Excellent post!
I have been trying for some time now to get the point across about the negatives of an overly directive child / parent relationship. A child needs only a language rich environment. All of this directive activity not only inhibits creativity in language use for the child, it also, quite often, gives a parent a false sense of security. The assume that as long as the child is "learning the lessons", they are acquiring fluent language. Unfortunately, that is rarely the case.
My own child acquired ASL not in a classroom, nor in a directive teaching situation, but merely from socializing with other deaf/Deaf people. I learned it in the same way. He much faster than I, as he was but a toddler. He was not provided with lessons to learn...he was merely placed in a situation where people conversed with him.
