If you got kids you know how it feels

I do my best to avoid doom scrolling and checking out bad news on social media but it's not easy to avoid it unless you force the algorithm to do so by intentionally deciding what to like and share, so it can learn.

My feed is getting less violent and giving me some very funny stuff. I saw a quote today that made me laugh because of how much I can relate to it.

Screenshot from X

It says, the real menace in dealing with a five-year-old is that in no time at all you begin to sound like a five-year-old. This is so true because in your attempt to make them understand you, you have to sound in a way that they can understand and that means you have to talk very differently from what sounds mature.

Anyone who has ever dealt with little kids knows it is true. Most parents can relate to this so well and the best people to look at for this are teachers who teach the preschool or kindergarten.

But after giving it a minute of thought, I understood why the author put #quote in the tweet. It's not just in the literal sense of dealing with five year olds but also dealing with adults that act like children.

Some people grow in body without maturing in mind. Maturity comes from learning and the changes you make after learning lessons in life. Some people do grow and go through life but they skip the learning part, which means there are 30 year olds with a 5 year old's mentality. Acting childish as an adult ain't a pretty picture.

When I spend time with my little cousins, a 1 year boy and 7 year old girl, I see it clearly. I try my best to be gentle with them because they're kids but since I'm matured I also try to reason with them with patience. But almost always, soon, their endless questions, shouting and screaming everywhere, and the stubbornness just pulls me in. They argue about the smallest things, repeat the same question ten times and refuse to listen to what I say sometimes.

When this keeps happening, before I know it, I am also raising my voice, saying things like, "do it because I said so" or "Stop it right now". Suddenly, I don't sound like the adult anymore, I sound exactly like one of them.

When you deal with a person that is only grown but not matured, chances are you get dragged down to their level. You could easily just lose control and forget you're an adult and start exchanging words with such a person.

So instead of giving wisdom or acting wise by avoiding an argument that is baseless or won't bring substantial profit, you start arguing, insulting back, fighting publicly and ending up embarrassing yourself just because you decided to deal with someone that's not matured.

An eye for an eye should be done on equal levels otherwise you're losing a bigger eye to someone with a smaller eye. What I mean by that is, you should become the bigger person because you understand you have more to lose than the one who has decided not to act matured.

Some people never grew pass childish thinking and those are the kinds of people if you choose to deal with, you could end up speaking their language.

How do you know someone's an adult but still act like a five year old? Easy to detect, just observe how they respond and react to problems. Kids lose their shit when there's a problem, adults only think about solutions and if it can't be solved they just figure out a way to manage it or live with it.

Gossiping, arguing over nothing, refusing to listen to council, and always wanting things their way, traits of children mostly.

Dealing with matured people that act like that feels exactly like dealing with little kids. If you're not quick enough to accept that this person you're dealing with hasn't matured so handle them like kids, you'll start acting like them when you try to respond to them without wisdom.

Kids will be kids, that's understandable when they behave like kids, they're kids, but when an adult does that, the problem is that the adult has to relate with other adults and when they relate like kids while being expected to behave like adults, there's confusion everywhere.

Try your very best not to fall into their behavior, because then you're no different anymore.

Kids will eventually grow up so we can tolerate it when they're kids, childish adults are already grown so we have to maneuver our way around such people otherwise we all end up as kids. Kids can't run companies, the government, and the economy, it's adults, so the more you act childish the less your chances of success. By success I don't mean money in this context.

There are people with cash but you see them online acting like kids. Having money doesn't mean you've matured, it just means you're doing something or having something that's bringing money to your pocket, period.