What our children can still teach us

• Children naturally model the virtues — wonder, curiosity, humility — that adults need to revive in order to strengthen civic life and heal polarization.
• Recovering a posture of awe is not naïve; it is a moral and civic practice that fuels responsibility, gratitude, and the willingness to see the world as worth stewarding.
• Communities that remain strong, like many in Utah, are rooted in these childlike habits of attention and neighborliness, showing how renewing public life begins with renewing how we see one another.

​Every week, I hear the same lament from friends, colleagues, and readers alike: the world feels broken. Politics are tribal. Neighbors glare instead of greet. On our screens, cynicism passes for sophistication and contempt masquerades as courage. We are told that everything is polarized and that division is inevitable, as if it were a weather pattern we simply must endure.

But what if the remedy to this exhaustion isn’t another program or policy, but a posture? What if the most powerful way to renew civic life is to spend more time with those who still see the world as good?

How about we spend more time with children?

The fact is that children still see the world as a place of wonder. They ask questions without irony or agenda. They are, in the truest sense, moral realists: they believe goodness exists, beauty matters, and truth is discoverable. They are alive to surprise. And they remind us – if we’re willing to listen – that gratitude, curiosity, and humility are not childish virtues but the foundations of a healthy civilization.

For years, my son has reminded me that “anything can be art.” It’s a simple phrase, almost naïve, but it carries a kind of moral wisdom. Where adults see categories and hierarchies, he sees possibility. To him, creativity is not a skill to master but a way of paying attention.

That lesson came alive again this past weekend. We visited the new Sotheby’s galleries in New York and came face to face with the Italian provocateur Maurizio Cattelan’s notorious gold toilet – a piece that scandalized the art world when it appeared at the Guggenheim several years ago. “Just like Duchamp!” my son exclaimed, recalling Fountain, the urinal that turned modern art upside down. Then, without hesitation, he added, “It’s art.”

A few galleries later, we stood before Chiharu Shiota’s breathtaking installations at New York’s Japan Society. In front of my son and me were vast webs of red string suspended in space, both fragile and architectural. “That’s art too,” he said, beaming.

He was right, of course. Both works, as different as they are, point to something deeper than the objects themselves. They ask us to see – the gold toilet not as mockery but as commentary on value, the tangled threads not as chaos but as connection. My son’s instinctive reaction wasn’t to critique or categorize but to delight, to recognize beauty in surprise.

That moment – his joy in seeing – reminded me how easily adults forget what children still know: that the world is enchanted, that truth and beauty still exist, and that our attention is the price of rediscovery.

As we age, we train ourselves out of wonder. We become evaluators instead of explorers, skeptics instead of seekers. We reward cleverness over curiosity, irony over insight. In public life, this takes the form of constant judgment and performing our opinions rather than refining them, signaling expertise instead of exercising it. The result is a society brilliant at deconstruction and poor at awe.

But wonder is not childish, it is moral. It begins in humility, the recognition that we do not yet understand. That humility is the seed of learning, and it is also the seed of citizenship.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt once wrote that education is the point at which “we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it.” To love the world, one must first find it lovable. That is what children do naturally. They find fascination where adults find routine; they extend grace where we keep score.

This is not nostalgia. It is civic realism. A society that cannot see the world as redeemable will not work to redeem it. That is why spending time with children is not merely a family virtue but a public one. Their capacity for awe is not escapism; it is preparation for stewardship.

As we enter the holiday season, when the calendar itself invites reflection, we would do well to ask what it means to sanctify that sense of wonder. To protect it in our children, yes, but also to relearn it ourselves. Imagine if our public life were shaped by curiosity instead of certainty, by gratitude instead of grievance. Imagine if we approached civic disagreement the way a child approaches art: with openness, imagination, and a willingness to be surprised.

That is not naïve idealism, it is the moral imagination at work. It is the same moral imagination that built our towns and schools, our churches and synagogues, our voluntary associations and neighborhood parks. It is what Alexis de Tocqueville saw when he described America’s “art of association” – the habit of citizens taking responsibility for the common good. And it is what still animates much of the American West, where family, faith, and freedom remain intertwined, and where civic strength begins not in Washington but around kitchen tables, in classrooms, and in congregations.

Utah, in particular, embodies this spirit. Its communities are sustained by families who still gather for dinner, who still know their neighbors, who still see service not as charity but as duty. That civic culture did not appear by accident; it grew from moral habits and the willingness to see the world, and one another, as gifts worth protecting.

When the news feels unbearable and the discourse irredeemable, don’t retreat further into screens or cynicism. Spend a morning with your kids or your neighbors’ kids. Walk through a museum, a gallery, or a park and let them narrate the world for you. Watch how they delight in what you overlook: the gleam of brass, the shadow of wire, the dance of color through glass.

Our political culture will not heal through legislation alone. It will heal when we recover the habits of heart that sustain both family and freedom – habits children still live by instinct. The task for the rest of us is to listen, to learn, and to remember that the first civic virtue is not knowledge, but wonder.