July 22, 2025

YOUR INNER CHILD
AS YOUR INNER LEARNER

How could our learning and leadership benefit from remembering that we’ve got a kid in all of us? ​ From today’s teacher, ​AARON BARLIN​

Do you remember how you would learn as a kid?

Commonly, and sometimes all the way through our teens, the kiddo-version of ourselves learned through play—and all the bumps and bruises that came with it.

We searched for new sights, imagined new stories and scenarios, jumped, ran, explored—all while resiliently taking new risks, falling, failing, and brushing ourselves off to do it again.

As characterized by Anne-Laure Le Cunff, author of Tiny Experiments, children are predisposed to a "systematic curiosity—a conscious commitment to inhabit the space between what you know and what you don’t, not with fear and anxiety but with interest and openness."

It’s easy to forget our sense of play in the day-to-day of adulthood.

In spaces of adult learning (from trainings, to webinars, or even to team meetings where regular updates are shared), learners are regularly bogged down by professional fears: of being wrong, of sounding stupid, of not being agreed with, of not being liked or not fitting in.

For learners and facilitators alike, these (often understandable) fears are relatively regular and routine; in other words, professional fears regularly and routinely get in the way of learning and collaboration.

This, if we zoom out, can appear odd, given that some of us when we were kids would literally skateboard down 30-degree hills, or make crazy jumps across a jungle gym, or play in mud that was probably too dirty for our own good—and fear didn’t stop us then. (Perhaps you even have the scars and stories to prove it!)

By welcoming in mistakes, you help welcome in your inner child’s intuition.

There’s no single teacher tool (or therapy tool or spiritual tool, for that matter!) that gets us all-the-way reconnected with our inner child, and thereby with our fundamental capacities for play, curiosity, and resilience.

However, there is a central teaching practice for doing so. An old teacher mentor had this phrase printed—big and bold—at the front of the classroom: “Mistakes are welcome here.” (Le Cunff calls them “intentional imperfections.”) By re-orienting our relationship with error—back to when it was part and parcel to just being a kid—we can be less fearful adults, and ideally take ourselves less seriously.

Especially as a high school teacher, my students’ young-adult stage of development could make it easy to forget that even they were already losing touch with their inner children, and instead developing a fearfulness characteristic of professional adulthood.

It was important to remind them—and myself—that our inner children hold the formative memories of getting through messier, scrappier, scarier things than we (hopefully!) face nowadays. And if you take some time to ask them, your inner child can likely remind you of that.

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