I'm at one far end of the spectrum, but I was reading Stephen King in 5th/6th grade, read Anna Karenina (chosen myself) in 7th grade for a book report and had r

I'm at one far end of the spectrum, but I was reading Stephen King in 5th/6th grade, read Anna Karenina (chosen myself) in 7th grade for a book report and had read nearly all of Tolstoy's works by the end of 9th grade. My parents never had a punishment for failure, only failures without effort. The idea was to set your goals so high that they cannot possibly be accomplished. It still holds to today for me...when I don't reach the goals I set for myself, I'm not disappointed, I look at how good I actually did do. The only time this is an issue is when coming up with those annual and semi-annual review goals that determine are used to measure if you're going to get a reasonable merit increase or not.