There’s a phrase I like to reference a lot: “out of the mouths of babes.” It’s originally from the Bible, and it means that kids can sometimes say the most utterly profound things when we least expect it. When kids are thinking something through, they have a way of breaking it down to its simplest terms and coming up with surprisingly sound judgments and decisions. See, as adults, we carry around a lot of excess baggage, and everything we think and hear and see all day long has to get through the filters we’ve built up over the years. Have you ever had “analysis paralysis,” where you’re so stuck in a problem that you can’t figure out the best solution? Try asking a kid. They’ll make the obvious (and usually correct) choice. The worst that can happen is if they choose the option you don’t want them to choose, then you’ll know what your heart really desires. Either way, the kid helps you make the decision! Enjoy these pearls of wisdom below, right out of the mouths of babes.
1. On my little cousin’s birthday someone said to him you’re getting old and he replied “I’ve been getting old since I was born.”
2. My daughter looked at me and said: “your love is a cake, and if you have another kid, I have to share half of my share with it. I don’t want to share. Besides, dad already takes two out of three parts of your cake.”
3. I apparently told my grandmother, after my second sister was born when I was 4, that I felt like “a cupcake without any sprinkles because nobody wants me.”
4. “No dad you don’t get it, she’s not my imaginary friend I’m her imaginary friend.”
5. After sleeping over at my friend’s house one night, their little daughter came and snuggled up with me in the morning and was telling me about all of little kid problems. All of a sudden she went, “You know what you call someone who’s pretty but isn’t nice?” half asleep I mumbled, “What’s that?” She said, “Ugly.”
6. My daughter was following me around asking whether things were alive or not, and telling me her opinion on them. “Cars aren’t alive,” she said, “because they can move but they don’t grow.” Then she asked “What about words? Words change and grow when we use them. Words are alive.”
7. I told a kid that he just said a made-up word. “All words are made up at first…”
8. There was a kid at a daycare I worked at was playing with a doll and I asked him what he was doing, he told me this is Jenny and told me her life story, he said this was true. I said, “Do you have a friend named Jenny?” He said something along the lines of “No I don’t but you don’t know if there is someone out there living this life, we never will there are too many people.”
9. My son went over to our neighbor’s house that had just lost his wife and sat on his lap. When he came home I asked him what he said to the old man and replied “nothing, I just helped him cry.”
10. I was cooking one night and I dropped the food and let out a very annoyed grunt. My daughter who was just about to turn three at the time looked at me and said “You don’t have to be angry daddy; you just have to be happy.”
11. I saw this parent giving a small kid (4, maybe 5) some pocket money, adding the phrase “Don’t spend it all!”…Standard parent stuff.
The kid just looked at the 2 coins and said “But all you can do with money is spend it.”
12. I remember talking to my son in a car ride explaining how life is no more than a game; my son asked “In video games, your goal is to be the hero or the best. So why don’t people do that in real life?”
13. I mentioned at a get together once that the bonfire smelled like my childhood. My friend’s son said to me, “And now it will smell like my childhood when I grow up.”
14. I was looking through my son’s primary school workbooks and found one of those ‘My name is…’ When I grow up I want to be…’ -type activity sheets. At age five, my son answered the “Something special about me is…’ question with: “I am no one else.”
15. When my uncle was very sick in the hospital my son looked at me and said, “Does everyone die?” “Eventually, yes” I responded. My son looked down and said nonchalantly, “Well if we’re all going to die why are we so afraid of it?”
16. I took my son bowling and his ball got stuck in the gutter about a meter in. I went to go retrieve the ball and unknowing how slippery the floor was, I slipped and fell flat on my back. When I finally crawled back to the line my 3-year-old son stood over me and said “that’s probably why you’re not supposed to cross the line.”
17. When my son was around 3, while sitting at the dinner table, he put his hand on my husband’s shoulder and said, “You are a good man. You are an angry man, but you are good.”
18. My friend’s kid explained The Hulk to me. She said he’s a big green monster and when he needs to get things done, he turns into a scientist.
19. I taught Kindergarten and we had a pinata for Halloween treats. After breaking it open I saw Neil (the disruptive kid in the class) comparing his bag of treats with Lisa’s. I wandered over to get a better look at what was going on, and sure enough, he was going through her bag of treats. Before I could interrupt I saw him giving her some of his treats so that they had the same amount. I later told him I saw him being kind to Lisa and he responded with “She needed me.”
20. My little sister handed me a juice box as I was packing to move out and said “No one is really a grown-up. They just act old because they have to.”
