There’s a moment—usually somewhere around the third time you’ve googled “why am I so tired” in a single week—when you start to suspect you’ve lost something important. Not your keys. Not your youth. (Well, maybe your youth.) But something harder to name. A lightness in your chest. A willingness to be delighted. A sense that the world is fundamentally interesting and not just an endless scroll of overdue tasks and confusing news alerts.
Ask Julian Shapiro-Barnum about that indefinable something, and he’ll tell you exactly where to find it: the playground.
Shapiro-Barnum is the creator of Recess Therapy, the wildly popular TikTok series where he wanders into parks and playgrounds and asks kids the kinds of questions adults usually reserve for therapists and philosophy professors—and gets answers that are somehow better than anything you’d hear in either setting. The videos go viral constantly, and it’s easy to see why. There is something both deeply funny and achingly moving about watching a 6-year-old explain, with complete confidence, the correct way to handle a breakup.
I’m 17 years older than my sister Kathryn, and I still remember her comforting me during a particularly ugly college breakup. “I like James because he shares,” she said, referring to her preschool boyfriend with complete authority. “You need a boy who shares.” She was 3 years old. And she was so right.
I thought about her advice a lot. Then, before I got engaged, I introduced her to my now-husband and asked what she thought. She studied him carefully and asked bluntly whether he was a good sharer. He said yes. She shrugged and told me he could stay. I married him. And now, as a mom of five kids, I have approximately 24 hours a day of evidence that children know more about life than we think. So why do we forget that?
“Kids are not aliens,” Shapiro-Barnum says. “We all were kids—we all are still, to some extent, kids.”
Now, after years of playground dispatches and hundreds of interviews, Shapiro-Barnum has written a book, How to Grow Up Without Becoming a Grown-Up, that’s a love letter to the kind of unfiltered, unselfconscious brilliance that adults tend to forget they’re capable of. I talked to him about the biggest lessons he’s drawn from all those conversations.
Get Reader’s Digest’s Read Up newsletter for more happiness, humor, travel, tech and fun facts all week long.
The wisdom of youth
The most surprising thing about spending years interviewing children, Shapiro-Barnum says, isn’t that they’re wise. It’s how much of their wisdom happened off-camera.
“I was starting to feel like there were so many amazing things that were happening when the cameras weren’t rolling,” he says. “It wasn’t just the brilliant things the kids were saying; it was more than that. It was the way they were acting, the way they were dealing with their feelings, the way they were navigating their relationships with their families and their friends.”
What he kept noticing, above all, was that kids are fundamentally freer than adults. And not because their lives are easier. “Being a kid is really hard in a lot of ways,” he says. “It’s not just fun all the time. It’s not sunshine and rainbows.” But kids operate with less accumulated baggage, and that makes all the difference.
“I think kids have less nuance than adults do and, in that, are more free,” Shapiro-Barnum explains. “They are freer to see solutions to issues that we couldn’t fathom solving. They are free to love more confidently in less complicated ways. They’re free to build friendships faster and have less barriers between them and their ideas.”
Adults, he says, have just as much capacity for all of this—more, actually, because we have more agency and opportunity to act on it. We’ve simply forgotten that it’s there.
The forgetting, he found, runs deeper than expected. “The most surprising part of the project is how far childhood feels from so many adults, and from myself,” he says. “A lot of adults talk about children as if they are these foreign beings. And they talk about their own childhood as if it was another lifetime, like their inner child is something that has to be accessed. That shocked me.”
His counterargument is the thesis of the whole book: “Your childishness is always closer than you think.”
The value of tapping back into your childishness, he says, isn’t just sentimental. “I think the value is ease, happiness, deeper joy, more fulfilling hobbies and a richer life, period,” he says. “Taking the methodology and practicum of childhood and applying it to an adult person should be an everyday practice. There is nothing to lose from being more curious, loving, open, imaginative and more active in one’s life.”
The secret to happiness, according to kids
In How to Grow Up Without Becoming a Grown-Up, Shapiro-Barnum distills the wisdom of hundreds of kids into practical guidance that tired, overscheduled adults can actually use. Here are some of the best pieces of life advice, straight from the source.
