3 Incredibly Important Lessons We Can All Learn From Kids
I recently came across an intriguing question on Quora.
It was:
“What can adults learn from children?”
Here’s what I came up with:
1.) Appreciate the little things more often.
Kids are always appreciative — and it’s something we need to pay attention to as adults.
It’s awesome seeing a little kid’s face light up when they see their friends or get an extra big scoop of ice cream. It’s warming to see them happy just because it’s a sunny day or because they get to wear their favorite shoes.
But as we get older, that appreciation fades.
Our lives get busier, and we feel we have less time to allocate to appreciation. We don’t seem to care about the ‘little things’ anymore.
We need to start.
2.) Listen to your body.
Kids are wonderfully in tune with their bodies.
They go to the bathroom when they need to. They eat when they’re hungry. They go to sleep when they’re tired. They run around when they need to burn some energy, they stretch when they’re sore, and they rest when they’re sick.
They have it figured out.
We, on the other hand, have it backwards.
We binge-eat while watching Netflix, even if we’re not hungry. We stay up late when we’re tired and skip breakfast if it means getting an extra 5-minutes of sleep. We sit hunched over keyboards all day, without exercising to destress.
If there is anything we can learn from kids, it’s to listen to our bodies and stay healthy.
3.) Learning is everything.
Kids have an untamed curiosity — they want to know everything about everything.
In reality, it’s instinctual. In order to survive, we need to learn — simple as that. So, we gather all the information we can, process, determine it’s usefulness and either use that information to our advantage or remember it for later.
We lose that as we grow up.
I don’t know if it’s the structure of schooling that scares us from learning or the accessibility of entertainment through emerging computer technologies and the Internet, but our desire to learn decreases dramatically as we go from kid to grown-up.
We need to prioritize learning again.
