Men, are you tired of the grind? Have you recently waxed nostalgic for the simplicity of your childhood, idealizing the innocence and imaginative power of the springtime of your life? Well, Yara Shahidi, the young costar of the new Eddie Murphy family comedy Imagine That isn't buying it. She can't wait to be where you are.

When I asked her at a recent press roundtable about the saving graces of adulthood, she wasn't stumped at all: "You can get a job!" The reply was met with much laughter, given that the young actress already has one of the most sought-after jobs in the world. "And it's just really cool," she continued. "You get to be free no matter what you're doing. It's not like, you know, 'My bedtime is scheduled for 8:00,' or something. You get to see more movies."

Ah, yes. The innocence of youth.

You'd think, then, that Evan Danielson—the character played by Eddie Murphy in the film, and the father of young Olivia Danielson, played by Shahidi—would be the happiest man alive. He's a successful stock trader who gets to stay up as late as he wants, and has managed to absolve himself from almost every marital and parental responsibility. He watches as many movies as he wants. He is, he thinks, the master of his own fate.

And yet it's his precocious and imaginative daughter that reminds him that his priorities are out of whack. He's not a master, not the king his daughter wants him to be. He's a slave.

Yet as idealistic and naïve as children such as Shahidi can be, there's simply no doubt that childlike clarity can, in fact, be the cure for many adult ills. The story of Imagine That was, in fact, inspired by a real-life incident between writer/producer Ed Solomon and his son Evan in which the six-year-old turned out to have better business sense than the seasoned Hollywood veteran.

As Thomas Haden Church observes in the film's production notes, "There is a wonderment, a kind of life-affirming eternal hope that dwells within children and what goes on in their imagination. &ellips; There's an innocence that unfortunately gets diminished as you get older."

I had the opportunity to follow up on that thought with Church at the press roundtables for the film, asking what his personal experience with diminished innocence has been. He replied at length:

I have a brother who is now the President of the Texas Trial Lawyer's Association, a well-known attorney who started out his career as a Texas Supreme Court briefing attorney. He and I are very close in age, and he's been a lawyer in Texas for longer than I've been an actor; and one day he said to me: "You know, it seems like, more often than not, business decisions are defined by bad choices and worse choices." For some reason, that really resonated with me.

You do get choices. But early on, when I first moved to L.A. as an out-of-work actor, those choices were just about, 'Can I buy a less crappy car? Can I pay my rent on my apartment? Can pay my credit card bills and the insurance payments on my car? Everything was just so simple. There was just a straight line from what I need to do to work to how I meet my obligations as a young man.

But you get older, and anytime you start strategizing—What's the right movie? What's the right writing project?—you're definitely losing some innocence there. Because then it's not just this free-form, idealistic stream-of-consciousness like you have early on in any career, where you just meet any opportunity head on. And later on, you start shoving opportunities aside, because you start prioritizing them.

When another journalist asked what his priorities are now, he answered directly and simply—with a familiar refrain from all the men who walked through the room that day: "My daughter."

Men, check your ambitions and your pride at the door. Follow suit with Church, Eddie Murphy, Ed Solomon, and director Karey Kirkpatrick. Take the opportunity sometime over the next couple of weeks to buy into the vision of Imagine That—and recover the magic.

A man's home is indeed his castle; but be worthy of the crown you wear.