One of the great things about kids is that they keep you on your toes. Not just because you have to worry about them all the time, but because they give you so many more things to notice. As we talked about a long time ago, if you have a son that likes helicopters or a daughter that’s obsessed with birds, there’s suddenly a reason for you to be a lot more aware as you go through the world. There’s stuff for you to look for, to point to, stuff that you would ordinarily have a kind of adult’s blindness too.

It’s important that we don’t lose this sense as our kids get older and are (slightly) less easy to impress. In fact, it means we need to work harder at it. We told the story of Robert Lovett and his father, who would play a game based on their shared commute (but on different schedules). Each would try to notice things on the way to work and school and then ask the other if they saw it or not.

We should always keep our eye out as we go through the world, looking for things we can share with our kids. We can take pictures with these magical devices in our pockets and show them when we get home (or text them when they get older). We can notice things when we’re out for a walk or a run and bring the family back later to investigate. We can notice a historical marker and then pick up a book about it or pull up the Wikipedia page and read it aloud with them. We can see things on work trips, call and tell them about it, and ask if they want to come see it with us sometime.

We quoted Sandra Day O’Connor a while back–if you’re not curious, she said, you’re not smart. Well, we have to demonstrate that kind of lifelong curiosity to our kids. We have to be infectious and communicative about it. We have to calibrate it to what we know gets them excited, what we want them to learn about. We have to bring them into our world…and show them the world.

We have to keep our eye out for opportunities to do that.