This article is brought to you by: Nathan's Mirror - "A young millennial father's outlook on life, and the interpretation of his own reflection when he looks into the mirror."

Young children are the most innocent and open-minded people on this planet – untouched by any negative influence our society dishes out to the rest of us. It’s a beautiful thing, really.

Many look to older or “more experienced” people as leaders, but we should all open our eyes and learn from a group of people that are much younger than us…

Kindergarten is the first setting outside of one’s household where rules exist and must be followed. It’s a time where true thinking and action come together, a time where cause and effect can continue to help us, or will ruin us. If you think about it, some of the most crucial life lessons, morals, ethical inquiries, and practicalities are taught to us in kindergarten.

Just rolling off the top of my head, here’s a list of some of the things I remember my class being taught in kindergarten:

• “The Golden Rule” – probably one of the most important of the bunch, to treat others the way you want to be treated.
• Play fairly.
• Taking responsibility for your own actions.
• Manners.
• That Dr. Seuss knew what he was talking about when it came to green eggs & ham – great combo.
• How to apologize and when it’s necessary.
• To look – observe our surroundings.
• Make good choices.
• Glue probably shouldn’t be eaten.
• Share with our friends.
• Not to hurt someone.
• Scissors aren’t for cutting fingers.
• How to follow directions.
• Staplers are the devil.
• How to listen.
• Not to throw things, especially at other people.
• The number of key chains on your backpack impacted how cool you were (not something we were taught by our teacher).
• Play with each other and how to do it nicely.
• How to share.
• Do your best work.
• Help each other
• How to respect authoritative figures (the teacher), each other, and ourselves.
• Winning isn’t everything, and not everybody wins.

I’m sure there are many more, but you get the idea. Looking at the list above, it’s easy to see that we were generally taught how to be good people and, because of the heavily invested trust that we had in our teacher, that’s exactly what we were – good people.

Many of these things were probably touched on by our parents prior to entering kindergarten, but we practiced those skills and beliefs, and learned even more about how those apply to many more situations other than just the ones that happen at home. Sadly, somewhere along the line, the use of all these essential skills and morally sound beliefs faded away and become skewed and biased over time.

Many things are to blame for this, but looking at the list, I can think of many examples and many people within our society that have forgotten what we were taught in kindergarten – the standards of being a good person.

I feel like we could all learn something from a kindergartner. For those of you with kids, understand that your children are amazing teachers, and the best parents are the best students.

It’s ironic, really. Our society praises the importance of education, financially supports it, and expects so much from it, yet many fail to practice the very base-line material that our educational system begins with. Riddle me that.

So instead of being so narrow-minded and stubborn, perhaps everyone should take a glance at some of the posters on the walls within any kindergarten classroom. There just might be something that you could learn.

If everyone had the mind-set of a kindergartner, but had the skill-set and the experience that comes with aging, then our world would certainly be a better place.

So at the end of the day, be more like a kindergartner. If a 5 year old can do it, should’t you be able to?