What kids can teach you
10 learnings
My boy’s now eight and at an age where he’s really coming into his own as a person, from choosing the clubs he wants to be part of, to writing the comics he’s constantly making with his friend. At whatever age, from the day he was born he’s always taught me something. He’s just an amazing person. The Japanese have a good word for this, it’s Oyabaka, a parent who’s a bit of an idiot about their own children. That may be true and I may well be blissfully deluded, but whatever that case I reckon the lessons are still valid.
1. Play
The best moments we share are where we’re playing. That might be making something together, being silly with words, pulling faces or just trying to make the other one laugh. Play connects.
I have also loved watching him explore the world through play, trying stuff out and seeing where things go. It’s liberating and inspiring, and I want to take a leaf from that book. How can we use this kind of exploratory play to make our experience of life richer and more meaningful?
I’d say the answer is in reframing experience as a set of opportunities to discover things. It’s through play that we make it more likely to make discoveries, so it’s my job to play and my purpose is to communicate the value of play—when and how it’s useful.
There’s more on that here:
2. Relax
He sometimes talks about things stressing him out but generally he’s really relaxed. It means he’s great company. He’s also a great antidote to my anxiousness. I love and want to learn from his combination of being relaxed and thoughtful, it’s such a great combination. I guess because he’s not preoccupied with thinking about himself and his place in the world it leaves more space to consider other people and their’s.
My sister came to stay last weekend and it happened to be her husband’s birthday. We’d forgotten so my boy took himself away and came back with a card he drawn and a bar of chocolate he’d wrapped up. I’d love to emulate that level of care and thoughtfulness.
3. Do a lot
If you want to get better at anything you need to do a lot of it. I’m often guilty of wanting to get straight to the end result but my boy’s approach to squash has shown me another way. After going to classes for a while something clicked and he started to practice at home, just hitting the ball against the wall. He started doing it all the time. His timing and technique improved, but also it was clear that he just enjoyed the activity. We’re often too busy or distracted to get into that kind of headspace but it’s somewhere I’m looking to visit more often. That kind of focus is joyful and productive.
In the comics he writes and draws with his friend he’s always on to the next one as soon as one is finished. I love that lack of preciousness and appetite to explore. When you gather a few of them together you can see how much they are experimenting with form, story-telling, colour and line.
4. Enjoy your friends
He’s eight now and has a great group of friends at school, two of which he’s know since he started nursery at the age of two. That consistency and depth of friendship is a beautiful thing. Appreciating my own friends is something I want be much better at. It’s about sharing time, connecting meaningfully and having fun. It’s also about being supportive. When my boy started football club he wasn’t that good, he’d never really played that much, but one of his mates never missed an opportunity to say how well he did something that practice— it was a lovely thing to see happen.
5. Do the right thing
I tend to bend a bit too easily, I’m a bit eager to please. My boy has a more developed moral core, he’s got a great instinct for what’s right. I think this is innate but we also trust him — he has plenty of opportunities to do the wrong thing but he generally chooses not to. I’m sure I’ll look back at this when he’s a teenager and want to rewrite this section, but for the time being it’s true.
I think he wants to do the right thing partly because we’ve been clear about what’s acceptable and what’s not. Those boundaries have to feel meaningful if they are to have any effect. That’s to say they are as logical as you can make them and you apply them consistently. But also, those boundaries need to be moral, appreciating the fact that children tend to be brilliant moral philosophers, they deeply care about truth, justice and fairness.
My boy has a feeling for what’s right, but I need structures in my life to make doing the right thing easier. Habits. Charles Duhigg talks about keystone habits in The Power of Habit; identify and implement one of these and its effects ripple out much further than you might imagine. For me this is running and exercising. While I do it I feel more alive—but also I’m more sane afterwards, it makes me easier to live with and I’m pretty sure I helps me make better decisions.
6. Want to get better
Recently my boy joined a football club. He’s not a huge football fan but his friends are and they play all the time. He said “I want to do this because I’m not very good at it”—I love that he’s realistic about his own level of skill and not inhibited by it. This is something Carol Dweck has written brilliantly on in Mindset. She calls this a growth mindset as opposed to fixed: the fixed mindset is defensive, protecting what you have; a growth mindset allows you to reframe your experience as opportunities to improve and to grow. Most people are probably a blend of the two mindsets, depending on their mood and the circumstances—but being conscious of how you see reality can allow you to choose how to react to it.
This is something I struggle with especially when under pressure but I’ve found at these time it helps to talk, please see point eight.
7. Draw
I love the way he draws—he’s eight so just starting to get a little more self-conscious about things but he’s still able to draw with so much freedom. I’ve been trying some simple exercises to try and loosen myself up a bit, one of those is 30 circles. You draw 30 circles, give yourself a time limit, and then adapt each circle by drawing a line of two. My boy’s circles are shown here.
8. Talk to yourself
Ever since my boy could speak he’s talked almost constantly. He’s done this whether there was someone to listen or not. As an only child I think his words help him build worlds.
I’m much less ambitious, the lesson for me is that you’re more conscious of things as you vocalise them. Your commentary can help guide and shape things as you’re doing them. You see this in how police drivers are taught to talk through everything they are about to do as they drive—the words force your brain to focus and to anticipate.
I often talk to myself in the street, but I do also get funny looks for doing so. There are more practical ways to articulate your thinking. I’m finding this place is a great for that — I’m talking to myself as much as anyone else here. Having the thoughts outside of my head makes them much easier to tame and make sense of.
This kind of openness is great at home and at work, it enables people to build a shared understanding. I work at Red Badger and it’s fundamental to the way they deliver.
A twist on this lesson is to internally vocalise what people are saying to you as they are saying it. It’s a way of listening more deeply and is one of the things I learnt from a recent improv course, you read more about that here:
9. Don’t care about what other people think
I always have cared way to much about what others think about me so it’s a huge blessing that my boy doesn’t seem to. He’s a little shy in large groups or in unfamiliar surroundings but that doesn’t hold him back from being vocal and keen to share his ideas and enthusiasm.
He’s always known his own mind, down to what he wants to wear and how he want his hair (long). He doesn’t look for validation and isn’t all that bothered when those choices are questioned — they’re his and that’s what counts. I think he has a bedrock of confidence that allows him to operate with this kind of grace. I don’t think confidence is something you can just conjure up, but perhaps you can cultivate it?
I’m trying to learn this lesson by putting myself in situations where I know I’ll be uncomfortable and then proving to myself that I can deal with it.
10. Recognise what’s precious
This last lesson was taught to me on the day he was born. I held him in the palms of my hands, cradling his head and back. A whole life. I’d never been so relieved to see anyone. It was such an intensely sweet moment. The immediate thing I took from that was that I was always going to love this boy whatever he did.
The longer, slower lesson I’m beginning to appreciate is that the people you have around you are incredibly precious. It’s not just the people, it’s where you’re at, it’s what you have. We spend so much of our lives trying to get somewhere else, being driven by ambition, or striving towards achievements or rewards. I not saying that’s wrong, but when our minds are always in the future we can overlook what’s here and now — or worse we develop a deep dissatisfaction with where we’re at—perversely something that can’t always be fixed by getting what you think you want.
I’m looking to keep this lesson fresh in my mind by counting my blessings and and doing my best to say thank you.
