My daughter turned out just as she was when was she was tiny, into books and animals. I think there are elements of lots of fields in many typical kid pastimes. I do wish I had emphasized more math type things when she was small, in terms of patterns and underlying number sense, because that was definitely a relative weakness, compared to her insane strengths in language related things.

I’m often amazed at how many people I know from high school did things for jobs that they enjoyed doing then (band friends now band teachers, track friends now track coaches, etc.) but I don’t really have many thoughts about people’s interests as early as preschool.

My friends and I all loved pretend play and dolls when I was a kid and we all wound up being in different fields as adults. in our group of friends we have: an ER doctor, an international relations college professor, an immigration lawyer, a high school history teacher, a social worker, an architect, and a pediatric nurse practitioner.

Not that I’ve seen in my kids.

No. Not at all. I imagined all the time and am a computer programmer.

What makes a difference is talking math with her - making patterns out of snack food, counting things, doing basic addition and subtraction around the house, reading math picture books (there are a lot of good ones).

For example, I’m told I never played with Barbies or baby dolls or much pretend play with keeping house, etc. I’m a very left-brained person who loves math and is an engineer. DD on the other hand loves her baby dolls and pretend play, which exhausts me! Ironically, DH is actually much better than me in that! Does that mean she will be less mathematical?