7-year-olds are naturally curious. Imagine the world through their eyes—it’s all one huge sandbox where everything needs to go through trial and error until it makes sense. Touch a hot stove—ouch, lick a freezing pole and you’ll never do that again. Unsurprisingly, children development experts believe that kids’ thirst for the world is virtually unstoppable. Amy Morin, a psychotherapist and lecturer at Northeastern University in Boston, calls 7-year-olds “explorers, scientists, and analysts” who “often ask questions about everything from why the sky is blue to where babies come from.” Next time your kid drops a time ticking wisdom bomb, you had better have a good back-up plan ready.

Imagine this simple fact—7-year-olds' vocabulary and reading skills are, so to speak, on fire. Kids of this age learn thousands of sight words, giving them solid conversational ammunition. Even when their first coherent expressions might mean the world to them but not that much to us, we have to celebrate their endless creativity. When you really think about these philosophical gems, you might start wondering—who said that older means smarter?