Questions

“All right, Ian, what you just said to your sister was unkind. You have a talking time-out.”

When my kids were 5 and 8 a talking time-out was the worst possible punishment. I usually reserved it for in the car, a place with limited natural consequences. For a set number of minutes (usually one for each year of life) they were not allowed to speak. Part of what made it so tortuous was that my kids always had a million things they wanted to ask about at any given time. I embraced the silence as golden. They did not.

I should let you know that I’m a quiet person. When I was pregnant with my son I worried about my lack of verbal savvy. What if he didn’t hear enough words, experience enough dialogue, because of my verbal style? I may have overcompensated. Once Ian was born I forced myself to constantly narrate our days. It soon became a habit to talk about everything with him, and once my daughter arrived, to include her in the conversation as well.

When we were in the car we discussed everything from the weather to other drivers to why shoes had laces. My son loved to ask “why” questions, but not just “why is the sky blue” variety. He wanted to speculate about why someone in the car next to us might have chosen to wear a blue hat and grow a mustache. Sometimes our speculation was silly. Ian loved when I would go down a rabbit trail trying to think of reasons why someone might wear a hat, why they might want a blue hat, and what was appealing about mustaches. It was fun to invent a story like how the mustached man was really an international spy in disguise. Other times we would take a serious angle, more like: “It’s cold out and the man’s favorite color is blue and his wife likes how his mustache looks.”

To be honest, these conversations were exhausting. I didn’t always have the patience or energy to engage. There were plenty of times that I’d answer his “why” with “just because, and that’s it.” But the majority of the time I would humor him and we’d discuss why some people like cars with two doors and why some people like cars with four doors or whatever had him puzzled.

There’s a quote by Catherine Stonehouse that resonated deeply with me recently: “Over time, our responsiveness to common questions prepares the way for children to trust us with the troubling questions.” (From Joining Children on the Spiritual Journey)

Beyond compensating for my quiet nature, that is really what I was trying to do when I had all those seemingly meaningless conversations with my kids. Building trust takes so much time, even with our kids. If we don’t take the time to talk about the common basic ways the world works, our kids won’t trust us to answer the really big questions.

My son is older now. He doesn’t ask the same type of “why” questions. He asks questions like: “Why does Brady go to church and say he trusts Jesus with his life but doesn’t live his life any differently than our friends who don’t go to church or believe in God?” This is one of many troubling questions I have now earned the right to talk about with Ian. These are not easy questions to answer. Yet, these are the kinds of questions where I want to join with God as the primary voices shaping how my son thinks through the answers.