Something said to you at eight can still echo at eighteen. Be careful what you say to kids.

At eight, a sentence from an adult does not get filed as somebody’s bad mood. It becomes a fact about you, and years later it is still running, usually in the same words it was said in. Whoever said it has almost certainly forgotten. That is the strange asymmetry of talking to someone younger than you.

Around a younger sibling or a kid you coach, treat your offhand comments as things that might stick. If a line from back then is still running in you, it was one person’s sentence and not a measurement.