A long time ago, and I will not dare count the years, a wise man told me something that left an indelible record in my memory: children are doors to learning, to the new, to what we do not yet know.

For us parents, the challenge is keeping the door open. When I heard this, my oldest daughter was a little baby, and I had not yet faced great challenges, except a visceral, new, all-encompassing and very worried love. Two guidelines echoed in my mind: observe and keep the bridge of contact.

Given the human habit of putting behaviors into little boxes and labels, many works conceptualize generations, giving them names and general characteristics.

With the labeling grew the outcry to identify, diagnose and fear intergenerational conflict. Generation after generation, at some point, for reasons of survival and individuation, conflicts appear. Named or not, for a time they set the tone of the relationship between the developing person and their parents or mentors. This is necessary for the development of one and the detachment of the other, and fundamental so that the child’s life is not reduced to the parents’ egoic desires.

This world, with all the new things caregivers have yet to master, is threatening to them.

For young people, certainty, security, the claustrophobic place where the “obvious” lodges is threatening. For caregivers, it is threatening that younger people want to run their lives with methods and means never seen before and that their analog decision-making process is dominated by the digital world. For young people, living constantly under judgment and attempts at conformity is threatening. An endless list of fears, on both sides, would fill page after page.

In a way, the choreography of the confrontation repeats itself in each generation, in different settings, with cultural, moral and social advances and setbacks. Peeling away the skins of the phenomenon, one by one, we find at its core a detachment, a distance between people who, sharing the same family community, stopped looking at and listening to one another.

The great challenge is to keep the door open. As children, much of the new world we uncover we could present to our caregivers: the wonder of discoveries, the slow progress of building and testing our wings toward autonomy.

As caregivers, we could gain much from those gusts of fresh air to revisit our convictions, dust off our obvious truths, update our internal operating “apps.”

A dialogue rich in possibilities could join analog thinking to astonishing digital processes and, with the consistency of one and the agility of the other, reach objectives and goals, create, solve, produce solutions for good living. I think that, instead of keeping our eyes on differences, it is more than time to focus on learning with.

No tutorial on the planet teaches the right texture of the pão de queijo (Brazilian cheese bread) I learned from my mother, who learned from her grandmother, beyond the step-by-step done with our heads almost touching. As for photographing that pão de queijo, turning it into a marvelous frame and, with the help of AI, recreating the great-grandmother’s kitchen, I do not yet feel able to do that (yet, because I intend to learn and already glimpse where to ask for lessons). Keeping the doors open means, above all, not judging and validating the possibilities together.

Keeping the doors open is, truly, genuinely, being interested in the world seen through young people’s eyes and respecting their experience.

There are opportunities for both sides of this conversation. I learned a lot from my four children and keep learning. Now and then I watch them (it has been a while since I left the stages of their existences) and I am moved by the way each one handles their own life.

All of them have surpassed me. They are human beings who face their challenges, each in their own way, open to learning and dialogue. Keeping the doors open is teamwork: a decision to be made by both sides, led by the more experienced and initiated by whoever can model respect in practice. It is an act sustained by respectful dialogue, by the deliberate suspension of judgment, by love in place of obligation, by spontaneity in place of automatic rituals.

Ah, the young people of today! All of us, one day, stood exactly in that place: some frightened adult complained, about us, about the youth of today!