Better You Blog

The concept of how children solve problems verses how adults solve problems is one that you should fully understand. It is very important because we lose those good problem solving skills as we get older.

Part of the reason for this is that we become more logical. We no longer want to try to be creative. We want to go straight to what we are sure will work. We do not give anything else a try and if what we think will work turn out not to work, we get frustrated.

Another thing is we lose our sense of experimentation. We just do not want to take the time to try different ideas or even come up with different ideas. We get lazy.

As mentioned children do things much differently. Here is an illustrated example of how a child and adult would approach the same problem.

Situation: Bob and his son, Bob junior, are given a video game system to hook up to a television set. Bob is 28 and Junior is 8. Neither have directions and neither of them have set up a system like this before.

Bob: Bob’s first instinct is to get out all the cords and pieces and lay them out nicely. He then examines each piece to see how everything fits together. He determines that there needs to be a cord running from the television to the game system and he picks up one that looks good. He then hooks up all the cords to the spots where they appear to go and turns on the system only to find that nothing happens. He unhooks everything and tries again and again. Eventually he gets frustrated and asks if the system is broken.

Junior: Junior dives right in just connecting cords. He ends up with the system hooked to the television, but nothing happens. He realizes he forgot to plug in the system and does so, but that doesn’t make it show up on the television. Instead of unhooking everything he starts messing with the television. He end sup turning the channel and viola the system is working.

Bob was quick to give up and he missed the obvious – plugging the system in. Bob’s first instinct was to make an excuse and say the system was broken. Junior kept at it and tried new things until he figured it out.

The difference in how they solved the problem is clear. Bob probably would have figured it out eventually, but Junior was the one to actually succeed. He never gave up and he was willing to experiment. Plus he did not miss the obvious because he was so focused on other things like his dad.

The way children solve problems is amazing. It is really something you can learn from. When you are solving problem strive to be more like Junior and less like Bob.

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