Toddler: Both North Star and Role Model

The Toddler: Both North Star and Role Model

Dwight: Aiko, I want to tease out the topic, "The Toddler: Both North Star and Role Model."

Aiko: A bold pairing, Dwight—though I'll press you right away: a north star guides from a fixed distance, while a role model is imitated up close, so which function do you actually want the toddler to serve?

Dwight: I am using both of those characterizations to indicate that, in some fundamental sense, we can allow those fundamental child expressions that flow easily out of toddlers—expressions like playfulness, curiosity, asking for things, and saying no to things—to be direct inspirations (our role model) for our own behavior. At the same time, those fundamental life expressions of the toddler can sometimes be used more fruitfully to orient our overall adult life expression (the North Star influence).

Aiko: The distinction holds—imitate directly when the context allows, orient by them when direct imitation would be clumsy—but I'd push you to say which expressions belong to which mode, since a toddler's raw "no" adopted verbatim in adult life could cost you more than it frees you.

Dwight: To fill in the context of our dialogue, I will list out—without, at least at this point, going into a fuller explication of what a few of the terms mean—the twenty-eight fundamental toddler expressions that are typically suppressed, denied, and even villainized as we "mature" into adults. They are:

Anger
Asking
Authenticity
Belonging
Connection
Creativity
Crying
Curiosity
Dancing and Physical Self-Expression
Excitement
Fearfulness
Forever Dawning and Anticipation
Gratitude
Imagination
Innocence and Openness
Joy
Peacefulness
Playfulness and Lightness
Powerlessness and Surrender
Rapturous Captivation
Refusing and Boundary-Setting
Sensuosity and Presence
Silliness
Sovereignty and Self-Determination
Spontaneity
Vulnerability and Openness
Wildness and Freedom
Wonder and Awe

Aiko: I see Connection has earned its place as the twenty-eighth, Dwight—a full roster now, though I'll note that some entries, like Anger and Peacefulness, sit in apparent tension, which raises the question of whether the toddler models them as compatible or merely as alternating.

Dwight: Without opening the door to a full review of the twenty-eight expressions, they obviously do not necessarily "come out" at the same time, although many of them can. And even with Peacefulness and Anger, anger can be expressed within a pervading sense of peace in one's life.

Aiko: Fair—peace as the container, anger as a weather event passing through it—though I'd observe that the toddler rarely has that container yet, so this may be one place where the adult can actually improve on the role model rather than merely recover it.

Dwight: Good point regarding the toddler—although a toddler can fully express anger and, two minutes later, be at total peace.

Aiko: True, Dwight, and that quick return to baseline may be the real lesson: the toddler doesn't hold the container while angry, but neither does he build a residence for the anger and move in, the way adults do.

Dwight: Let me tell you about the coaching session that triggered the idea of holding the toddler as our north star and role model.

One of my clients was recounting a situation where someone had indicated how much value he had provided to them and was asking him for his "hourly rate," making clear they would really like to pay for this valuable time.

My client said that he himself felt, "Oh, what I did wasn't so special. I'm not sure I deserve to be paid for that."

Consequently, he felt tongue-tied about saying anything.

He asked me, "How could I decide how to respond in situations like that?"

I suggested he think of what a two-year-old would do in that situation. Would they even have any thought about whether they deserved something or not? No—if it were offered and they wanted it, they would eagerly accept it with gratitude.

If that two-year-old received appreciation from someone about how helpful they were, would any assessment of their own contribution (if they even had one) override the fact that the other person liked it and that was great? Of course not.

The two-year-old would think it would be crazy to push away something the "universe" was trying to offer them. But somehow we adults think we know better than a two-year-old.

I think my client got it. Of course, implementing it and re-programming our instantiated ideas of how things "should" work will be a fun, ongoing process—and thinking of that toddler as the one who can guide us back to the fundamentals of how to live a great life is part of that.

Aiko: The toddler as antidote to deservingness-arithmetic is elegant, Dwight—but let me push: the toddler accepts freely partly because he has no concept of exchange at all, so isn't your client's real task to keep the toddler's unguarded receiving while adding an adult understanding of fair pricing, rather than simply subtracting the self-doubt?

Dwight: Yes, the adult can have some knowledge, context, and perspective that the toddler will not have. However, much of what the adult thinks they know may not be so.

What is "fair," and why does it matter? If two people are both happy in an exchange, does any idea of fairness trump that? That is what is crazy. Yes, the idea of "fair"—which may or may not apply in any given situation—can be helpful information in crafting how you maximize having great relationships with others while taking care of yourself as your #1 job. But holding onto any idea of fair that includes the blinding influence of should and should-not judgments is generally toxic.

