My 10-Year-Old Reminded Me I Don't Have the Only View

A few days ago, I was watching my son and feeling that quiet ache that parents know well. He is growing up fast. I found myself thinking about when he was small enough to pick up without a second thought, when I could carry him around the room, and he would laugh and hold on tight.

So I told him I missed that. And I picked him up.

He is ten now, so it was a little different from what I remembered. But we laughed, and I carried him around for a bit. And then he said something that I have not stopped thinking about since. He looked around the room from where he was, up at my height, and said with genuine surprise and amusement on his face:

"Wow, is this how it looks from your height?"

I smiled in the moment. But something about it stayed with me.

Just one additional foot of elevation. Same room, same furniture, same walls. And yet he was seeing something noticeably different from what he sees every day at his own height. He was not imagining a different view. He was actually experiencing one, for the first time, from where I stand.

And I thought about how often I forget that.

There are moments when my son does something that frustrates me. A choice that seems careless, a reaction that seems unreasonable, a response that I cannot quite understand. My first instinct, if I am being honest, is to correct it. Because from where I stand, it looks wrong.

But my perspective was not handed to me. It was built, slowly, over decades. It was shaped by my upbringing, my experiences, the mistakes I made, the lessons those mistakes taught me, the people who influenced me, and the culture I grew up in. All of that combined to determine how I see things today.

My son does not have any of that yet. He is ten. His perspective is being built right now, one experience at a time. Of course, things look different from where he stands. He is standing at a completely different height.

Psychologists who study interpersonal conflict have found that a large proportion of disagreements between people, whether between parents and children, colleagues, or partners, are not really disagreements about facts. There are disagreements about perspective. Two people looking at the same situation and seeing genuinely different things, because they are looking from genuinely different places.

The problem is not the difference in views. The problem is when we assume our view is the only valid one.

I do not think my son's perspective is wrong. I think it is his, shaped by where he is in his life right now. My job as his parent is not to immediately replace his view with mine. It is to help him build his own perspective through experience, conversation, and yes, the occasional correction done with understanding rather than frustration.

But this applies well beyond parenting.

Think about the last time someone did something that frustrated you at work, at home, or in a friendship. How much of that frustration came from the assumption that your way of seeing the situation was simply the correct one? What would shift if you got curious about their height instead?

Different perspectives are not a problem to fix. They are a reality to understand.

My son reminded me of that from one foot above his usual view of the world. He was not trying to teach me anything. He was just surprised by what he saw. Sometimes the most important reminders come exactly like that: simple, unplanned, and from someone who has no idea they just shifted something in you.

Where in your life are you assuming your height is the only height?"