At the age of 4 all of the children are prevalently geniuses in the way they perceive the world. They’re clean and unstained by what awaits them so they take each day as if it were a miracle, a boundless realm to explore and create, to learn and expand, interconnect, cross-reference let’s say the taste of the carpet and that of a rock, the point where something breaks, the way ants behave or your reaction to the lizard they brought into the house. They are not being mean, naughty or hard to handle, they are exploring what it means to be alive and how the things in this reality function.

They are innately curios about all and everything and at one point you’ll start to suppress it just by having so much on your mind that you don’t have the time to answer all of their questions or they are so far outside of your comfort zone you have no idea how to answer. At that age they carry every potential to make their life free, beautiful and productive with unconventional solutions to what they’ve seen. And then you tell them “no”, than the teachers, society, close and wider social surroundings tells them “no”, colleges, employers and law tells them “no”, moralizations tell them “no”, people who’ve lost the curiosity tell them “no”. We put up boundaries and barbed wire around certain behaviors as unbecoming, irrational, weird, unacceptable, unproductive, forbidden and wrong.

By their early 20s the children in decades long study have fallen from 100% genius level to 10%, and a decade later only 2% was left with their curiosity and zest intact. By the time they are 17 they will have heard “no” 150 000 times and “yes” only 5000 times. The more you’re repeated who you can’t be, what you can’t do or where you can’t go, the all opened “yeses” of early childhood start to disappear and create a closed box of fitting in, reinforcing the neurological pathway of “no” and this part of you just stops trying, shuts down due to the amount of backlash and punishment received for searching. No one is saying that all should be allowed, “No” is necessary to save them when they unaware of the dangers are doing something potentially dangerous, but how many of the “no’s” were just for your convenience, where you didn’t want to deal with something or repeated what they can or can’t do just because you were taught that way, without ever examining why. We’re not shooting for a 100% “yes” but a balance between the two that could keep the free and unbound by rules not made by the measure of a man. Systems don’t raise your children, you do!