If there’s one thing kids love, it’s asking questions. Why is it raining? What is fire made of? How many pipes are there in the world? How much blood does a horse have? Why do you look so tired, dad, and why are your eyes twitching like that? Do frogs eat nuts?

a big part parenthood It involves fielding these queries that effortlessly jump from the incredibly mundane to the existential and metaphysical. So “how big is a penguin?” seamlessly “why do people die?” can proceed to the question.

Dealing with this is so tiring. You have to dig deep into your own memories to unearth things you were taught decades ago, translate them into toddler-friendly words, and try not to be too flippant about the universe being a cruel, uncaring, meaningless place (kids will understand this). come out later). And ideally you need to make the learning process unambiguously fun.

“As a human transition out of toddlerhood “There’s a sweet spot between the explosion of vocabulary and language development, the propensity for social learning and cooperation, and the relatively immature executive function system,” says Dr. Sarah Lloyd-Fox, an expert in brain development and early life in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge. “This last part is where our inhibitory control Or it means that our ability to stop what we’re doing is still not like adults.”

For this reason small children They often ask question after question without considering when they should stop or which topics might not be appropriate. Every answer given leads to another question, and even “why” after “why” comes after “why” after “why” in a dance that has driven parents to madness for thousands of years.

But it’s easy to see yourself as an all-knowing sage when you come up with few satisfying answers. My daughter is now seven so she rolls her eyes at my silly jokes, but when she was three she thought I knew everything. And if he thought I was a genius, maybe I was. Of course, I didn’t know all the right answers. But I knew some of them.

For example, in 1999 I reviewed plate tectonics and coastal erosion for my geography GCSE and it never appeared in the exam, so a concise set of items about longshore drift lay dormant in my brain for decades. “What do kangaroos eat? Well let me tell you what they don’t eat: coastal defense infrastructure. What is this? Fasten your seat belt!”

Then one day he asked me a question that would change the course of the next few years of my life. “Dad,” he said. “Do spiders run out of webs?” I had no idea. It made sense that they had to do this, because webs are made of matter, and as far as I know, one of the fundamental properties of matter is that it is finite, but beyond that, it is not a scooby.

I researched and discovered that spiders run out of webs if they spin too much without eating, and sometimes they eat unnecessary webs to reuse the protein. I love it and if he hadn’t asked I would never have found out.

After a lot of hard work, this information is now part of a book. There’s No Such Thing as a Stupid QuestionA beautifully illustrated collection of weird and wonderful queries meticulously answered and fact-checked by experts. Of course, I was lucky enough to have access to world-class scientists to answer my questions. child’s questionsMost of us don’t do this. If you’re investigating your own child’s unusual queries, here are some tips…

Not knowing right away is not a bad thing

Nobody knows everything. Even experts need to research things and double-check information. Every “I don’t know” has a silent “yet” at the end. So don’t feel stupid when your kids ask and you don’t know.

Don’t trust Google’s artificial intelligence

For all this artificial intelligence companies love to brag about their genius, the AI-generated paragraph that pops up before your search results is still pretty ridiculous. I added a few questions from the book and it did a terrible job; Including ensuring the spiders won’t run out of anything. If I read this nonsense in 2021, this book wouldn’t exist.

Don’t let your phone ruin the conversation

Having access to all the world’s information 24 hours a day via smartphones is a double-edged sword. You don’t necessarily want a walk in the woods with your kids to turn into a session of sitting on a log searching for Wikipedia. Why not save topics and questions to review when you get home?

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Open your questions with your children

While there’s no such thing as a stupid question, some questions need a little expansion. “Does an elephant weigh more than a fire truck?” will only give you a yes/no answer, but you can expand on the subject: Why are some animals so big? How much water can an elephant spray compared to a fire truck? Do some countries have more elephants than fire trucks?

If you get a disappointing, boring, or completely incomprehensible answer, keep asking. If in doubt, act more and more stupidly.

There’s a time and place

Now a three-year-old asks: “Why does this guy smell so much?” This is certainly much cuter and more forgivable than an 18-year-old asking this, but understanding that there is a time and place to ask why diarrhea occurs (and it’s not at 8.30am at Pret A Manger) is an important question. It’s also part of growth.

But encourage your child to keep asking as he or she grows.

“As we enter middle childhood, the social interactions we’ve had up to this point (the way people respond to our questions) are coupled with changes in the brain and biology: hormonal changes“Children are becoming more aware of the social structures and expectations of our culture at a time when we are also experiencing brain and biological changes that make us more self-aware and self-critical.”

So keep pushing them to ask more questions.

Ask yourself questions; yes, even as an adult

Everything humanity has ever solved is the result of asking the right questions. Why is this happening? What happens if I eat this? Should I put my head in the fire? But now we seem to have stopped while we were still in school.

The book is written for children, but I hope adults buy something from that too. Adults don’t ask that many questions; As we get older, we worry that we will appear ignorant or be judged for what we don’t know, which feels like a great shame. If no one asked questions, no one would learn anything.

But when it comes to curiosity about the world, if we make people feel stupid about asking questions, they’ll stop. And that, as a possibility, is terrifying. You never feel stupid asking how someone is; So why would you feel silly asking how babies think without knowing words, how penguins tell each other apart, or whether a Venus flytrap can bite your finger off? (I found the answer to all of these when I researched my book.)

“We have a lot to learn from children and we need to emulate more of their approach to life,” says Lloyd-Fox. In fact, there is no logical reason why the curiosity, passion, and interest in the world we had in childhood should be left behind just because we are worried that someone will think we look silly. A life where you never ask questions and never learn cool facts about spiders is much stupider.

There’s No Such Thing as a Stupid Question: 213 Weird Questions, Expertly Answered! Published by Nosy Crow Publishing.