Throughout my life, first as a child and later as an adult, I have watched children put their first big questions to parents, nursery staff and teachers. In most cases, I am sorry to say, I have not seen adults give a fitting answer. Sometimes the reason was ignorance, sometimes boredom and sometimes simply a lack of time.
From my own experience, the replies children get to their philosophical and thought-provoking questions tend to sound like this. These questions have nothing to do with you. Knowing the answer will not put food on the table, so think about something useful instead (a Persian proverb puts it as “go think about bread, because melon is water”). I have a thousand things to do, so go and tidy your room. These questions will only drive you mad, so stop thinking about them and get on with your life. You will understand when you are older, so come and help me now. How should I know?
At nursery and school the brush-offs take a different shape. Colour more carefully, why are you going over the lines? Get on with your own work, why are you disrupting the class with silly questions? Each of these replies teaches a child the same lesson, and it is the lesson I explored in an earlier piece on why children stop asking questions in the first place.
When adults give the wrong answer
Some parents, keen to show their children that they know everything, mix right and wrong answers together and hand them over with confidence. Sometimes the wrong answer takes over the child’s mind and, after a while, hardens into a firm belief. Over time the person can even develop a prejudice in its favour and defend it without ever having examined it.
I will never forget a religion class I attended in Iran. I asked the teacher a question about religion and he replied: “These things are beyond our understanding. If someone asks you such questions, they want to mislead you. Tell them that some things are beyond our understanding and end the conversation.” I felt that his answer was meant only to silence us, not to help us think more carefully about religion.
Why children’s questions matter more than ever
Today children grow up surrounded by online content in which true and false information sit side by side. Preparing them to face that world matters a great deal, and the most important skill is not accepting or rejecting what they see without thinking it through first.
Yet many fathers and mothers are so busy that answering their children’s questions does not even make it to the bottom of their list. Some educators see only a fixed curriculum on their shoulders and treat any question outside the lesson as a waste of time. Adults who give wrong answers through haste or ignorance cannot hand society thoughtful, inquiring young people. So what can realistically be done, given how stretched families and schools are?
What parents can do
Parents who lack the knowledge or the time to discuss every question can at least remember their own childhood. Many of us had questions that were suppressed, answered badly or met with such a cold response that we no longer remember them, a kind of selective forgetting. Recalling that experience is the first step towards not repeating it.
The least such parents can do is to receive the question warmly and say something like: “What an interesting question, why didn’t I think of that?” If the child asks something the parent once wondered about too, honesty works best: “I had this question when I was little, but I forgot it because nobody gave me a proper answer. I’m glad you asked, because now we can find out together.” Even “I don’t know the answer, but the fact that you ask shows you don’t accept things without thinking, and that is really valuable. I’ll try to find out” tells a child that curiosity is welcome.
Parents can also keep a special, attractive notebook and tell the child: “Whenever a question pops into your head, tell me and I’ll write it here so we don’t forget to look into it.” Even before any answer arrives, the child learns that their questions are precious enough to be written down and kept safe. Parents should then set aside some time, however short, to look into those questions using reliable sources or by asking experts. Leaving a blank space under any question that has not yet been answered shows the child that it, too, is important enough to be answered one day. This kind of shared exploration sits naturally alongside the independent play that supports early cognitive development.
What nurseries and schools can do
For nurseries and schools, one answer may be a dedicated question hour: an open class led by someone with a grounding in both philosophy and psychology. Believe me, children carry many questions that end up buried in the corners of their minds because of how adults have reacted. Every time a child’s question dies, a fresh thought may dry up with it. Ideas are lost to the world in this way, and we adults are sometimes the ones responsible.
This loss is different from plagiarism, where someone copies another person’s work and the original ideas can still be found elsewhere. The thoughts lost through our mishandling of children’s questions cannot be recovered anywhere, because we have buried them in the child’s mind under the soil of our own ignorance, out of the world’s reach.
For many children, answering and discussing their questions is far more engaging than dry, dictated lessons, and an hour a week of free questioning could matter more than another structured class. Children need colouring and counting at nursery and maths and science at school, but they also need a bell that rings for open questions. Letting them debate with one another and with a skilled teacher helps turn them into thoughtful people who can use their philosophical minds well when faced with a flood of information, and who do not accept or reject anything without first thinking it through.
FAQs
- How should I respond when my child asks a question I can’t answer? Say so honestly, praise the question and suggest finding the answer together, perhaps by writing it in a question notebook.
- Why do children stop asking questions? Often because adults meet their questions with impatience, wrong answers or silence, so curiosity starts to feel unwelcome.
- What is a question hour in school? It is a regular open class where children bring any question they like and explore it through discussion with classmates and a skilled teacher.
