You Will Understand When You’re Older

“You will understand when you become a father.”

These were the ominous words my mom used to utter whenever I argued with her — trying to prove her wrong, trying to walk away triumphant from a battle of words we often had as a young teenager. I was convinced I was right, and that she was wrong. Neither of us was willing to accept that there can be ‘two rights.’

BOTH of us have grown — older and wiser. We still have plenty of philosophical conversations and arguments, but they’re rarely about what’s right and wrong anymore. They’re about what ought to be, and why. Winning an argument is easy. Coming up with something actionable is much harder — especially where we BOTH walk away with a better appreciation, and a more meaningful way forward.

But she WAS right. I could NEVER see her perspective as a kid. I see it NOW, because I see what she saw — I have the same vantage point she did, as a parent. Being a parent is worlds apart from being a child. How could I ever hope to see it at 13?

Here’s the part that took me longer to work out. It isn’t just a parenting truth. It’s a workplace one too.

The same blindness plays out every day between seniors and juniors at work — and most of us miss it entirely. The youngster in front of you cannot ‘see’ the perspective their superior is offering. They can’t stand where you’re standing, because they haven’t lived what got you there. So they write it off as ‘old man talking.’ Background noise. Something to nod through and ignore.

Here’s the uncomfortable bit: the fault isn’t theirs. It’s ours.

We conveniently forget how WE viewed our own ‘old bosses’ back when we were the youngsters in the room. We rolled our eyes too. We thought we knew better too. And somehow, the moment we cross over to the other side, we forget that the newcomers of today are walking the exact same road we once did — just with different scenery.

So what do we do with that?

The lazy move is to keep saying ‘you’ll understand when you’re older.’ It feels wise when you say it. It lands as talking down when they hear it. It closes the conversation instead of opening it — and worse, it teaches them nothing except that you’ve stopped trying to reach them.

The harder, more useful move is to understand the gap first, and then learn to talk in their language rather than yours. Not dumbing anything down — just meeting them where they actually are, instead of where you wish they were.

Because here’s the thing about a workplace that a family doesn’t have to reckon with: you don’t have twenty years to wait for them to ‘get it’ the way your mother had with you. A career moves faster than a childhood. If a junior takes a decade to arrive at the perspective you’re offering today, you’ve both lost a decade of what could have been built together.

So next time you’re talking to a newcomer significantly younger than you, remember your mother chiding you with ‘you will understand when you are older’ — and realise you don’t have that kind of time to spare in a work setting.

Learn to relate. Learn to win over your juniors, not by lecturing them into agreement, but by closing the distance between where they stand and where you stand. The rest of communication becomes so much easier once familiarity is established.

Everything teaches. Even the arguments we lost as teenagers — we just needed a few more years to hear the lesson.