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I Spent a Year Asking Children for Life AdviceโโโAnd It Rewired My Brain
Wisdom from the least experienced, delivered in the most profound ways.
Photo by Aaron Piang on Unsplash
The first time I leaned down and asked a child, โWhat advice would you give me?โ I was expecting something silly. Something about ice cream flavor or which superhero would win in a fight.
Instead, I got lightning. A six-year-old boy looked up at me and said, โThe hardest time to say no is when it matters the most.โ
He didnโt know the word peer pressure, but he knew the shape of it. That moment became imprinted on me. I had spent my life fitting myself into spaces and rooms I didnโt belong in and saying yes when I should have said no.
Nevertheless, here is this child, not even tall enough to reach the counter, telling me a kind of truth that most adults struggle to learn in a lifetime.
I began to casually carry a notebook and jotted down advice any time I could. Some children shared wisdom by accident, through their stories or through their tantrums.
Some children said things that were so sharp and so clean that they broke through the clutter and noise in my head. What began as a light-hearted experiment became a daily practice.
For one year, I focused on asking kids for life advice, and honestly, it rewired my brain.
Children taught me humility in the simplest ways
One day in afternoon, a little girl decided to try out her new bike. The look of joy on her face vanished as soon as she realized pedaling that bike was going to be harder than it looked.
She dropped the bike and shouted, โI canโt do it!โ Then she ditched her bike and went in the other direction, away from her new bike.
I felt the urge to fix it for her. I was going to push, coach, and insist.
Luckily for both of us, there was something I saw and heard from another parent: stop watching. Give them the space to fail.
I walked away from her and found a seat on the porch. A few minutes passed, and I turned around to see that she had come back on her own.
She was pushing the bike into the grass. She wobbled a bit, scraped her knee, and tried again.
By the time the sun went down that evening, she had her body moving across the yard with the kind of grace that looked like she had been on a bike since she was born.
That day, something different happened inside of me. I began to realize how often I choose to rush my growth and, as a consequence, I stare at myself too hard and wrestle myself down for every little failure.
Kids reminded me that persistence blooms best when no judgment is hovering above their heads.
Humility is not belittling yourself. It is stepping back so life can teach you on its own terms.
I witnessed this truth again in a group of children playing with blocks. One boy yelled at another for knocking his tower down.
Rather than punishing, the teacher just sat with them until they calmed. Then she said, โItโs normal to be mad. But talk when youโre ready.โ
The boys ended up laughing, building one tower together.
And in that moment was a philosophy: emotions donโt need fixing, they need space.
Their advice reshaped how I see adulthood
Once, a boy said to me, โAlways respect the working man.โ
His father had said this to him one day in a grocery store after he cut in front of a man stocking shelves. The father explained, โOne day you will be doing a job, and you will not appreciate someone blocking you from doing it.โ
I stood there stunned. Think of all the people I breezed past and walked past at airports, cafes, and offices. That boyโs advice hit me harder than anything I ever read about leadership.
Respect is not some grand gesture. It is quietly choosing to treat every single person like they matter.
On another day, a kid told me, โPeople donโt think about you as much as you think.โ
He explained it with this: Can you think of the last time you thought about a stranger who tripped publicly? The answer was never, unless prompted.
That thought obliterated years of excessive self-consciousness. How much of our life do we spend worrying about people judging us and what they think? If those feelings fade before the moment ever ends?
Even humor contained truths. One child told me, โDonโt water the tree your noose is tied to.โ
It was dark, but it was also brilliant. He meant donโt keep pouring water on the very thing that hurts you.
I was thirty years old and finally had words for the times I had stayed in toxic relationships or literally worked myself to exhaustion.
Wisdom doesnโt always come in soft tones. It can show up raw, odd, or even uncomfortable.
And then there were the understated, almost poetic lines. โThis too shall pass.โ โDonโt set yourself on fire to keep others warm.โ โBe nice until someone gives you a reason not to.โ
The kids handed me phrases to be mantras during sleepless nights, boardroom conflicts, and heartbreaks.
Wonder and play rewired my worldview
As I gathered these pieces of wisdom, I saw that children were not just teaching me strong lessons about resilience or respect. They were teaching me how to wonder again.
I remember one girl was so frustrated with a jar of playdough that she could not open it. She finally gave up and said, โI donโt want it anymore.โ
At first, I laughed. Then I saw myself. How many times had I declared that I didnโt want something simply because it was hard to get to?
She had reminded me that giving up isnโt always a weakness. Sometimes itโs a doorway to patience.
Reading childrenโs books with them added an additional layer of lessons. There were lines in Charlotteโs Web about friendship, or in The Little Prince, reminding me that โall grownups were once children, but only a few remember it.โ
These were not just words. These were step-by-step instructions on how to leave my humanity intact while the world pressed down on me in demand of efficiency and status.
One boy said to me without hesitation, โBelieve in yourself. Wizards start as students.โ
He was quoting Harry Potter, and I could feel the sparkle in his eye like it was its own original prophecy.
Another boy leaned in during a group activity and said, โNever grow up. Always down.โ
It made no sense, yet it made all the sense. Sometimes meaning isnโt logic, itโs play.
At the end of that year, I noticed myself changing. I began to pause before I acted. I apologized quickly. I spoke to strangers with newfound softness. I said no without guilt. I laughed more.
Most importantly, I changed the way I listened; I started to listen, not just to children, but to everyone.
Because wisdom is not ordered by age, wisdom is everywhere. Wisdom is waiting for us to become humble enough to hear.
What children gave me, I try to carry forward
In hindsight, I think the children were not offering me advice to help me put my life back on track. They were holding up mirrors.
They showed me how tenuous patience can be, how respect is learned in the smallest moments, how humor has the power to carry the most unbearable truth, and how play can weave joy back into the fabric of days that are just ordinary.
As a 30-year-old Indian man with blinders on who chased status and productivity, I wouldnโt have predicted that kids would have been my best teachers.
They became my philosophers, my comedians, and my reminders that being human has little to do with knowing more and much to do with remembering better.
When I find myself slipping back into cynicism or self-importance, I return to those notes I jotted down.
Children, awkward, blunt, hilarious, tender children, remind me.
Wisdom did not arrive downwards from the elders in my life. Wisdom bubbled up from the smallest voices around me.
Children rewired me, through their honesty and their wonder.
The smallest voices tell the biggest truths.
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I Spent a Year Asking Children for Life AdviceโโโAnd It Rewired My Brain was originally published in The Human Journal on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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