The Wonder Years

Learning from Children

I’m going to make an exception and post this one on both my blogs…

I was going through my daily dose of blog feeds when an interesting post caught my eye.  ZenHabits wanted to share with its readers How to be Childlike, and offered some great advice on how you can start being more childlike.  What I found most interesting, however, was the number of ways in which we can improve as adults, by learning from our children…

Some qualities of young children that happen naturally:

  • they live in the present
  • they have no concerns about money, productivity, or being cool
  • there are no limits to their imagination, except what they’ve been exposed to
  • they play and lose themselves in play
  • they create with abandon
  • they are endlessly curious, and ask questions … without end
  • they love showing off to their parents

We could learn a lot from children. Sure, they have qualities we might not want, but in my eyes, they are already perfect. We don’t need to mold them into people, we need to be more like them.

We lose this childlike nature, the nature we’re born with, because of society – it has certain institutions and systems in place that beat childishness out of us, so we can be more productive citizens and consumers…

So many of us need to remember this one.