Who's the leader?

" Dylan, look here, look here, look at this cool red car! No, stop playing with the wrapping, look at the car!" Does that sound familiar? How often do you try to engage your little one in something that, in your eyes, is obviously exciting, but he just seems to be fascinated by something else altogether? Well, take heart. Every time you find yourself in such a conflict of interest, you might do well do abandon your own pet project (whatever it might be) and start talking about your child's current object of affection. A study done by M. Tomasello and M. Farrar showed that when 1.5 year olds are taught new words for objects, they learn better when an adult talks about and labels objects to which the kids are already attending, as compared to when the adult tries to redirect their attention away to another object and talk about that object instead.
And in case, you were wondering the objects used in the study were equated for their 'fun quotient'. This means that the researchers made sure that the toy that the child was attending to and the toy that the adult was trying to trying to draw his/her attention to were equally fun. This precaution rules out the possibility that in this study children learned better when the toy was more interesting (Tomasello & Farrar, 1986)
Bottomline: Try to 'follow-in' on what your child is attending to, as far as possible. Let him/her take the lead! Of course this makes most sense in your child's first two years, and might not apply later.