Kids are smarter than you think
Kids start out pretty useless, actually utterly useless. But they are so damn cute! As we know cute is good enough in this world, so good in fact that we take these little heartwarming things and nurture them into 5 foot something tall things and give them all of our stuff when we die.
But between being born and into adulthood we often treat our young children as if they are dumb. But these little adults have more in common with real adults than you think. Sure you don’t want to let your 3rd grader drive you home, your insurance rates would go through the roof! But you should trust them with knowledge of the world and not just tell them what to do.
As I have encountered more and more parents over the years something has struck me, the kids that do the best are the kid's whose parents trust them with information. Now maybe these kids do well because these kinds of parents are more attentive and it's genetic for them to be attentive, but I postulate that any human on this planet if they want to, can talk to their child were an adult.
Once again I am not advocating giving them the keys to the castle on day 1, but I am saying that you should explain to your little child why you want them to do the things that you want them to do.
The newborn’s brain is about 1/4 the size of a grown adult’s, so they have a lot to learn and they do so pretty quickly! By the time they are 2, they know who you are, who their family is, how to eat, poop in the toilet hopefully, know how to walk and believe it or not, know how to treat people.
It has been shown that a human starts to cement who they are going to be at about 3 years old, is your kid nice and kind and caring? They will have those traits into their 70’s. Is your child a huge asshole, that grabs, pinches and doesn’t listen to anyone? They are going to be your future boss.
As we grow we cement these things into our brains, we become our environment, we assume the roles that we are given and told to play and that becomes a part of our physical neuron network, this lovely growing network of small electrical gateways that we are just barely, maybe beginning to understand.
But throughout human history we can see what young mentorship does to a child, when taught at a young age to think like an adult, to understand empathy for people we usually make a good person. But if we treat them poorly and chastise them or talk down into them they turn into the villain in a superhero movie.
I only have the frame of reference for my journey and the journey I am witnessing with my 2 sons and their peers that I get to know and their parents. But one thing is abundantly clear to me.
If you treat your children with respect, all the time, you raise a respectful person.
There are lots of good kids that I know and there are other children who have issues and I can trace these issues in every case back to how their parents treated them. In some cases they just were asked to obey without being given any context for the orders they were supposed to follow. In other cases they were chastised or yelled at for minor infractions and never apologized to. Some parents think that they are the alpha and omega of their child's lives, but this is a false narrative, you are temporary in their lives and ideally, you will die before they do…right?
These children are our responsibility and they are the adults we are trying to raise so think of it like this. You start a brand new job and everyone around you is great, they talk nice to you and tell you what all the corners of the office do, who the janitors are, and how you can make their lives easier so they can do better for us. You are explained how pay works and easy ways to get more, you are shown all the shortcuts that these people have known their entire lives. There are times when you are sat down and trained on internal and even external protocols, things that matter and things that don’t seem to have much value but really do. Your boss takes you to lunch and tells you that you are doing a good job. Well if you have enough of that, after 2 years you will be a rockstar employee and when the next new person comes along you will follow in the footsteps of your trainers. But then when someone comes into your office that does not have those values and is a huge negative nelly you will not stand for it.
Now let's imagine most jobs, you are given your time card, given minor introductions, little training, and yelled at when you don’t perform. Maybe you are lucky and sometimes get some nice co-workers to stand up for you and show you some things but this training is not formalized by your employer so you only get tidbits here and there. Eventually, you learn that your boss hates the color yellow and you love yellow so you wear it a few times a week and you get treated like crap, but there is nothing you can do about it. You know the small stuff that can matter in life.
In our first scenario, you are golden, in our last one you are normal or in a bad situation, maybe you are able to pull yourself out of a hole and take something good out of it but there is no guarantee.
Your child starts their job on day 1, they can only learn what you teach them and what they see and you will control all of this information. It is imperative that you EXPLAIN why we do what we do, don’t just blindly give orders and expect them to follow. At best you will get someone that can’t think for themselves, at worst you will create a frustrated adult that doesn’t trust people to do the right thing. My analogy may seem strange, an employee and a child but if you think about it the logic is right in front of you, we are all entering new environments and there is education to be had. So we can do it correctly from the beginning or try to fix a mistake late down the road and if you have spent any time as an employer then you know its much easier to do it right sooner. If you don’t know that consider this a business article, treat and train your employees right, and your kids.
Your kids are smarter than you think, they will understand, maybe not the first time, but the 40th or 50th time. Your job is to repeat until they understand, not to expect them to understand the first time. We never know what will stick with our children and when, we just have to be there when the door for learning opens and you’ll have a much better chance of getting it through if you are consistently teaching and explaining how adults do it. Explain in a loving way as much as you can, and if you make a mistake apologize, it works at work and it will work with your children.
