Lessons Learned from...Children

Original thought: Children are a gift from God? Having none of my own and no plans to have any, I may not be the most obvious promoter of kids, yet I felt the time has come to make this post. Between spending lots of time with my 18-month-old niece and just finishing Ian Brown's The Boy in the Moon, I have lots to say on the subject of what children teach us. I know, I know, this subject has been done to death; the poor old horse has been beaten so much he's practically dead. But bear with me and stay tuned, I think I may have something new(ish) to say...

Amended thinking: While of course there are many things that little ones help us learn (as aforementioned, many authors have chronicled them ad naseum), I've discovered after that perhaps I do not have anything new to offer to this narrative. I don't think I'm comfortable essentializing children in this manner. "Children" is my first Lessons Learned post that involves people. While I know we all try to learn from our fellow human beings each day, it's important to learn from particular people. It wouldn't be appropriate, for example, for me to right a post on Lessons Learned from, say, "The Elderly", "The Blind" or "White People" (OK, this one might not be appropriate, but might be hilarious...thanks, Christian Lander). Not to say that we can't learn from individuals in these groups, but I think it's important to learn from the individual, not from our stereotypes about the group.

A common thought is that "children are a mirror" - they show us what we truly are. If this is true (and I'm not necessarily convinced it is), I am a narcissist, trying to turn them into a lesson for me to learn. So I didn't learn a lesson from children themselves, but from trying to learn a lesson about children. How meta is that?

I like learning a lesson from everything in life, but not EVERYTHING is a lesson for me to learn. Some things are just meant to be appreciated for what they are.