You don’t have to be strong all the time
When Shapiro-Barnum asked 8-year-old Sloane for her best advice on being a boss, she delivered a speech that would embarrass most executive coaches. In full: “Even bosses cry. You need someone to lean on even if you’re an adult. It’s OK to be scared and show it. So, I guess, really probably stick with your friends and family because they’re who will be with you until the end. And if you’re ever feeling sad, find someone to lean on. Even if they are an adult and you think adults aren’t supposed to have strong feelings. Blah blah blah blah blah. That’s a stereotype. Adults can cry too.”
But in all seriousness, there is real wisdom here—especially for anyone who has spent years trying to project competence by pretending they’re fine when they really, deeply are not. Research consistently shows that having a solid support system and leaning on them when you need help is one of the most powerful predictors of lifetime happiness. Vulnerability isn’t weakness.
Try it: The next time you’re struggling—at work, at home, wherever—resist the instinct to white-knuckle your way through it alone. Send a text. Call a friend. Tell someone you’re having a hard time. Ask for a hug.
Say what you need
When Shapiro-Barnum asked elementary schooler Avery for her best advice for adults, she delivered what might be the most efficient piece of relationship guidance ever recorded: “Get a husband who cooks.”
You could spend years in couples therapy unpacking communication styles and attachment theory. Or you could just listen to Avery. She’s not wrong. The equitable division of domestic labor is one of the most reliable predictors of long-term relationship satisfaction, and the older you get, the more you realize that the seemingly small decisions—who makes dinner, who handles logistics, who carries the invisible mental load—get exhausting fast. Whether you’re choosing a partner or renegotiating the terms of an existing relationship, getting specific about what you need is not high-maintenance. It is, per Avery, simply good planning.
Try it: Be honest and open about what you need from your partner. Don’t make them read your mind or set them up to fail with expectations they can never meet. Do return the favor by asking what they need.
Make your space more joyful
Kiara has strong opinions about adult bedroom decor. Specifically, she believes we have failed spectacularly. “Adults need to have cooler beds,” she said. “Adults have just beds. I’ve seen them. They’re just big beds. They don’t even have cool sheets. Adults should have beds with slides and staircases.”
The slide-and-staircase bed does raise certain logistical questions—mostly involving aging joints and building permits—but the underlying point is a good one. Adults tend to strip the joy right out of their living spaces in the name of looking like adults. Neutral walls, practical furniture, everything painted in Millennial Greige. Because we’re so worried about looking stylish or put together, we overlook elements that spark delight. (Looking at your home, Kim Kardashian.) Adulthood, aesthetically, is very often just a practical beige sectional and walls painted an inoffensive color probably named “Resale Value.”
Try it: What if you went the other direction? You don’t have to construct a loft bed with a fireman’s pole (although no judgment), but try something that makes your environment actually fun to inhabit. Hobbies and playful pursuits genuinely improve well-being and lower stress, so why not pull out your Star Wars Lego set or Lisa Frank drawings and display them proudly?
Build friendships fast (and stop overthinking it)
One of the things Shapiro-Barnum has observed across hundreds of playground interviews is how efficiently kids form bonds. A kid who didn’t know another kid’s name 10 minutes ago is now their best friend, co-founder of an informal rock collection business and emergency contact. There’s no runway. There’s barely any small talk. They simply decide, with total confidence, that they’re friends—and then they are.
Adults, he points out, have constructed a lot of unnecessary barriers to this. We overthink, waiting for just the right moment, while we passively hope that friendship will just happen to us, rather than treating it as something we actively build.
“They are free to build friendships faster and have less barriers between them and their ideas,” Shapiro-Barnum says.
Try it: I know, I know, making and keeping friends as an adult is much harder than it was in elementary school. But kids are a useful reminder that a lot of those barriers are self-imposed. You can introduce yourself. You can suggest plans. You can skip the part where you spend three weeks wondering if the other person even likes you and just act as if they do. The success rate is higher than you’d think.
