I loved it when my boys started talking. But there’s a limit to how many questions a dad can answer each day, especially that age-old toddler query “why?”
I don’t remember the first word my first child spoke. I wasn’t there. I was working. But I do remember the text message I got from my wife.
“Blake said a word!!!” I couldn’t have been more proud. He was very young, in terms of normal development, to have said something that could be given more meaning than pointing at a ball and saying “pffftbog” (which had been his go-to noise for anything he liked up until this point).
Over the next few months, I took a keen interest in helping him develop his language skills — I’ve always been a writer and I love words. So when my first-born son started using words of his own, I was in heaven.
A few years after Blake turned up, Laurence arrived. Blake, by this stage, was prattling away in his own merry way — and pestering me (and his mum and everyone within earshot) with question after question.
That wasn’t an issue for me. I pride myself on my ability to answer as many questions as I can for my kids — I’ve had the benefit of a really good (and really expensive) education, a solid dose of life experience and a lifetime of accruing what most people would describe as useless trivia stored somewhere in the deep, dark recesses of my brain.
The downside of that is that I will forget someone’s name within two minutes of meeting them. My short-term memory, not so good.
I met my new neighbour this morning and right now, I have no idea what his name is. I’ll probably just call him Carlos until he corrects me. Over and over again.
But the fact that it was Michael Collins who was the first guy not to land on the moon while Armstrong and Aldrin made history is still lodged in my brain … along with the fact that it was Eugene Cernan who was the last person to walk on the moon.
It didn’t take my boys long to figure out that Daddy knows a lot of stuff about a lot of stuff. And so, it began.
Question time
There are two types of questions that toddlers generally ask their parents and according to research, it’s all about helping them to learn.
The first are the questions they use to figure out what the hell is happening around them, or when they just genuinely want to know something.
“Why is the sky blue?” or “Where’s mummy?”
(The answer to question one is “because of the way light from the sun travels through the air we breathe”, and the answer to question two is “she’s at her house, because your daddy’s a moron”.)
These types of questions I’m well equipped to deal with — and it’s part of being a good dad to be able to answer these ones.
When I was a lad, my old man taught me a lot of stuff, straight off the top of his head. It didn’t matter that he’d left school in his mid-teens — he knew things.
I can remember, quite vividly, a car ride where I learnt about black holes (“gravitational fields so intense that not even light can escape” are the precise words he told me). I was four.
Then he explained in the simplest of terms what gravity is. And it was a lesson I’ve carried with me for more than 40 years.
So I’m always happy to answer my boys’ questions, as best I can. But these days, dads have got an electronic cheat sheet in their pockets.
There’s nothing that can’t be looked up on a smartphone in a matter of seconds, to satisfy a toddler’s curiosity about the world around them.
The moon is 384,400km away. The sun is 695,700km wide etc, etc…
But there’s another very common question that will test the patience of even the saintliest of dads. It’s a single word and it’s three letters long.
Why?
The other way toddlers learn is by asking a very simple question: “Why?”
They do it for a number of different reasons but mostly, according to every book on parenting I’ve ever read, because it’s pretty much guaranteed to elicit a response from Mum or Dad.
And so they will ask it. Over and over again until you’re just about ready to pound your head against the wall through sheer, unadulterated frustration.
And just when you think you’re about to blow a gasket in your brain, they’ll ask it again.
Both of my boys did this, and both of them frayed my admittedly short temper a least two or three times a week with this form of incessant questioning.
“Put your sandals on, buddy…”
“Why?”
“Because we’re going to the park!”
“Why?”
“So we can kick the soccer ball around…”
“Why?”
(It’s at this point you should resist the urge to point out that we’re going to the park to kick the soccer ball around “because you f*cking asked me to take you to the park to kick the soccer ball around about two f*cking minutes ago, goddammit!”)
It’s like trying to live with a voice outside your head that doesn’t know when it’s time to quit.
How do you deal?
This is a tip from my mother-in-law. She’s got more than 30 years’ experience in early childhood education, and is just about the most patient woman I’ve ever met.
One evening over a glass of wine, I started venting my frustrations about being a dad — and in particular, how I was struggling to deal with every single statement I uttered to my boys being met with the question “why?”
She said the best way to defuse it was to spot the right question that I could turn back on the kids.
When they ask “why”, I’d ask them “why do you think?”
This approach serves a couple of different purposes aside from simply defusing the situation.
It helps your kids feel like they’re being engaged with, and that they’re part of the conversation.
But most importantly, it gives them a chance to think the situation through, and provide themselves with the answer which is a vital stage of learning critical thinking skills.
For the first few months, both my boys would offer up reasoning, which was alternately right on the money, or so hilariously off-track that it was genuinely amusing.
We all learned valuable lessons, with that one simple trick.
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