A woman at the park gasped last week. My son was three feet up a climbing frame built for kids twice his age, moving like he’d done it a hundred times. Because he had. He’s twenty-five months old. He doesn’t really run — he launches. Off the couch, off the bed, off anything with an edge. Most days he lands fine. That gasp wasn’t really about him falling. It was about a kid that small, moving that sure of himself.

I felt two things at once, watching her gasp. Pride — that’s my son, look at him go. And right behind it, a flicker of the same fear she had. My wife feels those exact two things too, just in the opposite order. Worry first, then pride. For a few weeks, we treated that as a disagreement between us. It isn’t. It’s the same two feelings, showing up in a different order, in two people who both love the kid doing the climbing.

Every parent has this moment. You watch your kid do something or not do something and a small voice asks: is this normal? Is this me? Am I doing this wrong? Nobody tells you that voice shows up. It just does, usually at the worst time, usually while someone else is watching.

So instead of just feeling that voice, I went looking for what it actually is. Not to prove I was right. To understand what was actually happening — with him, and with us.

He’s not reckless. He’s wired this way.

Turns out, psychologists have studied kids like this for decades. There’s a well-known way of describing a child’s basic wiring, built by a researcher named Mary Rothbart. She broke it into three parts: how easily a child gets upset, how much self-control they can manage, and how much they crave big, fast, exciting stuff — climbing high, moving quickly, jumping into things headfirst.

That third one has a name: surgency. And one of the actual questions researchers use to measure it, word for word, is whether a child “likes to go high and be swung around fast.” Another is whether they “run, rather than walk, from room to room.” I didn’t need to invent a description of my son. Someone already wrote one, years before he was born, and he’d top the list without knowing he was being tested.

This isn’t a discipline problem. It’s not us being too soft, or too busy, or not saying no enough. It’s just where his dial is set. Some kids are born wanting big and fast. Some are born wanting quiet and slow. Neither one is the “better” kid. They’re two different settings, decided before either kid could walk or talk. I trusted that same instinct once carrying him up to Tiger’s Nest, at 10,000 feet — the drop was real, and so was his certainty that I had him.

Why “just calm down” doesn’t work

Here’s the part that actually mattered to us. The self-control piece — the ability to stop yourself mid-impulse, or redirect when someone asks you to — is the slowest of the three to develop. It’s not missing at two years old. It’s just not built yet. Research shows this skill grows mostly across the toddler and preschool years, not before them.

So when we ask him to “channel that energy into something calmer” and he doesn’t — that’s not him ignoring us. It’s not us failing as parents. We’re asking a kid to use a part of his brain that hasn’t finished growing yet. A big appetite for excitement, paired with a self-control system still under construction, isn’t bad parenting. It’s just a timeline. And it’s not a timeline either of us gets to speed up.

It’s not just him. It’s also us.

Here’s the piece that’s less about who he is, and more about what he watches every day. Kids don’t copy everything around them equally. They copy what they can actually see happening, especially when it gets an instant, obvious result. A dad jumping off a step is loud and visible and immediate — a toddler can try it themselves right away. A parent sitting quietly with a book or a pencil is quiet, slow, and mostly invisible from the outside. There’s nothing obvious to copy.

I move constantly. Always have. My son has spent two years watching one parent be loud and physical, and a lot less time watching a parent sit still and make something quiet with his hands — because that’s not something I do much either. So it’s not just that he was born high-energy. It’s that our house has mostly shown him one way of being in a body. Nature picked the setting. Our home picked which direction was easier to practice. It’s the same discipline I wrote about in watching him without stepping in — except this time the thing I have to hold back isn’t my hands. It’s my own wiring, showing up as his.

Why this isn’t really about our son

Here’s where it stops being just our story. Think about what we all quietly call “good toddler behavior” — sitting still, staying focused, being easy to manage in a room. That’s really just describing kids who happen to have more self-control early. And self-control, remember, is the one part of the brain that takes longest to grow in every single child, no matter their type.

Which means the whole yardstick we use to judge “a well-behaved two-year-old” is measuring a skill that barely exists yet in anyone that age. A quieter kid looks calmer earlier simply because they don’t have as much impulse to hold back in the first place. A high-energy kid is asking the exact same unfinished brain to do a lot more work — and won’t look “calm” at the same age, if calm is the only thing we’re measuring. That’s not one kid ahead and one kid behind. That’s a measuring stick built around the easiest trait to spot, unfairly judging every kid who doesn’t happen to have it yet.

We weren’t really disagreeing about him. We were each carrying pride and fear alone, and calling the gap between us a disagreement.

My wife felt this insecurity before I had any of this to explain it. She’s the one who said it out loud first — told me she was worried, told me she wanted us to actually sit with it instead of talking past each other — and asked me to write about it. Partly so I’d be forced to actually understand it, instead of just telling her not to worry. That’s a harder thing to hand someone than it sounds. It’s also the entire reason this piece exists.

We didn’t fix anything, exactly. What we got instead was a clearer picture. He’s not behind, and he’s not too much. He’s a kid built for big and fast, with a self-control system that hasn’t caught up yet — being raised in a house that’s spent two years showing him mostly one way to live in a body. The climbing was never the problem to solve. It’s the most honest thing about him we’ve seen so far. The only real job left for us is building a house with enough room in it for the kid who actually showed up — instead of quietly measuring him against the calmer one who didn’t.