The Ones Doing The Teaching Are Smaller

Go to a child expecting to be taught something, and the odd effect lands on you rather than on them. You become more present. Most of us arrive the other way round, carrying a list of what we intend to pass on about a life they joined only a few years ago.

We do hold information worth handing over. They also arrived holding something we have spent decades wearing away.

They have not yet decided what things are for

A child does not avoid a person on the basis of appearance, and does not regard a pair of shoes as having only one function. Psychologists have a name for the adult version of this, functional fixedness: once you know what an object is for, it becomes difficult to see it as anything else. Children are markedly less subject to it, for the simple reason that they have not finished learning what anything is for.

A saucepan and its lid can hold one of them for thirty unbroken minutes. Watch that happen, then try to recall the last time anything held you that way without a screen being involved.

They have not learned to manage the face

They are utterly unselfconscious in what they show. Delight, fury, and boredom all arrive undisguised. The management of expression is one of the first things we teach, usually without meaning to, and it is genuinely useful, and something goes out of the room when it is complete.

They live right inside the hour they are in, looking at everything with the openness that comes of not yet knowing, and out of that comes a plain excitement about the world which adults reach only with difficulty. Nearly every path of self-improvement anybody has ever set out is, in one form or another, an attempt to find the way back to it.

The dance of leading and following

We still have to be the loving guide. That part does not go away and should not. But being with children teaches you to move between leading and following and back again without treating the change as a defeat.

Adjusting as the flow shifts, from wearing shoes on your head one minute to making sure everybody has eaten the next. When you let a child set the direction of the play, they pull you somewhere you would not have gone, into not knowing what happens next, which is the thing adults arrange their entire week to avoid.

The honest limit

None of this makes children wise. They are not. They have simply not narrowed yet, and the narrowing is exactly what makes an adult useful, capable of keeping a household running and a promise kept. The argument is not to be a child again. It is that the narrowing went further than it needed to, and thirty minutes on the floor with a saucepan is a cheap way to find out how far.