Thinking Like a Child
Someone asked the legendary Art Linkletter once how he got kids to say the “darndest” things on his very popular 1960’s TV show. His answer was simple: “Just think like they think!” The older one grows, the truer and wiser that insight becomes. It may just be one of life’s best-kept secrets and perhaps one of the great keys to happiness.
Children have so much to teach us that we “adults” would do well to wonder sometimes who is really learning from whom, or who should be. Their sincerity is refreshing, their honesty is disarming, their innocence is both.
They laugh easily, they cry even easier — and the fact that they are so vulnerable and so impressionable makes us so accountable. We never see ourselves better than when we’re looking in their faces. We know ourselves better as we get to know them. They are a reflection of what we are. This can be unsettling.
They give us hope because they have so much. They increase our faith because theirs has not yet been tainted with doubt. They renew our love because they are so easy to love.
They have a transparent quality about them that we adults seem to lose somewhere in the teenage years. They’re real. They say what they think and usually mean what they say, and yet their inherent idealism is shattered the day they discover human hypocrisy – especially if it comes from someone they love or admire.
They are priceless. So rather than trying to make them more like us, maybe we should try to be more like them, to think more like they do.
For after all, Robert Fulghum was right. All we really needed to know we did learn in kindergarten, and wisdom really wasn’t at the top of the graduate school mountain but there in the sandbox, and if all of us would have our cookies and milk about three o’clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap, it really would be a better world. And it is still true, that no matter how old we are, we should hold hands and stick together when crossing the street.
So let’s do our children a favor this Christmas, let’s think more like they do. We may be doing ourselves the bigger favor.
Brian Schroeder is the former Wyoming Superintendent of Public Instruction, an ordained minister and founder/president of The ChrisCorps Association (bschroeder081858@gmail.com)