How To Help A Little Thinker Fall In Love With Big Questions
Spoiler alert: kids already love big questions. The title is admittedly deceptive. Sorry.
Ask pretty much any parent, particularly those with small children, and they’ll tell you as much. What parent hasn’t been ambushed by a million bouts of “why”? Who hasn’t been minding their own business, going about their daily tasks, only to have the little in their house hit them with a truly difficult question for which there is no easy answer (if there’s any answer at all)?
Kids may be afraid of the dark. They may balk at cleaning their rooms or eating their vegetables. However, when it comes to asking enormous, complicated questions, there is awkwardness, no discomfort, and no inhibition. There’s no ego, no hesitation, or any understanding of why big people run from them. Between a kid and a query, there is only love.
Kids love the complexity of big questions. They love the possibilities, the process of talking about them. They love the playing with ideas that follow. They love the feeling of autonomy and empowerment that comes with being entrusted with a big question. For a kid, a big question can contain the whole universe. It’s not an obstacle, and it’s not work. It’s a beautiful and intriguing beginning.
So, there’s really no need to help a kid fall in love with big questions. But there is definitely a need to help ourselves, as big people, rekindle our feelings for them. Do you remember when these marvelous rabbit holes of creative thinking started to seem more like bottomless pits? Can you recall the point at which it became weird to ask things, instead of wonderful? Do you know how these captivating exercises in thought became de-romanticized, and thinking got reduced to a duty, a chore, and an obligation?
There are pages and pages to be written about the benefits of nurturing a child’s love of thinking, of questioning. In encouraging them to love big questions, we give them valuable tools with which to navigate school, their future career, and their personal lives. How fortunate are we that something our kids love to do is also really good for them?
But there’s also much to be said for allowing our adult selves to rekindle our romantic, dreamy love of asking things too. Who better to do this with than someone we love, and who love big questions, you know, like our kids?
