Master

 Hi

I think it is one of our very important duties to be good examples for our children. But our children I, who do not have any kids, mean anyone who we can play the role of a more grown-up person for them. It might be someone younger or someone older. It does not really matter how the biological ages are with respect to each other. It might be even fluid. Like someone might be both in the same conversation with us. It is more of a matter of life lessons we passed and communicating the mindsets and understanding the younger mind and in many cases correcting their trajectory. 

It is such a tricky action to do because it can be easily such a hurtful action. The younger person has their own mindset and they usually have a lot of courage to take on the path but your eyes will see the wrongness of it all. The easiest and shortest paths are not usually the best. They will discourage the other person and make them upset because they feel your disagreement is hurting them. They see their opinion as an extension of themselves and seeing how wrong it is will make them feel bad. But it is the art of you to shape your disagreement in a way that is not hurtful. You have to take them through a journey and in that journey make them understand that you understand what they have thought about. 

A part of you, feeling you are older and know better must be you know how to communicate your opinions properly and the younger mind has enough respect for your opinions to accept them. Otherwise, it will be a process of grinding gears that never get in sync with each other and they have their own speeds. 

It is a process of respecting their mindset. It is a process of making them understand you don't want to run over them and you are in control and they can trust you. If you cannot communicate this to them, they feel insecure and they want to apply their own way and they won't respect your corrections. This is especially true for complex problems which do not have a clear answer and your answer might be far from optimized. The younger minds are good at local optimization.

Also, you might be wrong in many cases too. They will have ideas that you feel are useless because you are seeing the problem from your own perspective and they have their own perspective which might be using newer methods that might be better than what you have in mind but less trustable for you. So now, you are the slow gear and the other thing younger minds are good at is being faster. From here it all depends on your strategy. It depends on how much you trust them and how much you think they are smarter than you. It depends on how much risk they will add to the solution compared to your solid brick solution of yours and how much benefit will come from it. And finally, it depends on how truthful you are and how much you want to enjoy controlling people and seeing them grind, and how much you want to give space to youngers to grow.