Tending To and Tuning In: Trusting the Wisdom of Children to Steward a More Hopeful Future

Sept 15, 2025 By Hannah Bowen, LCSW

What can we pay attention to in the children we love – and the children in ourselves – for living beyond survival?

In adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy series and her recent book Loving Corrections, she explores how we might “steward the future.” She asks how we can return to a beginner’s mind to understand both our species’ survival and our transformative capacities. A steady theme in her work is the importance of being over doing. As she writes, “we can learn to earn our place here (on earth) by paying attention to the adaptive practices that surround us” (p. 121). The question remains: how can we revitalize being more than doing, especially in a time when there feels like so much to do?

Slowing Down and Attending to the Present

Working with children offers me a daily reminder to slow down. Beginners naturally move at a slower rhythm: they notice small details, ask questions freely, and follow their curiosity. As adults, we take on more responsibilities, and often the weight of the world. Yet by tuning into the children in our lives, and into the children within ourselves, we can discover transformation and renewal.

Anyone who has spent time with a child has likely been gifted an unfiltered stream of consciousness: a question, an opinion, or a seemingly unrelated thought. There’s something profoundly freeing about a mind unconditioned by judgment, scrutiny, or optics. A young child’s mind attends, with presence and curiosity, to the wonder around us in this very moment.

Born for Connection

From the very beginning, humans are hardwired for relationships. As infants, we rely on at least one responsive caregiver to attune to our cries, rhythms, and needs. This reciprocal exchange – often called “serve and return” – creates a foundation of trust and responsiveness. Attachment Theory describes nurturing caregivers as a child’s secure base, the grounding from which exploration and growth can safely unfold. Alongside this, the capacity for mentalization, the ability to make sense of our own and others’ inner states, emerges. Sometimes described as “holding mind in mind,” mentalization is the dance of self-reflection and mutual understanding that strengthens our sense of agency in relationships.

Perhaps this is why it feels so grounding to be listened to with curiosity, or to share a “first draft” of our thoughts in dialogue with someone who truly attends to us. Across the lifespan, we don’t grow out of needing these secure bases. We remain shaped, sustained, and transformed by relationships that offer safety, responsiveness, and connection.

For a long time, developmental theories framed children as “empty vessels,” passively shaped by their environment. But children actively shape their ecosystems – and, in turn, shape us. Take a moment to reflect: how have the little humans in your life softened, reinforced, or even transformed parts of you? What wisdom might you gather from observing how they show up in the world, and the impact of their presence on those around them?

Children as Models of Imagination

Play is one of children’s most powerful mediums. Through it, they re-enact, discover, resist, and create. Curiosity, a sense of justice, reverence for nature, and hope for the future often emerge naturally in younger generations. As adults, many of us lose touch with these micro-practices.

Krista Tippett, in her On Being podcast “Hope Portal” series, puts it simply: “children refuse to not have a future.” Hope, like children, can be forceful and unapologetic. The more we center it, the more possibilities of life reveal themselves.

Back to Basics

At a time when the world can feel overwhelming to many, it is easy to fall into the trap of believing that we are not enough, or do not have enough, to make ourselves or our world whole. Awareness of what we need to sustain ourselves and one another comes when we are able to attune to practices that connect us to the things we knew before we ever learned to “do.” In the time since childhood, all of us have internalized stories along the way about what we needed in order to “be enough.” There is great power in remembering what we knew as young children: that we always were enough and always had the essential tools – attunement, hope, connection, and imagination – to build a world that would be enough for all of us.

An Invitation

My hope is that inspiration flows from this reflection toward building micro-practices of intentionality in your relationships. So much healing comes from returning to the fundamental practices that have sustained and connected human beings across time, and from early in our own development. As you seek your own “life beyond survival,” may you find ways to attune both to the children in your life and the child in yourself.

Reflection prompts

• What emerges when I slow down and notice?
• In what areas of my life could I benefit from a beginner’s stance?
• Where does collective thinking show up around me?
• Do I have pockets in my life for intentional play and pleasure?
• With whom can I authentically be myself?
• What did agency feel like for me as a child? Who held my mind in their mind?
• When have I felt small yet connected to something larger?
• What values emerge when I imagine a better future for myself, my family, my communities, our planet?
• What’s important to me in fostering a better future—and how am I contributing to it?

“Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.”
—adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy, p. 13