“Flighty. hyper. careless. impossible to settle.”
These are the words that cling to monkey children as soon as adults realize they cannot be folded neatly into structure. Teachers scribble them on preschool notes when a child is caught climbing tables instead of sitting in circles. Relatives whisper them when your child bounces from one toy to the next without finishing a single game. Strangers mutter them in restaurants when your child sings to themselves while dangling upside down from a chair.
And if you are painfully honest, these words have escaped your own lips too… not because they are true, but because in your exhaustion, when bedtime has unraveled for the third night in a row or when your child has lost three pairs of shoes in a single month, they are the only words that seem to capture the chaos.
They are not truth, though, and you know that. These labels are shortcuts, designed to collapse vitality into flaw, to disguise sensitivity as disobedience, to reduce the complexity of…
