Can kids answer your life's questions?

Kids have more council for you than you’d expect! They see more through you than you are aware. Both you and children can benefit enormously from this knowledge.

As founding member of the Open Up festival, a festival that focuses on collective growth, I was asked how to connect the children’s activity more to the adult part. Then I remembered ‘The Fairy Tale of Reality’ I had organized with a friend in 2001.

At this festival, we invited kids to come to our booth to answer life questions that adults faced. The effect had been amazing. Lots of willing adults had anticipated a moment of nice conversation with a child. They, as much as I as the inventor, were surprised at what happened. It was more truthful and real than anyone had expected. I remember a women coming out saying “I needed six months of therapy to admit that this child is right.” All the more reason to repeat and upgrade the booth for this festival.

Together with my partner we prepared and hosted a workshop for a group of kids between 9 and 12 who wanted to participate. We taught them how to work at a counter and most importantly how to get the question of the adult clear. Kids often consider adults as talking unnecessarily complex in order to evade things. In other words, what bothers us about most politicians bothers kids about us. So we taught them only to come up with their answer when they got the understood the question. After the workshop we let the kids loose on the adults.

I was seriously touched with how much integrity these kids had and how they talked to adults on the same level.

What happened was that within two hours after they started they were at it almost full time. They opened up a second and third counter and even started to make money on it on a voluntary basis. A child’s advice “If you look for a new partner, be yourself and go to outdoor activities with your friends.” So elegantly simple. It’s true, if you’d do this: You’ll smile more because of your friends and the activity and have a bigger chance to meet new people, both through your friends and because you are at new places.

I have met many adults who were really impressed with the advice they got and even set to work with it. But also the positive pride of the kids went sky high. Can you imagine what it does to a kid if they meet an adult who is prepared to seriously listen, is open to being helped and takes their council seriously? Can you imagine how happy kids are to help adults out?

At the end of the festival the children insisted to speak to the whole festival community about how much they had liked participating in this activity. I wonder what would happen if organizations or politicians would meet children in this kind of set up. I am now looking for opportunities to try it out.