When the World Calls Your Child a Genius: Persistence, Pressure and the Joy We're Trying to Protect

There's a video in my head I'll never lose. COVID, the one daily walk we were allowed, and my son — two years old, maybe a little more — running full pelt down the road, roaring. Not being silly. Roaring. Because he wasn't a toddler on a walk, he was a dinosaur, completely and joyfully a dinosaur. To other people on that pavement it probably looked a bit strange. To us it made complete sense, because a few months earlier we'd given him one of those lift-the-flap dinosaur books, all the really obscure ones, and by the time he was two and three months old he knew every single one.

Not because we drilled him. Because he loved it.

## Persistence isn't the problem — but it does cost something

I don't see my son's persistence as a problem. I never really have. That total, beautiful commitment to the things he loves is one of the best things about him. But I'd be lying if I said it never cost him anything. When an autistic special interest takes hold the way it takes hold of him, other children move on and he's still there, still in it, still going deeper. And that can feel a bit lonely sometimes, even when the interest itself is pure joy.

So I think about that a lot — how to protect the joy without letting the isolation creep in around the edges. I haven't cracked it. But it's the right question, I think.

## The genius label, and why it's a trap

My son is a natural mathematician — give him an obscure sum and he'll just tell you the answer, out loud, done. And he taught himself guitar by ear from about five, Mozart, nobody had shown him. People started calling him a genius. A prodigy. And they meant it so kindly.

But here's what those words did, without anyone intending it: they built a cage. Because when you tell a child they're a genius, you're not just describing them — you're setting a standard they now have to maintain. You're quietly telling them that this thing they love, this thing that's just naturally part of how they move through the world, is actually a performance. And performances can fail.

He sat his grade four classical guitar exam at six and got a distinction. And then he stopped playing. Completely. The thing he'd been getting up at 5am to do, just for love, he couldn't reach anymore. It wasn't that he couldn't do it. It was that doing it officially, with stakes, stopped it from being his. And once it stopped being his, the pressure didn't motivate him — for a brain like his, pressure is suffocating.

## What we do now: keeping the door open

There are no lessons now. No practice, no grade to aim for. Instead he has "music time with daddy" — two people, a guitar, no agenda. Sometimes, on his terms, he teaches his dad a chord he's worked out. We're just trying to keep the love alive, to keep the thing that is genuinely his from becoming something that belongs to other people's expectations.

Because that's the strange thing about the word genius. It's meant as a compliment, but a lot of the time what it actually does is take something that belongs to a child and hand it to an audience.

## The persistence is the gift

If your child goes deep on something — dinosaurs, numbers, a single video game, the entire history of a football club — I'd gently say this: the persistence is the gift. Not the grades, not the things that impress other people. The ability to love something that completely, to go that deep, to care that much. The world will keep pointing you and them toward the outcomes. The work, I think, is keeping your eyes on the love.

There is nothing I would change about that brain. Not a single thing.

I don't have a neat ending for this, because I'm still in it. But if any of it sounds like your child, or like you, come and listen — Episode 5 is the longer version of all of this.

🎧 Listen to Episode 5 and join the community:

And if today is one of those days where it all feels like too much, the free Two-Circle Reset is a 5-minute thing I made for exactly those moments:

You're not alone. I'll see you in the next one.

https://youtu.be/ybpvgY37w5Y