Something very important we can learn by taking care of children, which is essential in relationships in general is to be able to observe the mind acting in another person without being affected by it.

A child is in one sense not different from an adult. A child has desires and emotions, just like an adult has. The only difference is that the intelligence of a small child is not very developed, and in this way a child is not capable of filtering these desires and emotions like an adult can. A parent has thus to learn to deal with the child without being affected by these fluctuations, being able to remain in control of his emotions and use one’s intelligence to gradually teach and educate the child.

A parent understands that the child doesn’t do things out of malice, it is just the mind working. He or she thus learns to keep his cool and deal with it in a sober way, using his own intelligence to find what the real problems are and how they can be solved. This is what it means to be an adult in the first place. We keep our cool and don’t take things personally.

This is very useful also in other relationships because very few people can remain in control of their emotions all the time. Most people just break down from time to time and become again a child, crying and screaming for whatever reasons. If we become affected by that, we also get caught up in the same trap, and it can very quickly degenerate into quarreling, shouting, and screaming. If we can remain in control of our emotions, we can peacefully analyze the situation, understand the underlying problem, and figure out how it can be solved.

Being able to remain rational in situations of stress is not something we are born with, but it is something we can develop. We were all small children once, crying and screaming like all small children do. However, we gradually learn to control our emotions, at least to some degree, and by careful introspection and detachment, we can gradually learn to also deal with the emotions of others, without taking things personally. This is one very important skill in all kinds of human relationships, starting from married life.