There is a proverb: “A real teacher is one who is ready to learn from everyone he meets. And a true student is one who sees his teacher in everyone. But where are the children? Believe me, they are our best teachers!
Often at seminars on child psychology, I ask the question — «What do you learn from your children?» And every time the audience is perplexed: “What should we learn from them? We ourselves teach them everything!” I beg to differ. We are not able to educate or even give advice if we do not ourselves strive for new horizons.
So what can our children teach us?
Children teach us… the ability to live for today. Adults spend a lot of time thinking about the future or remembering. Among the «dreamers» and among the «nostalgic» one rarely sees truly happy people. Only those who live in the present are happy. This is how our children live. That is why almost all children feel happy people.
- What is your role in the family?
They teach us unconditional love. The ability to love not for something, but just like that, is something that we, adults, often talk about with distrust, and yet it is thanks to this that life, no matter how difficult it may be, acquires meaning.
Children are open to the world, and therefore the world is open to them. This is about mental flexibility. Most adults «lock the door» on their heart. To some extent, this is necessary, such closeness protects us, but often it also leads to a negative perception of the world and oneself in it. When we don’t trust the world, the world doesn’t trust us.
Surely you have noticed that children do not have conventions and restrictions, stereotypes in thoughts and behavior. The older a person gets, the more patterns create a wall that makes it difficult for them to see new paths. Communication with children, a conscious desire to learn from them, helps to weaken the influence of these restrictions and live more meaningfully and freely.
And of course, we should learn from children the ability to be happy people. The Russian philosopher Grigory Pomerants wrote: “One can be happy for no reason. One can be happy despite failures, even misfortunes. A child is always capable of happiness and is happy when he plays, when he feels his mother’s love and loves her. And many big people are too preoccupied to be happy. When we, adults, respond to the lessons of love that children teach us, we get a chance to find our way, to feel like a truly happy person.
- What worries our children?
* G. Pomerants «Lonely traced path» (Delphis, 2002).