Brian Schroeder

Someone asked TV legend Art Linkletter once how he got kids to “say the darndest things” on his memorable TV show of the same name. His answer was simple: “Just think like they think!”

And therein lies one of the great secrets of life and perhaps one of the great keys to happiness. 

Children have so much to teach us that we “adults” would do well to wonder sometimes who is really learning from whom, or who should be. Their sincerity is disarming. Their honesty is refreshing. Their innocence is both. 

They laugh easy, they cry even easier — and the fact that they are so vulnerable and so impressionable makes us so accountable.

We never see ourselves better than when we’re looking in their faces. We know ourselves better as we get to know them. They are a reflection of what we are. This can be unsettling.

They give us hope because they have so much. They increase our faith because theirs has not yet been tainted with doubt. They renew our love, because they are so easy to love.

They have this unvarnished transparent quality about them that adults seem to lose somewhere in the teenage years. They’re real. They say what they think and they usually mean what they say, and yet their idealism is shattered the day they discover human hypocrisy.

They are priceless. Few things in life fall legitimately into that category, but children do — they are truly priceless. So rather than trying to make them more like us, maybe we should try to be more like them, to think more like they do.

For after all, Robert Fulghum was right: All we really needed to know we did learn in kindergarten, and wisdom really wasn’t at the top of the graduate school mountain but there in the sandpile — and if we would all have our cookies and milk about 3 o’clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap, it really would be a better world. And it is still true that no matter how old we are, we should hold hands and stick together when crossing the street.

So during this Christmas season, let’s do our children a favor: Let’s think more like they do. We may be doing ourselves the bigger favor.

Merry Christmas!