Yesterday, I shared some reflections on The Five Invitations, a book about what death can teach us about living fully, and how the five invitations reminded me of the way babies and toddlers naturally experience the world.
But that was only half of what struck me as I read. The more I thought about these invitations, the more I recognized the very things I spend so much of my time encouraging parents and caregivers to practice through Magda Gerber’s Educaring® Approach.
Let’s start with Ostaseski’s discussion of patience: he suggests that patience actually implies we’re waiting for something to get better. I happen to agree with that stance, as you can see in a simple search of my website…
He offers another word: constancy, the capacity to remain with what is true, moment after moment.
Are we being patient because we’re waiting for a child to stop crying, finish struggling, learn to walk, or become more cooperative? What if, instead, we practiced constancy? What if we simply stayed present with the child in front of us, without needing the experience to become something else?
We’re not waiting for something better to happen. We’re witnessing what is happening now.
Another passage that stopped me was a reflection from Rachel Naomi Remen…she distinguishes between helping, fixing, and serving. Helping sees someone as weak. Fixing sees someone as broken. Serving sees someone as whole.
Think about that for a moment: When we approach children as people who constantly need our help, what does that say about how we see them?
Of course, children need us. They need our care, protection, attention, and guidance. But they don’t need us to solve every problem, remove every obstacle, or make every uncomfortable feeling disappear.
Sometimes a child who is struggling doesn’t need us to fix anything. They need us to be there, to acknowledge what they’re experiencing, and to trust that they have the capacity to work through it.
And sometimes they do need our help. The distinction is in how we see them, not simply what we do…Are we responding to a helpless child, or are we supporting a capable human being who needs us in this moment?
That question gets to the very heart of the Educaring Approach.
Ostaseski also writes about welcoming everything and pushing away nothing. We live in a culture that often treats discomfort as evidence that something has gone wrong. A frustrated child needs to be distracted. A crying child needs to be made happy. A struggling child needs to be rescued.
But struggle is part of life. So are disappointment, sadness, anger, and fear.
Our job isn’t to eliminate those experiences. It’s to help children feel safe enough to experience them, express them, and gradually come to understand them.
And that requires something of us, too. We have to become comfortable with discomfort, including our own.
The Beauty of Not Knowing
Of all five invitations, perhaps the one that most directly connects to my work is Cultivate Don’t-Know Mind. It’s actually something I’ve written about before…something called “listening in,” a term coined by Claudia Gold.
Ostaseski describes approaching life with curiosity, wonder, and openness, allowing ourselves to discover what is true rather than relying on what we think we already know.
When we observe children, Magda encouraged us to imagine placing our preconceived ideas, expectations, and judgments into a glass bowl. We don’t have to pretend they don’t exist. We simply set them aside so we can see what’s actually happening.
It’s a deceptively simple practice:
A child throws a toy.
Is she being defiant? Experimenting with gravity? Expressing frustration? Trying to get our attention?
We don’t know.
And that’s okay.
In fact, not knowing creates the possibility of discovering something we might otherwise have missed.
Rather than rushing to interpret, label, or correct, we can observe with curiosity. We can allow the child to show us what is happening.
I’ve found that this practice extends far beyond our relationships with children. How different might our interactions with partners, friends, colleagues, and even ourselves be if we approached one another with a little less certainty and a little more wonder?
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For years, I’ve described the Educaring Approach as much more than a way of caring for babies. It’s a way of being in relationship with another human being.
Reading The Five Invitations reminded me just how universal these ideas are.
Presence. Acceptance. Authenticity. Rest. Curiosity. Trust.
These aren’t simply parenting techniques. They’re qualities that can guide us throughout our lives.
And isn’t it remarkable that so many of them are already visible in the youngest among us?
Perhaps one of the greatest gifts of spending time with infants and toddlers is the opportunity to recognize these qualities in ourselves again. To slow down. To stop trying to control every outcome. To become more comfortable with not knowing. To allow ourselves and others to be fully human.
The Five Invitations is beautifully written, and I recommend it to anyone who finds themselves navigating grief, contemplating mortality, or simply wondering how to live more fully. It is not a child development book, nor is it intended to be. But for me, it offered an unexpected reminder that the wisdom we seek as adults is sometimes right there in front of us.
Sometimes, perhaps, our children have as much to teach us about living as we have to teach them.