Children are great teachers

Sometimes I believe that children have so much to teach us, and we have so much to learn from them. Contrary to the popular idea that we are supposed to teach them how to live life.

Of course, we are supposed to guide them, and we’re supposed to make sure that there are certain rules and ways of being that they are protected from or aware of. But that’s not the only transaction I believe should exist in relationships with children.

Maybe our relationship with children does not have to be a one way transaction of adults teaching and children learning. There is so much that we can learn from simply paying attention to how they move through the world.

When I look at children and their ways of being, there is so much about them that I wish we also gave space in ourselves as adults.

I think there is a sense of spontaneity and willingness to just do things, try things, experiment with newer ideas, jump into newer games or activities, join in on something interesting that people are doing, and how they do it with sheer excitement and a wish to explore it.

There are other times when I look at children and I see how important play is for them and how important movement is for them, and they probably don’t even know how it benefits them or why it’s important, or they’ve not read theories or articles about its requirement in adulthood. It just comes very naturally to them. If you look around, you’ll see it’s very hard for kids to just sit still. They just want to play. They want to engage. They want to move. And there is so much joy in tweaking rules, explaining rules, having other people follow them, in a sense also just bringing people together in their spirit of wanting to play.

And perhaps that is one of the beautiful things about play. It brings people together without requiring a reason beyond the fact that we want to play. There is something about children being able to enter into that space so naturally, without first needing to know what it is doing for them or why it is important. And people do come together simply because of how much honesty children bring in while asking for it.

When I look at children, I also believe that so many of them are unabashedly expressive and honest about their emotions and their feelings, things that they hear around.

If they’re feeling sad, they’re feeling sad, and they will come and make sure that you’re aware about it. If something hurt or upset them at school, they will make sure that you exactly know which friend or teacher did what and how that affected them. If they’re missing somebody, or are hurt, or excited about an upcoming birthday, you will exactly know how their thoughts and feelings are structured around that particular event or person.

And I believe that’s one of the things that we significantly lose as we grow up. There is so much hiding and shielding of words, of feelings, of expressions, of sharing, and of our own experiences with people. Sometimes it feels as though we’re all walking around with shields, trying to be very careful about which parts to disclose and which parts not to.

Of course, children also learn very early that not everything can be expressed everywhere, and that there are things that may not feel safe or appropriate to share. But I think there is something about the layers of social filtering that we develop as we grow up that can sometimes become so thick that even our loved ones, the ones that are close to us, have no idea about our inner worlds and our state of being either.

As adults, there is so much shying away from expressing love, an emotion which is as beautiful as it can get and an emotion which, in its truest sense, fills a person’s heart and just gets absorbed with every part of the body. And we are so afraid to explore that and express that.

And perhaps that’s something that we have to learn from children.

Even when it comes to that idea of children wanting support and wanting somebody to fall back on, wanting their caregivers, their parents, their loved ones around while they’re celebrating, is something I have been in awe of.

A lot of asking for help and support feels like something wrong, or feels like a task when we grow up, and our sense of wanting to be independent almost precedes everything else.

And perhaps somewhere along the way, we begin to confuse independence with not needing anyone. We become so proud of being able to do things on our own that asking for support can start to feel like a failure rather than simply another way of being in relationship with people.

And in that process, somewhere, we lose the possibility of warmth and care that having support, in fact, can bring, even if we have to ask for it.

Maybe there is something we can learn from children about allowing people to be a safe place for us too. About knowing that being able to return to somebody when we need them does not necessarily take away from our independence.

The way that children dream, the way that children allow themselves to fantasise about different possibilities, the way children allow make believe scenarios to exist, also takes a little away from the seriousness of life which we all have to move through.

And maybe sometimes stepping into that world of fantasy and imagination can be one of the nicest spaces that we allow ourselves to move through. Of course, while recognising that reality looks very different from it.

And perhaps there is something similar about curiosity too. Children are extremely curious and inquisitive. They want to know everything that they possibly can under the roof. They ask questions, they notice things, they want to understand people, and sometimes they ask questions about parts of our lives that we didn’t even realise were visible to somebody else.

Sometimes, as we grow up, we find ourselves holding back from showing interest in other people. We don’t always make the time or the space for other people’s stories to also be seen and witnessed by us. We become so caught up in our own lives that curiosity about another person can sometimes start to feel like an intrusion, or simply something we don’t have the time for.

And yet, curiosity can be such a beautiful thread that brings relationships and people closer to one another. It can be a way of saying, “I see you. I want to know you. Tell me more.”

Sometimes I have seen children around me ask questions about a particular aspect of my life that perhaps no adult did. I remember my younger brother, when he was nine years old, calling me and randomly expressing how he noticed that he would really like to learn how to be with people and make time for everybody else because he saw me do that.

Perhaps that explicit expression of acknowledging my behaviour was not something that other people around me, especially adults, had done. And I think there is so much to learn from that too. To just express. To just share. To be curious. To learn. And to grow with each other.

Maybe that is also what curiosity allows us to do. It allows us to remain interested in one another. To keep discovering people even when we think we already know them. To ask questions instead of assuming that we know.

Children are great teachers if we allow them to be so, and trust me, they will teach you with the utmost glee and enthusiasm!