If you were mommy, what would you do?
April 5, 2026
6 min read
philosophy • perspective • empathy • childhood
"If you were mommy, what would you do?"
The other day, you asked me that.
It was a small question, but not a small one.
It stayed with me because it was not only a question about mommy.
It was a question about perspective.
The more you grow, the more I notice that children are not strangers to philosophy.
In some ways, philosophy seems built into us from the beginning.
We want to know what is fair and unfair, what is right and wrong, why one person acts one way and another acts differently, why the world feels one way to me and another way to you.
We ask about truth, intention, justice, and reality long before we learn those words.
And adults, for all their confidence, often fail at exactly this.
We judge people quickly through our own eyes, our own moods, our own history, and our own preferences.
We look at what they do, but we often do not take the time to understand the context from which they are acting.
We want to know whether someone is right or wrong before we ask what they saw, what they felt, what they feared, what they carried, and why the situation looked the way it looked from where they stood.
Some people would even say that if we had exactly the same life as another person — the same family, the same wounds, the same pressure, the same opportunities, the same fears, the same love, the same disappointments — we might act exactly as they do.
I do not know if that is fully true.
But I do think there is wisdom in the idea, because it softens the arrogance with which we judge others.
It reminds us that we are less separate from one another than we like to think.
This is why love, kindness, compassion, and good relationships depend so much on one difficult ability: the ability to step outside yourself and try, even imperfectly, to see through someone else's eyes.
That is a very hard skill.
Maybe that is why your question struck me so deeply.
Without knowing it, you were asking for exactly that exercise.
What would happen if I stopped being myself for a moment and tried to see the world as mommy sees it?
What would I do then?
What would make sense from there?
What would feel fair, necessary, difficult, or obvious from her side of reality?
Your question reminded me of a philosopher named John Rawls.
He imagined something called the veil of ignorance.
The idea is simple: imagine you had to design a whole society without knowing where you yourself would end up inside it.
You would not know your sex, your wealth, your talents, your health, your family, your class, or your place.
And because you would not know, you would have to think more carefully.
You would try to make the rules fair not only for the people who end up on top, but also for the people who do not.
You would be forced to think beyond your own advantage, because for all you know, you might be the one with less power, less luck, less protection, or less voice.
That is what I like about the idea.
It interrupts selfishness.
It forces humility.
It makes you imagine life without assuming you will be the winner.
Your question felt like a smaller, more human version of that same movement.
If you were mommy, what would you do?
There is a lot hidden inside that sentence.
It could be curiosity.
It could be imagination.
It could be the beginning of moral thought.
It could be your way of noticing that your mother and I are not the same, that we move differently through the world, carry different burdens, respond with different instincts, and are seen differently by others.
It could even be that you are already noticing certain unfairnesses before you have the words to name them.
And if that is true, then your question matters even more.
What moved me was not only the question itself, but the fact that it came from you.
It felt like a glimpse of your mind stretching beyond itself.
A glimpse of you noticing that other people are not just characters around you, but centers of experience too.
Because one of the great awakenings of childhood is realizing that you are not the center of the universe.
At first, a child lives inside a world that revolves around immediate experience.
Hunger, comfort, fear, joy, frustration — everything comes back to the self.
That is natural.
But slowly, another world opens.
A child begins to notice that other people have inner lives too.
That mother is not just "mother," but a person with thoughts, emotions, limits, history, and reasons.
That father is not just "father," but another person entirely, with his own character, blindness, wounds, and ways of seeing.
That every person around you is living from a center you cannot fully access.
This, I think, is one of the beginnings of ethics.
The recognition that other people are real in the same way you are real.
That recognition changes everything.
It does not make life easy, but it makes depth possible.
It makes compassion possible.
It makes justice possible.
And it makes love deeper, because love is not only attachment.
Love is also the attempt to understand another reality without reducing it to your own.
Of course, there is a limit here.
We will never truly know what it is like to be inside another mind.
We can imagine, infer, listen, observe, and care, but we cannot fully cross that boundary.
We remain ourselves.
Still, imagination matters.
Approximation matters.
Trying matters.
Sometimes we think that because perfect understanding is impossible, understanding itself is impossible.
But that is not true.
We do not need complete access to another soul in order to become kinder, wiser, or more fair.
We only need enough humility to admit that our own perspective is incomplete.
I think that is what your question touched.
It was a child's question, but not a childish one.
It carried inside it one of the most important movements a human being can make: the movement from What do I feel? to What does it look like from where you stand?
That movement will not make life simpler.
But it may make you kinder.
And sometimes that is better.
— Dad