“Take the red one”, the nursery teacher said. My child obediently bent his little knees and picked up the red brick from the floor. My mouth fell open. “Now the blue one.” He let the red brick slip from his sticky fingers onto the carpet with a thud and reached for the blue. A smile of cheerful satisfaction spread over his rosy face. “And now where’s the yellow brick?” This time there was a second of hesitation, his hand gliding deceptively towards the green brick. Bah – I thought to myself, realigning my jaw, it is a question of luck. “No, the yellow one”, said the nursery teacher firmly. The hand still teasingly waited – oh the suspense – but then complied. His smile grew wider. I was amazed. Flabbergasted. He knows the colours, and I was unaware of it! What other remarkable, as yet unknown, capabilities does this child possess?

Of course I tried the trick myself that afternoon when we got home; it would take a stronger parent than I to resist. Forgetting, in my excitement, our usual afternoon routine of yoghurt, crackers and a bit of fruit, I pushed both children straight into the playroom, rummaged through an array of more obviously entertaining toys, and proceeded to arrange four coloured bricks neatly in front of him on the floor. For three minutes I successfully held his attention whilst he proudly placed a series of coloured bricks on the table at my behest – until out of the corner of his eye he spotted his wheelie ladybird and scampered off to whizz through the rooms on that. His less biddable sister had more quickly realised that this was perhaps a parrots’ game and had been tearing up old newspapers under the kitchen table for some time.

For all its brevity, I was hooked. This – in my eyes – exemplary achievement, which had been nurtured and then displayed by someone other than me, filled me with a new sense of pedagogic duty and ambition. And though I remembered the yoghurt, crackers, even the fruit, my mind was elsewhere, whirling with the possibilities of further child improvement. So there it was, the following afternoon, that I found myself sitting on the floor in a play cafe repeatedly naming and pointing at the shapes in a jigsaw puzzle hanging on the wall. “Circle.” “Where is the circle?” “Square.” “Where is the square?” On and on I went, until both children gave me what I deemed was an adequate response. But it did not last long: bored, they wriggled off my lap and wandered over to a miniature table, bedecked with crayons and paper. Enthusiastic scribbling ensued. Unperturbed by this lack of interest and abandoning my hot coffee, I came quickly after them and sat down in a miniature chair. Taking a crayon, I drew a big circle on both pieces of paper, and then a square and then a triangle. The pointing and naming began again. The children looked dismayed, and pushed my hands away from their drawings. Thus followed more enthusiastic scribbling, and no shape naming.

At this complete (and in retrospect, understandable) rejection, I returned to my coffee and spent a moment contemplating what I had done. The vision of an overly ambitious mother, standing draconically over her children until they could immaculately recite the times tables for a local competition flooded my mind and filled me with a sense of foreboding. What was I hoping to achieve? The only way I’d ever learned anything was when I could see some benefit in it for myself, and usually where some fun was involved. I was definitely taking all the fun out of it, and the benefits were minimal. They would learn from me too, but without the laboured repetition. So I have decided to limit my pedagogic efforts to enthusiastically pointing out vehicles (admittedly, sometimes with the mention of the colour at the same time) as we walk down the street and to reading funny children’s books which don’t appear to be ‘teaching’ much, beyond a love of stories and fantastical pictures, at all. Genius (well, some level of intelligence perhaps), if they have it, will grow of its own accord, and the thing is, I could never really see myself tending a greenhouse.