Is it right to ‘Catch them young’?

Over the past two nights, I learnt that my 4 year old son has a philosophical edge. Typically, he doesn’t easily relent when he is asked to get onto his bed and sleep. He makes also sorts of excuses and keeps awake till my wife gets tired and sleeps herself. Most times, his excuses had been to either switch off the light in the bed-room, without which he won’t sleep or to tell him stories. But, during the past two nights, I noticed a difference. He was lying down on his bed and suddenly started asking us questions, which surprisingly turned out to be quite philosophical; I don’t know, if he realized them to be so; I also don’t know, from where he got these ideas? The previous night, he asked point blank, who ‘created’ us? If he asked me the same question slightly differently, I wouldn’t have took much notice and be so shocked. I can understand that kids usually are interested to know about how they came into this world? But, it is slightly unusual for a kid of that age to ask, *who* brought them here?

The night before that, he asked me another more intriguing question. Why does *yesterday* not come back and allow us to live again? I was really shocked and almost equally awed to hear him ask this question. It sounded unbelievable, for it was one of my own favorite questions too. I have delved on such thoughts a lot, because I like to. The answers for those lie in some extremely cryptic science – maybe physics, maybe evolution, maybe mathematics – I don’t quite know and I know also that none of us know. But, these are extremely interesting questions.

I didn’t attempt to answer this question to him. Partly because, it was not the right time to and because, I thought he wouldn’t understand if I explain him my philosophical thoughts behind it. But, I could be wrong. Maybe, he can much more easily inculcate what my mind is straining to reason, because adults are heavily adulterated by certain specific ways of thinking, while kid’s minds are completely open – they are highly receptive, willing to accept anything, without attempts to reason them too much.

Almost all adults are slaves to their thought process and fall flat on realities. Depending on which area you’ve worked most in your life, you are either logical (try to reason everything before you believe them) or you are creative (try to innovate and bring in your own thoughts into the existing ones). Though, there are few people who have both traits enough in their minds, there is probably nobody who has a good balance of both and with the most important element called acceptance, that links these. I believe that kids are much better than adults at both, since they haven’t seen much of either worlds and hence not as polluted as adults are.

So, is it right on our part to ‘catch them young’ as is stylishly put, inject them with our age-old convictions and thoughts and pollute their minds. The truth is, I don’t know…So, the next time my kid asks me any such questions, I will chose to keep quiet and let him think about it on his own and slowly fall asleep…