What Parents Can Learn from Their Children
We assume that childhood is a process of learning—of accumulating knowledge, understanding social norms, and preparing for the so-called real world.
We imagine ourselves, as parents, as the wise guides leading our children through the labyrinth of life, equipping them with the tools to navigate its complexities. But what if we have it backwards?
What if, instead, our children are the true philosophers, and we are merely their students?
I was confronted with this thought recently when my young daughter came home, looked at me, and immediately asked: "What’s the problem?"
She hadn’t been told anything. She hadn’t been primed to expect bad news. She simply saw it—registered my expression, my body language, the almost imperceptible shift in energy that adults often miss in each other. She noticed what was there, not what was said.
It was a moment of pure presence. No speculation, no assumptions, no over-explanation—just a direct question cutting through all the noise.
Children often arrive at philosophical truths through lived experience rather than abstract reasoning.
That evening, my daughter saw me wrestling with a difficult situation—an instance where an adult had been deeply unfair to her.
She looked at me, absorbing the weight of it, then simply said, "Okay, I forgive that person."
It wasn’t resignation. It wasn’t forced. It was a quiet, deliberate act of power.
She understood something many adults struggle with—that forgiveness is not about justifying another’s actions, but about choosing not to be bound by them.
She had, in that moment, taken control of something unjust, not by fighting it, not by denying it, but by asserting her own agency.
She decided to forgive, and in doing so, made the concept of forgiveness entirely her own.
This is why children and philosophy belong together. They don’t just theorize about ethics and human nature—they live these ideas, often with a clarity that adults spend their lives trying to regain.
Children see the world as it is, not as it should be. They do not linger in imagined narratives of betrayal or injustice unless they are taught to do so. They experience, they feel, they react—but then they let go.
It is adults who hold on, who replay the scene in their minds, crafting alternate versions of reality, who find themselves trapped in loops of resentment or analysis.
This is something philosophers have grappled with for centuries.
The Stoics urged people to accept life as it comes, to control only their own reactions.
Zen Buddhism emphasizes beginner’s mind—the ability to see things without the distortions of accumulated bias. Children do this naturally. They do not struggle to accept reality; they simply meet it as it arrives.
Of course, children lack the wisdom that experience brings, but experience alone does not necessarily lead to wisdom.
Sometimes it leads only to cynicism, to layers of self-protective armor that constrict rather than liberate.
Watching a child respond to life’s events with fluidity and openness is a reminder that perhaps we are the ones who need to unlearn.
What do parents stand to gain from this? For one, a renewed ability to meet life with curiosity rather than defensiveness.
To see events as they unfold without the need to judge them immediately as good or bad, fair or unfair. To recognize that sometimes, the healthiest response is not a strategy or an argument, but a simple, What’s the problem?
Perhaps, if we are lucky, we can relearn what we once knew.
Perhaps our children, unknowingly, are here to teach us what we have forgotten.