on the "fun" parts and leaving out some of the darker stuff) and a story I thought for years was connected to it, "Frog and Toad Together;" picked up some basic concepts of reading but never needed to read, so didn't bother to learn until we were taught the alphabet in kindergarten.
My teacher was horrified by my lack of penmanship (it got a little better, and then progressively worse over the years), but impressed by my ability to put the letters together to create words. I was reading at a second grade level by the time we were done learning all the letters, and, over the following summer, discovered dinosaurs and Science Fiction (Heinlein's The Star Beast), and tried to read the stuff I remembered dad reading to us, Robert Arthur's (actually, I later found out, a "House Name" - originally there had been one man with that name, who, when his son became old enough to write, stepped into an editorial role with the publisher and let his son write for him; he started a few product lines, including the "[things] and more [things]" anthologies, usually writing at least one story before he retired, while his son created "The Three Investigators" - originally "Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators" but "Hitch" was only actively involved in one story, approved his single cameos in four others, and then asked to be removed from the franchise) Ghosts and More Ghosts and Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings - dad convinced me to read The Hobbit first, after seeing me struggle with the setting stuff at the beginning of the trilogy and it would be about four years before I tried it again.

 

[Time4T]

No prodigy here. I remember reading some western story in grade school. It was the first book to light up my imagination. But it wasn’t until my early teens, I was sick in bed with the flu or something and my mom bought me The Shining paperback, I read that sucker in one night. Looking back, that's when I really became a reader. I had thought that was early, but you fokes reading in diapers put the kibosh to that. Thanks.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

No prodigy here. I remember reading some western story in grade school. It was the first book to light up my imagination. But it wasn’t until my early teens, I was sick in bed with the flu or something and my mom bought me The Shining paperback, I read that sucker in one night. Looking back, that's when I really became a reader. I had thought that was early, but you fokes reading in diapers put the kibosh to that. Thanks.

A girl I graduated with was literally reading while still in diapers (she wound up #3 in our class, just missing #2 due to a single C grade in one class; our only 4.0+ died that spring when a drunk driver hit him after he dropped off his date and was heading home after a dance).

 

[Time4T]

died that spring when a drunk driver hit him

Sad

Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings - dad convinced me to read The Hobbit first,

Lord of the Rings was the first classic book I disrespected by skipping pages. I had the big all-in-one hardcover with all the fold out maps and stuff. (I really wish I knew where that was now.) But anyway, someplace, I think in Return of the King, the battle before Aragon regained his throne, I skipped pages. I wanted more Frodo and Gandalf. And the war just got boring. Even at the time, being that far into a book and skipping pages felt wrong. Memorably sacrilegious.

 

[TinaMigarlo]

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i love it.
They finally did it.
If you can read better than everyone else, its an official medical problem?
Hyperlexia.
The kid's intelligent, and likes reading... lady, get this kid to a doctor, quick.

"Help! My kid wants to sit quietly and read for hours,
instead of running around getting in trouble."
*writes prescription for pills*

we actually let these people lead us and tell us what to do?
that's the amazing part.
-------------------------------------------------------
pretty much everyone participating in this thread, really.
there's a sometimes spoken sometimes unspoken implicit thread...
its not "normal" to read really well, and we all know it.
we also know its not normal for a kid to read and speak like an adult spontaneously really young.

but does this really need to be a medical diagnosis?

Was I a strange kid? Sure

I could never admit with a straight face that I wasn't a weird kid.
I'm now a weird adult... but I no longer care, and I enjoy it.

 

[JHarp]

If you can read better than everyone else, its an official medical problem?
Hyperlexia.
The kid's intelligent, and likes reading... lady, get this kid to a doctor, quick.

I hate to be that kind of person (no I don't), but modern media especially the internet has damaged the actual perception of what medical professionals do.

The 'labels' used to diagnose medical conditions, are considerations for clinicians, educators and a bunch of legal people including public health to use for the care of a person, should there need to be accommodations or otherwise, on top of being able to group similar occurring traits for better facilitation of treatment which can include communicating their needs in a more straightforward package to family members.

Realistically they shouldn't have become buzz words on social media for day to day life, because they aren't meant for that.
Especially short form content has ruined a lot of the purpose of these things because people think they get concessions based on being lightly related to specific parts of a condition to self diagnose. It can help but people have taken it too literally and turned what would be an entry into proper healthcare into a stigma, like they do for a majority of health in the first place.
Awareness doesn't mean self help diagnosis websites and trending because of barely having some qualities that are 'different'.

There is nothing wrong, for people who actually need accommodation to be given a few extra notes on their records, it is a problem when people start using the possibility of having something as an excuse for a child acting up or to avoid crimes by claiming they aren't mentally capable of understanding their actions.
The fact people keep attempting unsuccessfully to misuse a system that has to suddenly fight this extra BS because people want to make as many claims as possible to lower their own fault.

Diagnosis helps family members because it stops them imagining worse options, stops them acting extreme over minor developmental changes, especially with recent pandemics causing people to become hyper sensitive to some diagnostic processes.

Hyperlexia, since you are so trigger happy about that one, means that a child might not respond naturally in school or at home when given developmental appropriate books.
Instead of punishing the kid for not paying attention and for ignoring the class, they can actually be given a challenge, imagine proper handling of a diagnosis to improve the quality of life for a child.

 

[TinaMigarlo]

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I'm not an expert, believe you me.
It just sounds funny to repeat the phrase,
'reading well, is a mental health red flag'
surely you can see the irony there.