The Insights of a Child

I read a blog post of one of my friends, and she told an intriguing story about a time when she gave her 7 year-old cousin a dollar because she lost a bet, and her cousin started running around the house screaming “I’m rich! I’m rich!” It made me realize that we have our best communication skills when we are children. Children don’t worry about being politically correct or whether or not what they say is offensive. They tell you exactly what they mean without being tactful. If they don’t like how something tastes they will say, “Yuck,” whereas an adult would say, “I think that it has too much salt.” Why is it that as a human race, as we age we only get worse at communicating.

Maybe that’s exactly the problem: we age. As we get older, it is not socially acceptable to be blunt. With a child, those blunt comments are seen as funny, whereas with an adult it is only seen as rude. As we age, there is an expectation that we will also mature, and as we mature, there is an expectation that those offensive, blunt comments that get to the heart of the problem should no longer be accepted. So then why is it that as we mature, and our vocabulary and processing skills improve that we find it more difficult to say what we want to say?

One of my hypotheses is that we become too concerned with social correctness that we lose the meaning in what we are saying. It’s like writing a good essay. There is a reason that many drafts are required, we don’t get it right the first time. When we talk, it’s like speaking in first draft form. This could be why many people are communicating more frequently with texts and emails. It allows us to formulate the “right” sentence without the awkward moment when the person is standing in front of you waiting for an answer.

Many people, when hearing a criticism, immediately assume that it is only meant to demean what they have done. Often times, criticisms are meant to improve what you’ve already accomplished. We think of the word ‘criticize’ in its pejorative sense too often. It could be this way of thinking that is forcing us to revise our criticisms to the point that it loses its meaning. Instead of using the word ‘bad’ we replace it with ‘developing’ or always make sure to add a ‘but…’ What I mean is that there is always a comment praising another portion of what you’ve done that makes the criticism meant for improvement seem less important. That is why I always tell people who are trying to come up with “the right words” to tell me what they initially thought. From my experience, the watered down version of the truth that occurs from mental revisions only cause more communication issues. Ironic how in trying to come up with the right words to solve a problem, we can often create another one, and the most innocent people in the world, children, are the best at saying what needs to be heard.