Children teach us as much as we teach them

By Dr. Heather Bozant Witcher
Young Adults

Parenting is an endless learning opportunity.

I was making dinner in the kitchen while the kids were in the living room. In those moments, often, I’m bracing myself:

Who will hit whom? Who will run so hard and slide into the furniture? Who’s going to need my attention while I’m trying to brown the ground meat?

Instead, there was silence. In my house, that’s not always a good thing. You can imagine the various scenarios that play out with twin 3-year-olds and a 1-year-old who wants nothing more than to be like his big brothers.

I prepared for a scene as I sneaked over to peer into the living room.

We have a cushioned play mat that we unroll for a softer surface on the wood floors. The mat was sprawled out; the sofa pillows and blankets were missing. And the children were running and crawling over humps and bumps that had been created on the mat.

It was a scene that I watched quietly, inwardly proud and pleased and astonished. Once they saw me watching, of course, they wanted me to join in – running over the “terrain” amidst choruses of “push them back under.”

It was a “new game,” as they told me later. Their imaginations had gone wild, and their creativity exploded to create something that only they could understand. Somehow, their brains had connected the idea of pillows and blankets with the mat and established that great fun would be had. And it was!

For the rest of the evening, their “terrain” provided an endless source of amusement. Running, hopping, crawling, rolling. As I watched and listened, I realized that this was the kind of creativity and out-of-the-box thinking that so often vanishes as we enter adulthood.

In my professional writing courses, we often turn to real-world businesses and collaborative models to analyze how new ideas and new partnerships get created. Innovation, after all, drives productivity and workplace happiness. The common trait that some of the most well-known and successful businesses share is their out-of-the-box thinking. That’s what they’re looking for in employees.

Where is it, then, that we lose the capacity for such imaginative and creative play?

I don’t look at a mat and think of all the possibilities that that object could have; I look at it and think, it’s a good play surface. But that emphasis on possibility – on creative opportunities – is often what drives the next big idea … or at least creates a sense of excitement.

Parenting has shown me that  – unlike what I thought – it’s not only myself doing the teaching and modeling. Of course, our children learn from us (the good and the bad). But we learn from them, too. And that’s perhaps one of the greatest joys of having toddlers – it’s an endless learning opportunity.

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