How much fun is it to just hang and chill with kids?

In the early years especially, there’s no judgement, no image, no ego—it’s just a little inquisitive spirit of love navigating through its newly formed sensory apparatus whilst attempting to decipher the information in the world surrounding it.

This translates into a positive energy for everything around them.

These kids speak with enthusiasm and excitement. They ask direct and tactless questions. They’re free in the sense that they rarely hate and they’re curious because they want to learn, so a near perfectly objective point of view is what they offer.

But not all adults see them in this way. Some parents just completely disregard the wisdom of their child’s thoughts and feelings. It really is a missed opportunity.

A child can provide some fantastic insight into the reality of our existence so they should always be treated with this capacity in mind. Just because we’re an adult, it does not make us better than a child or even more intelligent than them in every way.

For example, one child I work with was in the middle of suggesting that his Mum should look after herself too, just like we were suggesting that he should do for his mother by not chucking tantrums. She cut him off and said that is irrelevant, but that was entirely incorrect.

Considering that she was an extremely anxious person who lets her self-generated stress consume her, it was utterly relevant for her to take better care of herself.

The child could see how much self-abuse she engaged in, so he simply called it the way he saw it.

Not only are they pretty sharp with getting to the core of some issues, but they’re fucking funny too. Their curiosity and imagination fuels the artistic articulation of their experience so sometimes this can result with some ridiculously humorous statements.

Here are some illustrations of funny and insightful things that children have said to me:

• Your head looks too small for your body
• I don’t know why mum yells all the time, yelling isn’t fun at all
• Did you know that the ocean is like our air, but for fish?
• Sometimes I wonder where the universe is
• Everyone should just be friends
• I still like playing with my sister even though she always beats me at everything
• Where do the birds and the bees come from?
• Why are so many people fat?
• You smell funny, but a good funny.

As you can see from these examples, kids are both hilarious and perceptive. They have a beautiful ability to view the world through a more pure lens. This makes us feel super good when we’re around them.

They also are more open to receiving information that is potentially precognitive.

I was working with one particular girl who believed that sometimes she would dream the future before it happened. She was a beautiful child, just under ten years of age and had a good nature. I would hang out with her on average once a fortnight for nearly a year, so we became quite close. I would always look forward to her telling me about her dreams which had turned out to be a premonition of her eventuating reality.

For example, she told me she had dreamt about the new family dog a week before the pup was brought home as a surprise.

Another day she expressed to me that she had a dream the previous night which came true—it was about her friends and their specific actions which they had exactly enacted at school that very day.

On an additional occasion, I had gotten a little lost on our journey. We drove past a telecommunications tower and she pointed to it and said “that was in my dream last night.” In that moment I knew that we weren’t lost; we were exactly where we were meant to be. I kept driving according to my intuition and almost immediately we were surrounded by a familiar environment and back on the right path to our destination.

These uncanny experiences with children are not uncommon. Yet as they grow older they are usually told by their parents, the school, society and their other interpersonal networks to believe a certain way, so they lose their natural ability to tap in to the greater grid.

Just like an animal knows when a tsunami is heading their way, humans have the innate capacity to know and feel energy, but over many generations our imagination and awareness has been unfortunately impeded through social and cultural conventions.

If we want to create the opportunity to consistently experience this phenomenon then all we have to do is hang out with young children.

They also have an amazing natural skill at gazing at the world in wonder and exercising a state of reverence. They look at leaves in the wind as a magical experience. They see the sun filtering through the trees as a divine masterpiece.

It’s these types of lessons and reminders that make hanging out with kids so f#@king awesome. They have much to teach us, as long as we don’t close ourselves off to it.

Ultimately, if we conceive our adult selves as both a student and teacher, then we’re more likely to tap into the wisdom of our little unbiased and uncorrupted mirrors.

Hanging out with kids is both an enlightening and entertaining experience.

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Editor: Renée Picard

Image: Momo Mustafa at Pixoto