What you’ll discover is that there is often a very weird something behind the question. It is often as important to understand what that thing is as it is to answer the questions. The problem is that you can’t directly ask that lest they shut down.
The problem is that a question like, “how can the floor” might be related in the kiddos mind to something as seemingly unrelated as “why did we eat hamburgers last week?” and if you go down the wrong path, suddenly your kid has a link between hamburgers and orbital motion that doesn’t necessarily link up in any real logical way.
My approach is not to just answer questions, but to help them think through their questions and how they might answer them. No clue if that works.
I found you need to tailor the questions a bit more to their question and enter their frame as much as possible.
Daddy, why are there police?
Well, that’s a good question, what do you think police do?
Put bad guys in jail.
Hrm… Well, do you remember the movie we saw last month with the sheep? (Sheep Detectives it is very good and everyone should watch it.) Was the spoiler a bad guy?
No… But they did arrest them. Why?
And then we slowly work through a conversation about policing without going too deep into the details.
What you’ll discover is that there is often a very weird something behind the question. It is often as important to understand what that thing is as it is to answer the questions. The problem is that you can’t directly ask that lest they shut down.
The problem is that a question like, “how can the floor” might be related in the kiddos mind to something as seemingly unrelated as “why did we eat hamburgers last week?” and if you go down the wrong path, suddenly your kid has a link between hamburgers and orbital motion that doesn’t necessarily link up in any real logical way.
My approach is not to just answer questions, but to help them think through their questions and how they might answer them. No clue if that works.
Later that week on the playground: and my dad said your mom eats so many hamburgers that she causes orbital motion around her.
Fun fact: the tides are influenced by how many hamburgers “your mom” has eaten that day.
My sister says the trick to deal with this is to respond with something like “well, what/why do you think?”
I’ve gotten mixed results with this approach.
I found you need to tailor the questions a bit more to their question and enter their frame as much as possible.
And then we slowly work through a conversation about policing without going too deep into the details.