Those Questions Children Ask

Sooner or later a child asks something that leaves you stuck. Not the easy stuff. The kind of question you have never worked out an answer to for yourself, and now a small person is staring at you, waiting. Plenty of parents quietly dread that moment. And if you think being childless gets you off the hook, think again. I was a teenager when my young cousin put one of those questions to me.

It may have nothing to do with where babies come from or any talk of storks. The question could land on death, or war, or why some people have nothing. These are the ones most of us struggle to settle in our own heads, never mind explaining them to a kid. We tend to push them aside. We would rather not go hunting for answers at all.

The trouble is that an unanswered question rarely stays unanswered for long. If you leave the space empty, someone or something else fills it, and the version your child picks up may be nothing like what you would have wanted. I am not claiming a child will simply absorb whatever you say even if you do have a reply ready. But most of us would at least want a say in the matter rather than being cut out of it entirely.

Books have been written for exactly this. Parents' guides, children's picture books, titles aimed at particular ages. Keep an eye out for them and read them yourself first. You may come across one that handles a hard topic in a way you are comfortable with, pitched at a level your child can follow, whether you read it aloud together or hand it over for them to read alone. Or you borrow what the book does well and say it back in your own words.

There is one more thing. We cannot dodge the difficult questions forever. Far better to wrestle them to some kind of answer on our own time than to be cornered by a child's curiosity, or by some event nobody saw coming, with nothing to offer.

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