I'm always curious to learn of everyone's experiences with the many techniques and skills we have learned or developed using some of the principles of NLP.

As a very proud parent of an almost 22 month old child, I find myself beginning to notice something very different about her development at this point in time than of other children her age locally - particularly in her communication, both verbal and non-verbal skills.

To cut a long story short, she has already a vocabulary of in excess of 800 words - can happily string together semantically sound sentences of anything up to 15 words. She has well developed tonality too - and understood very early what was a command and what was a question and she uses the same now to everyone around her(the poor cats have never been told off so much!) Also she uses lots of OOOOHs and AAAAAHs to indicate when she doesn't know what a word is, but is ready to listen and remember it.

Apart from being born at home (which is more unusual these days - but that's another issue)and having some lessons at 7 months in sign langauge,all my wife and I have done is avoid negation, except when wanting the opposite deliberately, have used lots of OOOOHs and AAAAHs and loads of body language in our communication - and have of course always ensured the state we wanted her to be in was the one we were in first.

We have been reading books to her from about four months old, as it pacified her and have never really stopped. She thinks nothing of having up to 50 stories a day!!

My only concerns are, moving on, that whilst we are very capable and happy to keep using these methods, and adapting them as she develops further; what happens when she goes to playschool and then school when others have developed at a different rate?

What I am asking is have we made a rod for our own backs by applying what we have learnt?

I seem to remember hearing Richard Bandler saying that the ''trouble is you were born, you had parents and they sent you to school!''

I will value any of your experiences, ideas and feedback.

Many Thanks