Did you know that you can smash a glass juice bottle with a soft ball so that the orange juice inside splatters a wonderful yellow color all over the living room wallpaper if you just choose a particularly good angle and kick it with a lot of force? Do you still know the prepositions of the ablative? Are you over 40 and still know all the influencer fashion brands? Do you regularly try out a completely new sport? BMX perhaps? Or water ballet?
If you answered yes to all of these questions, then I congratulate you. You have contact with children. Maybe you have some at home yourself. Or maybe you just like to invite your nieces and nephews over for a weekend sleepover. Maybe you work in a school or a daycare center. Maybe you are a swimming coach or a social worker. Maybe you just talk to the young people in your neighborhood.
In any case, you know: children are a lot of work, yes. And I’m not just talking about dirty laundry and spilled juice bottles. Life with them is a constant challenge: they have to be raised, they’re hard work, they cost money. They really get on your nerves. But today is no time for complaining. Because children are, first and foremost, a joy. And this text is therefore intended to be nothing more than a declaration of love to all people under 18.
Milk tooth out, meeting ruined
Because such an orderly and boring adult life is given lively disorder by children. They dance in the living room on a perfectly normal Tuesday afternoon when we are working from home. They prevent us from attending boring meetings because they knocked out a baby tooth just half an hour before while wrestling. They rearrange kitchen cupboards so thoroughly that you end up not being able to find the flour or discover it weeks later in the shoe cupboard next door.
And we adults benefit. Not only does our patience get thicker, children also train our ability to react. They force us to leave the well-trodden action highways in our brain and take the detour via synapses that have long since become rusty. They make us spontaneous, creative and flexible.
Do something about your calcification – let children into your life!
A Spiderman costume for a birthday coffee at Grandma’s? Why not? Thinking through the conditional probability from tenth grade stochastics with your 15-year-old and maybe even understanding it? What a workout! Conducting a remote sales pitch on the sidelines in the sun instead of in the office? Sometimes it even works better. You just have to duck your head every now and then when the ball is flying low. If you don’t plan on starting a well-organized bonsai nursery at the age of 35 out of sheer boredom and the onset of calcification, then let children into your life!
But children don’t just keep their brains busy. They also train physically. My mother, for example, who thought sport was an absurdly unnecessary activity when she was young, taught us children to ski. She even got into the football business for a while for her grandchildren.
If you’re worried about losing muscle mass and gaining weight while lazing on the beach, this won’t happen if you travel with people under 12. You’ll be running. Either after a wobbly toddler who’s about to throw himself into the waves, or after a ball or a kite or a pair of underpants that you’ve carelessly taken off and are now floating away.
Helping earthworms across the sidewalk – children are the best mindfulness trainers
And then it’s also about mindfulness. “Now” is a time reference that perhaps no one can fill with life as well as a child trying to balance a ball on top of another. Building a tower out of Lego bricks. Helping an earthworm across the sidewalk. Spreading strawberry yoghurt evenly over the dining table.
Do you know the wonderful feeling of gratitude when real happiness shines through in your everyday life every now and then? No pay rise, no lottery win, no car, no trip around the world, no success on earth can release as many endorphins as one of these tiny moments sometimes does: the view of the sandy bathtub in which you showered the children after a day at the beach, playing happily. The smell of freshly baked bread that comes from the heads of the sleeping eldest. The giggles from the children’s room; the youngest reads a comic in bed at night. The joy of the fifteen-year-old when he manages to do a backflip.
Imagine: A huge property where no gang of kids ever runs around
And even the huge amount of money that children cost – it’s a good thing that it’s invested in them. Imagine if you had invested all that in parties, alcohol or other stupid things. In a huge property that never has a gang of kids running around. In elegant dinners with muted music. In outrageously expensive skin creams that are supposed to distract us from aging but don’t magically make wrinkles disappear. In that sense, the money in a bicycle, a children’s book, a recorder, new wallpaper for the completely messed up living room is really well invested.
Speaking of money: children are actually a financial asset – if you can wait a little. Because of course the brat who is currently devouring kilos of steak with mashed potatoes, spaghetti bolognese or expensive organic muesli at our expense will, in the best case scenario, pay your pension. He may ensure that this society has new ideas that will help us move forward economically. In the end, he will invent a CO2-eating machine, a pill for dementia or a frugal plant that can feed the entire world population. Some of our children will look after us, lug our water crates, conduct peace negotiations or plan senior-friendly housing for us.
The wait won’t take long. And that’s actually quite sad. After all, people are children for the smallest part of their lives. So don’t wait too long: count trees, pet caterpillars, collect stones, lay your head on the grass and tell yourself stories about the cloud monsters that are currently passing through the sky. You will then feel what happiness is again.
