Kids are usually in a hurry to grow up and become adults, but is it really all that great being a grown-up? Adults are portrayed as the role models of our world, so is there anything these experienced folks can learn from us kids? I can assure you there is quite a lot.

It seems hard to think that adults, who are supposedly wiser and authorized, can learn anything from noisy and naughty kids. In today’s fast moving and demanding world, adults are compelled to follow a particular set of strict rules and instructions. As a result, they lose the touch of freedom and wild imagination, something that kids are full of.

If you ask an adult what their ambition is and you ask the same question to a kid, you will get very contrasting answers. Kids don’t hesitate when it comes to dreaming, they think outside the box and come up with the craziest ideas.  Adults on the other hand, think long and hard. This is because they are well aware of their abilities, and are confined by societal boundaries as well as self-skepticism.

All of us dream. However, when adults dream; they start pondering over it. Then, they come up with their own obstacles and eventually give up. Kids on the other hand, being their innocent selves, have definitive answers and a lot of confidence in themselves.

Being a teenager, I find myself to be stuck in the middle of this circle. We are partially aware of the things that can bring us down, but the “childishness” within ourselves gives us hope. I think that is something that adults most definitely need to adopt. They need to learn to be brave enough to believe in themselves with all their silliness.

You do not have to be serious and boring all the time to become an adult. It means you become a mature, wise and responsible person. It surely doesn’t mean that you can’t be children at heart. What does it mean to be a child though? Being a child connotes being happy in the littlest of things, enjoying everything to the fullest and always being excited with a sparkle of craziness.

In fact, as we look back in history, some of the silliest ideas turned out to become most successful and brilliant business campaigns. Adults tend to be scared of failure, afraid of falling behind, and fearful of looking stupid. All this is just societal pressure building up on them. Just as George Bernard Shaw said “We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing”. Thus, not only adults, all of us, need to learn to be carefree - Don’t be afraid of being childish, just be you.

Children are unbiased, honest, strongly opinionated and dare to turn bold ideas into actions. Anne Frank [age 16] touched millions of hearts by voicing out her account of the brutality of the Nazis. Ruby Bridges [age 6] helped end segregation (racial discrimination) in the United States. Two sisters, Isabel and Melati [ages 10 and 12], of our own home Indonesia, thought of an innovative way to reduce the littering of plastics in the famous island of Bali.  What adults can take away from this is that they should learn to be firm on their decisions and not be influenced to follow what other people want, they should be able to identify the things that are right and wrong for them, putting themselves before others.

All of us, grown-ups and kids, have our flaws and strengths; and we can exchange them with one another. The learning between adults and kids should be reciprocal. Kids should learn to be responsible, patient and understanding like adults; and adults can learn to be self-confident, creative, honest and most importantly childish like kids.

Having written this blog has been a very inspiring and quite enlightening experience for me. Being in the middle of childhood and adulthood is interesting and confusing at the same time, diving deeper into this intriguing topic has and hopefully will help me become a better person altogether, and I hope it can make you be the best version of yourself too.