One of the worst things my parents ever did to me was limit me.
Not with cruelty. Not with obvious abuse. Not with some dramatic, cinematic villainy.
Just with a quiet, ordinary, everyday refusal to take my mind seriously.
And if you’re a parent reading this, I want you to understand something up front: limiting a child doesn’t always look like punishment. Sometimes it looks like “stability.” Sometimes it looks like “keeping them grounded.” Sometimes it looks like fear dressed up as responsibility.
But the outcome can be the same.
It can reroute a life.
I Wasn’t Bad. I Was Bored.
If you’ve ever had a smart kid, you know the pattern.
Half of them become teacher’s pets. They behave. They take the gold stars. They learn to win the room.
The other half? They get labeled.
They’re “difficult.”
They’re “restless.”
They’re “a distraction.”
They “won’t apply themselves.”
That was me.
Public school was repetition. And repetition is a kind of slow starvation for a kid who learns fast.
By the time I walked into class, I’d already read what was written on the board. I knew where the lesson was going. I knew the answers. So for the next hour I did what a lot of kids do when they’re trapped in redundancy: I entertained myself.
And if you’re entertaining yourself in a classroom, you’re usually disturbing someone else.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t learn.
It was that nobody was giving me anything worth learning.
Fourth Grade: The Moment That Should Have Changed Everything
Back then, Indianapolis Public Schools did placement testing.
In fourth grade, I tested at a college reading level.
The school told my parents I should be placed into advanced classes.
And here’s the part that still sits in my throat decades later: my parents didn’t do it.
I was a C student, so they ignored the recommendation and kept me placed right where I was.
Think about what that means.
A school system — not known for generosity — looked at me and said, “This kid needs more.”
And the adults responsible for me said, “No.”
So instead of being introduced to things that might have lit my brain on fire — language, higher thought, challenge, discovery — I stayed in a room where I already knew the ending before the lesson began.
And when you trap a kid like that long enough, they will find stimulation elsewhere.
In my case, I didn’t find French.
I learned to shoplift from a classmate.
That sounds like a punchline, but it isn’t. It’s a warning.
If you don’t give your child something worthy of their mind, the world will.
And the world doesn’t care whether it feeds them light or poison.
Fast Forward: I Watched It Happen Again
Years later, I’m an adult. Recently divorced. Strained. Doing my best to parent inside a broken relationship and a complicated life.
And then I get the message:
My daughter’s school wants to advance her.
That moment hit me like the ghost of my own fourth grade.
So even though my ex-wife and I were in a place where talking was hard, I swallowed everything and told her what happened to me. I begged her. I explained it plainly: “Please don’t do to her what was done to me.”
But she lived in that same limiting world — the world where fear wears the mask of “being practical.”
So my daughter stayed where she was. Same redundancy. Same wasted time. Same slow atrophy that happens when a mind built for running is forced to shuffle.
And the results were similar.
Not because she wasn’t gifted.
Because she wasn’t fed.
What You’re Looking At Now Is the Salvage Version
Everything I’ve built through the Cernunnos Foundation and the Blue Ribbon Team — the writing, the ideas, the systems, the worldbuilding, the research, the experiments — that’s my mind’s output.
But understand what you’re seeing.
You’re seeing the version of me that self-educated through curiosity after being raised to be a drone worker by people who didn’t care where their kids ended up.
That’s not bitterness. It’s observation.
I’m a grown man building an entire ecosystem of thought largely because I refused to accept the limits placed on me.
And sometimes I look at what I’ve done and I don’t feel pride first.
I feel grief.
Because I can see, very clearly, what was stolen in time.
Imagine what a small amount of encouragement forty years ago could have done.
Or even a little challenge.
Anything.
The Lesson for Parents
Please don’t limit your children.
I’m not saying force them into some miserable pressure cooker. I’m not saying treat them like trophies. I’m not saying push them into advanced classes so you can brag.
I’m saying something simpler and more human:
When you see talent, get out of its way and feed it.
A child’s mind grows like a muscle.
If you keep it under load, it strengthens.
If you leave it in redundancy, it weakens. It goes looking for resistance somewhere else — and that “somewhere else” is often not safe, not healthy, not dignified, and not reversible.
Challenge your children.
Mentally. Creatively. Curiously.
Give them harder books. Give them bigger questions. Give them languages. Give them projects. Give them tools. Give them problems worth solving. Give them rooms where they are the smallest mind in the room sometimes.
And when a teacher tells you your child needs more?
Don’t ignore it because their grades don’t look pretty.
Sometimes the smartest kids have the ugliest report cards — because they’re trapped in a system that rewards compliance more than intelligence.
Don’t mistake boredom for laziness.
Don’t mistake restlessness for failure.
And don’t mistake “keeping them normal” for protecting them.
The Line I Wish Someone Had Said to My Parents
Your child does not need to be reduced to be safe.
Your child needs to be challenged to be alive.
If you want a better world, start there.
Feed what’s good.
And whatever you do — when you see talent — don’t stand in front of it.
Disclaimer:
I am not, nor have I ever been, a perfect parent. I am certain that my own failures shaped my children in ways I still do not fully understand. This piece is not written to point fingers or assign blame. It is written in the hope that the next child whose mind runs faster than the world around them might be recognized, challenged, and supported rather than limited.
