When I was grocery shopping a few years ago and had my son by me in the cart, I saw an extremely obese man coming up close behind us in the produce section.

Please, please don't say anything out loud and embarrassing, I thought.

"Wow," my son said. "Look at how tall that man is."

The man was tall, but I hadn't even noticed that. Instead I focused on his weight, while my son simply noticed his towering presence.

Kids are like that. While adults have a tendency to judge, little ones observe without criticizing.
While catching a few minutes of "American Idol" with the kids before quickly turning it off when it got mean-spirited, one contestant covered in glitter and wearing a shiny, jeweled shirt that most people would find wildly tacky walked into the room. The three judges looked at each other, their eyes saying everything their mouths didn’t.

"She's beauuuuutiful," Grace said.

After a recent kindergarten lesson on Martin Luther King Jr., Benjamin told me one night that when Poppa went to school students were segregated by color.

"Was that the right thing to do?" I asked him.

"No," he said. "God created everyone special."

I like how kids see the world. The bigger challenge is keeping it that way.