  We study the effects of exotic kinetic terms on parametric resonance during
the preheating epoch of the early universe. Specifically, we consider
modifications to the action of ordinary matter fields motivated by generalized
uncertainty principles, polymer quantization, as well as Dirac-Born-Infeld and
k-essence models. To leading order in an "exotic physics" scale, the equations
of motion derived from each of these models have the same algebraic form
involving a nonlinear self-interaction in the matter sector. Neglecting spatial
dependence, we show that the nonlinearity effectively shuts down the parametric
resonance after a finite time period. We find numeric evidence that the
frustration of parametric resonance persists to spatially inhomogenous matter
in $(1+1)$--dimensions.
