Michael Kearney (born 1984) is an American game show winner and child prodigy. He is known for setting several world records related to graduating at a young age and his high earnings on television game shows.
Kearney was working at an improv theater group in Nashville, Tennessee, as of 2023.
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Education and early life
Kearney was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Kevin, an officer in the United States Navy who worked as an engineer, and Cassidy Kearney, a teacher of Japanese descent. He has a younger sister, Maeghan. Kearney was born two months prematurely because his mother had developed toxemia from anorexia nervosa and he had stopped growing in utero. Kearney developed early verbal and reading skills, speaking in full sentences at seven months old and reading phonetically after his first birthday. The family then relocated to Washington State. At age 3, he took apart the family television to see how it worked, but was unable to reassemble it. His parents then enrolled him in a Montessori school, where he was tested and placed in a mixed kindergarten and first-grade class. Kearney outpaced the material the school offered him, but performed poorly in certain tasks, causing him to act out. The family then relocated to Novato, California, and sought a psychological evaluation for Kearney at the University of San Francisco. He was then diagnosed with dysgraphia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. His parents declined to medicate him with his prescribed Ritalin.