Do children’s flexible causal inferences promote more cre-ative causal discovery for observing adults? Inspired by a taskin which children are more likely to consider unconventionalcausal forms (Lucas, Bridgers, Griffiths, & Gopnik, 2014;Wente et al., 2019), we designed a new method in which child-adult pairs work together to solve a causal task and assessedthe relative influence of each member of the pair on the other’scausal inference. Consistent with previous research, childrenwere better than parents at learning the unusual conjunctive re-lationship, suggesting that children make more flexible causalinferences than adults. Our research also revealed a surpris-ing and new result – that observing a child explore broadlyhelped parents to be more flexible and open-minded in theircausal learning. In contrast, a child observing an adult’s ex-ploratory interventions had no negative consequence on thechild’s ability to infer the correct relation. Follow-up exper-iments explored the degree to which this child-led bootstrap-ping for adults was due to the particular exploratory evidencegenerated by the child during play, or merely the presence ofa child. Results suggest that both factors may play a role inshaping adult’s causal inferences.