Build a cardboard box fort (literally and figuratively)
When was the last time you just let your imagination run wild? Shapiro-Barnum is particularly struck by kids’ relationships with their own imaginations. For children, there is no ceiling on what’s possible, and they haven’t yet learned to preemptively edit themselves. A kid with a cardboard box doesn’t see a cardboard box; they see a castle, a rocket ship, a time machine, a submarine or a nice napping spot. (And their disappearance into said cardboard castle, rocket ship, time machine or submarine will then scare their parents witless when they can’t find them. Ask me how I know.)
Adults, by contrast, often kill their best ideas before they’ve made it out of their own heads. We have become so practiced at anticipating why something won’t work that we skip straight to the obstacles and never spend any time with the possibility.
“They imagine bigger,” Shapiro-Barnum says simply.
Try it: The fix isn’t complicated. Simply start imagining bigger—and not just in the grand, vision-board sense but also in the everyday sense of letting yourself follow an idea somewhere before you shut it down. (And it doesn’t have to end with some new way to make money or be productive!) Nurturing imagination has real cognitive and creative benefits all on its own. Start by asking yourself: What would you do if you approached your next problem the way a kid approaches a cardboard box? And if you need to build a cardboard-box fort to sit in to think about it, do it.
Love more confidently
Here is one that tends to hit adults right in the chest: Kids love without a lot of asterisks. They tell you they like you. They hold your hand on the playground without performing a full cost-benefit analysis. They are not hedging their bets or managing expectations or leaving themselves a tasteful exit. They are just in it.
“Kids are free to love more confidently in less complicated ways,” Shapiro-Barnum says.
Somewhere in the process of growing up, a lot of us learned to love with one foot out the door. We hold back, stay a little guarded, dole out warmth in careful doses, wait for the other person to act first. It feels like self-protection, but Shapiro-Barnum would argue it’s more like self-deprivation.
Try it: The practical version of this isn’t throwing all caution to the wind—it’s more about the small moments of connection you routinely withhold because you’re afraid you’ll be “too much.” The “I love you” you thought but didn’t say. The compliment you gave in your head but not out loud. The check-in text you almost sent, then didn’t. Say “I love you,” give the compliment, send the text.
Take your silly hobbies very, very seriously
One of the most consistent themes across Shapiro-Barnum’s work is that kids do not do anything half-heartedly. From ages 4 to 10, my oldest son was into trains—and I mean INTO TRAINS. He researched them, watched them, talked about them (incessantly), even slept with them. We had to laminate his Thomas the Tank poster because he insisted on cuddling with it every night.
It’s not just my son. There is no such thing as a casual hobby in a child’s world. There is only complete and total commitment.
Adults, meanwhile, tend to treat their fun as optional extras: nice when they happen but easily sacrificed for work, responsibilities or the vague guilt that we should probably be doing something more productive. We squeeze joy into the margins when we can find them and then wonder why we feel depleted.
Try it: Get a hobby and enjoy the heck out of it. Schedule it into your life. Make friends who like to talk about it as much as you do. And whatever you do, resist the temptation to turn your hobby into your side hustle. Kids aren’t doing their hobbies to make money; they do it because they love them, and you should too.
Shapiro-Barnum’s argument is simple: Stop treating childlike engagement in your own life as something to grow out of. “There is everything to be gained from acting like a child and nothing to be lost,” he says.
That might be the most important sentence in this entire article. And I say that as someone who owns a very serious, very adult, very sensible bed—and is now seriously reconsidering the slide option. How fun would that be?!
How to Grow Up Without Becoming a Grown-Up
For more kid wisdom that just might change your life, check out Julian Shapiro-Barnum's book.
About the expert
|
Why trust us
At Reader’s Digest, we’re committed to producing high-quality content by writers with expertise and experience in their field in consultation with relevant, qualified experts. We rely on reputable primary sources, including government and professional organizations and academic institutions as well as our writers’ personal experiences where appropriate. We verify all facts and data, back them with credible sourcing and revisit them over time to ensure they remain accurate and up to date. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.
Sources:
- Julian Shapiro-Barnum, creator of Recess Therapy and author of How to Grow Up Without Becoming a Grown-Up; interview May 19, 2026
- Recess Therapy on TikTok
The post How to Live a More Fulfilling Life (According to Some Really Wise Kids) appeared first on Reader's Digest.
from Reader's Digest https://ift.tt/J3HUonx
Comments
Post a Comment