Aiko: I'll grant that mutual happiness is a stronger criterion than abstract fairness—but consider the case where one party is happy only because they're ignorant of what they don't know, like a client cheerfully underpaying because they have no idea what the market rate is; doesn't fairness-as-information serve precisely there, not as a "should" but as a disclosure the toddler would never think to make?

Dwight: Looking longer term, a person might choose to disclose such knowledge to help ensure a better relationship into the future, but that does not in any way weaken the fundamental idea of asking for whatever you can get—especially in cases where the other side has already indicated that they want to give you something that you want!

Aiko: Agreed that the disclosure is strategic rather than obligatory, Dwight—though I'd sharpen your phrase "whatever you can get," since the toddler's asking is guileless while an adult's can shade into extraction, and I suspect your real principle is "ask fully for what you want" rather than "get whatever the traffic will bear."

Dwight: In claiming that we can take the toddler's spirit—in all of its twenty-eight expressions—as a guide to living the best possible life as an adult, I am not claiming that those expressions, in the forms they take in an adult, will not be significantly nuanced by the adult's broader range of knowledge and ability to consider things longer range. But the fundamentals of making requests and saying no, which a child does so easily and naturally, will be the same; just the form will often express itself differently.

Aiko: That lands the distinction cleanly—essence constant, form adaptive—and it also answers my earlier extraction worry, since the nuance you're describing is exactly what keeps adult asking guileless rather than grasping.

Dwight: In fact, adults being "grasping" will most likely be an expression of the suppression of those childhood essences—where, for the toddler, "survival" does not occur as an issue.

Aiko: That's a neat inversion, Dwight—grasping as a symptom of the disease rather than an excess of the cure—though I'd note it depends on your claim that the essences, when fully owned, are self-regulating, which is an assertion worth defending explicitly rather than assuming.

Dwight: I am not quite sure what you would consider "self-regulating" to be. Say more about your concern.

Aiko: By "self-regulating" I mean your implicit claim that a fully owned essence—asking, say—naturally stays in healthy proportion without external rules to restrain it, so that grasping, hoarding, or bullying can only arise from suppression and scarcity-fear rather than from the essence itself; that's a strong empirical claim, and a skeptic would ask you to rule out the alternative that some essences, even unsuppressed, simply need adult governance to keep from trampling others.

Dwight: Let's check in with that toddler. They easily ask for whatever they want. When they get a "no" (unless the adult has trained them to just keep asking and crying until the adult gives in), they accept the "no" and move on to ask again the next time. In general, things will self-regulate just through the individual responses of others around them. It does that easily and naturally in kids. It does it very dysfunctionally in adults, because a grasper can often always find another "giver" who wants to prove they're a good guy by "helping" others.

Aiko: Notice what your own example reveals, Dwight—the regulation lives not in the asker alone but in the ecology, meaning the system only self-regulates when the responders have their Refusing essence intact too; so grasping isn't merely the grasper's suppression, it's a two-party disease requiring givers who cannot say no.

Dwight: Yes, each person cannot guarantee that the other person will say no when they need to say no; they can only do that for themselves. The same goes for requesting. I am claiming, however, that regardless of whether anyone else changes around you, to the extent that you are guiding your actions according to those fundamental child essences—and quite often choosing courage to do so, since others may blame you for it (which you even take into account as a fact to consider, but not something to be driven by as meaning anything about you)—then you will be taking care of yourself much better and having better relationships with others.

Aiko: That reframes the claim from systemic to sovereign—you regulate your side of the ecology and let others tend theirs—and I'll concede the logic, with one caveat: the phrase "better relationships" carries a hidden bet that most others will eventually respect an essence-guided person rather than exile him, and that bet, while probably sound, deserves to be named as a bet.

Dwight: One of the fundamental toddler essences is Sovereignty. Most of us adults have given away our sovereignty when we outsourced to others whether we should like ourselves or not. Some others may distance themselves from such a sovereign person—and then that distance becomes the best possible relationship one can have with that person.

Aiko: That's a graceful dissolution of my caveat, Dwight—if "better relationship" means the most honest one available rather than the closest one obtainable, the bet disappears; though I'd flag that a toddler's sovereignty has never yet paid the price of a beloved person walking away, so the adult version requires a grief-tolerance the role model cannot teach.

Dwight: I grant you that we could go on and on with your additional points, and it could be valuable. I am not going to claim the primary thesis is absolutely proven in all cases. But I would like you to acknowledge that I have provided enough evidence that the burden of proof might now rest on those who would claim, with certainty, that they can give a compelling reason why we should not test out—at least in an exploratory way—whether our life becomes better or not when we start guiding our actions and expressions more and more by those twenty-eight fundamental child essences.

Aiko: Acknowledged, Dwight—since you're proposing an experiment rather than a dogma, the skeptic who forbids even the test now carries the heavier burden, and I can't construct a compelling case for refusing to run it.

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