I used to worry my son was “too much.” Too loud, too energetic, too visible in places that expected children to be small and contained. Raising a high-energy boy meant moving through a world that often expects children to be quieter, smaller, easier to manage.
My boy was never going to be easy to take places
That was something I understood quite early, and spent quite a long time feeling bad about.
Not because he was unkind. Not because he was unhappy. But because he took up space in a way that other children didn’t seem to, and the world – or at least the particular corner of it we moved through – had quiet opinions about that.
Playgrounds were the worst of it, in those early years.
There is an unspoken social contract at a playground. Children play, broadly within certain limits. Parents watch, broadly without needing to intervene too often. Everyone goes home more or less as they arrived.
He didn’t operate within those limits. He wasn’t reckless, or unkind. He just had a tendency to play… fully. As if whatever he was doing was the most important thing that had ever happened, and the idea of doing it quietly or carefully or in a way that didn’t draw attention had simply never occurred to him.
I spent a lot of time at playgrounds watching him and watching other parents watch him.
There was one afternoon that I still think about.
He had found a tree at the edge of the playground. Not a particularly tall one, but tall enough that climbing it required some effort and a certain amount of noise. He had been up there for a while, fully absorbed, making the kind of sounds that small boys make when they are pirates, or explorers, or whatever he was that afternoon.
Nearby, a little girl was moving slowly through the grass collecting flowers. Quietly. Carefully. Her mother was watching her with an expression I recognized – the particular softness that comes from watching your child do exactly what you hoped they might.
The mother glanced at the tree.
Then she looked at me.
She didn’t say anything unkind exactly. Something like – goodness, he has a lot of energy doesn’t he. The kind of thing that sounds like an observation but lands like a verdict.
I smiled in the way I had learned to smile.
And then I looked up at my son.
The moment I realised he could feel it too
He had heard her.
I could see it in his face. Not devastation. Nothing as large as that. Just a small shift. A flicker of something that crossed his features and then disappeared as he went back to being a pirate.
But I had seen it.
And standing there at the bottom of that tree, I felt something loosen in my chest that I hadn’t realized was tight.
Because I knew that feeling. The one that crosses your face when you understand that you are being assessed and have been found to be a little too much.
I had been feeling it for years. Every time he was loud in a quiet space. Every time he ran when other children walked. Every time someone made the face, or said the thing, and I smiled and said something apologetic and steered him gently in a direction that would make us both less noticeable.
I had been carrying that feeling quietly through every playground, every café, every gathering where his particular kind of energy didn’t quite fit.
What children absorb without being told
And I realized he had been carrying it too.
Not because I had said anything. But because children feel what their parents carry. They absorb it the way they absorb everything – without being told, without understanding it fully, just taking it in and letting it settle somewhere inside them.
He knew, on some level, that he was a lot. That the way he moved through the world required apology.
And I had been the one teaching him that. Not with words – with a look. With a steering hand. With a smile that said – I know, I know, I’m sorry.
The little girl had climbed the tree by then.
Not as high as him, but up there, laughing. Her mother still on the bench, watching with an expression that had shifted into something more uncertain and more alive.
My son was showing her where to put her feet.
When I stopped trying to make him smaller
Something changed after that afternoon. Not immediately, and not completely. But definitely something had changed.
I stopped trying to manage him into a shape that would make other people more comfortable.
Not because I stopped caring what people thought. But because I had seen his face. And I understood that every time I quietly signalled that he was too much, he was receiving a message about who he was. And that message was wrong.
He wasn’t too much.
He was exactly what he was.
And what he was, I was slowly understanding, had things to teach me that I hadn’t expected.
What he taught me about slowing down
He taught me to go outside. Not because I had read that outdoor time was beneficial, though I probably had. But because outside was the only place where everything made sense.
His energy, which felt disproportionate inside – too loud for the living room, too physical for the kitchen, too wild for any space with breakable things in it – became completely proportionate the moment we were outdoors.
He could run without being told to stop.
He could climb without being told to be careful.
He could be as loud as the situation seemed to require, which was often quite loud.
And something happened to me when we were outside together.
I stopped watching him the way I watched him indoors. Stopped tracking him against some invisible measure of how much was acceptable. Stopped managing the gap between who he was and what the room could hold.
I just watched him.
A boy, moving through the world as if the world was built for him. Which, outdoors, it mostly was.
And slowly, without meaning to, I started to slow down. He made me do that.
And it wasn’t because things were calmer. They weren’t, particularly. It was because I had stopped fighting the current. Stopped trying to redirect it into something more manageable and started just – following it.
More parks. More trails. More long afternoons with no particular destination.
More mud, more noise, more time.
His way of being outside became my way of being outside.
Present. Unhurried. Not thinking about what came next.
Learning to read him differently
He also taught me something about feelings.
He didn’t perform them for me. Didn’t wrap them up tidily with an explanation attached. When something was hard, it came out sideways – in energy, in noise, in the particular way the afternoon would suddenly tip into chaos for no obvious reason.
For a long time I treated that as a problem to solve.
Later, I understood it differently.
He wasn’t hiding his feelings. He just expressed them in a language I hadn’t learned to read yet. And the work wasn’t fixing him. It was paying closer attention.
Which, again, meant slowing down.
Not the afternoon, or the pace of our days, necessarily. But something internal. Some rushing quality in how I moved through the hours with him. Some part of me that was always slightly ahead of the moment, managing what was coming rather than noticing what was here.
He kept pulling me back.
Not gently, always. But back.
A slower life, found unexpectedly
He is older now. Still himself – still fully, completely, unapologetically himself. Still the kind of person who climbs trees and makes noise and takes up space without particularly worrying about whether the space was offered.
I am glad he still does.
I think about that afternoon at the playground sometimes. The look that crossed his face. The girl climbing up to join him.
I wonder what would have happened if I had kept steering him toward something smaller and quieter and more apologetic. Whether eventually he would have arrived there. Whether the weight of all that quiet signalling would have slowly shaped him into someone less.
I don’t know.
What I know is that somewhere between that afternoon and this one, I stopped trying to make him easier to explain.
And in doing that something began to shift. Not in a way I could have named at the time. But looking back, I can see it: he was the one who started pulling me in a different direction.
My boy did that. Not by being calm, or easy.
By being entirely, exhaustingly, beautifully himself.