Why Kids Don’t Ask Questions They Don’t Know Exist: Parenting Tips For Boosting Curiosity
Last Tuesday, I was folding soccer cleats and mismatched socks at the kitchen table while my 10-year-old Lila worked on her science report about pollinators. She sighed so loud the Chromebook shook, and pushed it away from her. “I’m done. There’s nothing new to say,” she said. I wiped a smudge of peanut butter off my jeans and leaned over to look. Her search bar history was exactly what the assignment prompt listed: why are bees important, how many bees are left in the world, what do pollinators do. All correct, all exactly what she was told to look for. “What do you wonder about bees that wasn’t in the class video?” I asked. She blinked at me. “Nothing. That’s all we need.” I reminded her of the weekend two months before, when we’d watched a big fuzzy carpenter bee chew a half-inch hole into our back deck railing for 10 minutes. “Do you ever wonder why that guy didn’t just move into a hive with the rest of the bees?” I said. Her eyes went wide. “Wait, they don’t all live in hives? I didn’t know I could ask that.”
A couple days after that, I was subbing for a 7th grade English class, and after the class finished their reading quiz, a boy named Javi asked if he could look up a problem with his dirt bike. I said sure, as long as he stayed off social media. He pulled up YouTube in two clicks, typed “how to fix sticky throttle on 2021 CRF 110”, and had a 3-minute step-by-step queued up before I’d finished marking half the quizzes. I stopped by his desk on my round and asked, “Do you ever look up stuff you don’t even know you need to ask about?” He frowned like I’d just asked him to solve calculus in his head. “Why would I look up something if I don’t know what I’m looking for?”
That question stuck with me. It’s not that Javi or Lila are bad at being curious. It’s that every tool they use to find information is built to give them exactly what they ask for, immediately. When I was their age, if I needed information for a report, I’d walk to the school library, check out the encyclopedia volume for B, and while I waited for the librarian to help me find a book on honeybees, I’d flip through the neighboring shelves. I’d stumble on a book about solitary bees, or a weird pamphlet about beekeeping in the 1800s, and leave with a dozen new questions I never would have thought to ask. Now, you type your question, get your answer, close the tab, and you’re done. There’s no dead time, no wandering, no accidental discovery. Over time, we stop expecting those discoveries. We stop believing there’s anything worth knowing that we don’t already know to ask for.
I’ve been testing small, low-effort changes at home and when I’m in the classroom, and none of them require getting rid of phones or Google or going totally off-grid. The first thing we do is a 10-minute unstructured click rule. Any time the kids are working on a school project online, after they’ve found everything they need to turn in the assignment, they have to spend 10 minutes clicking any link that isn’t related to their original question. It doesn’t matter where it goes, they just have to follow a rabbit hole and tell me one weird thing they found at the end. Lila did this with her bee report, and ended up reading about a species of bee that lives only in the Mojave Desert and only pollinates one type of cactus. That little fact was what got her an A on her presentation—her teacher said it was the most original thing anyone turned in.
Another small change: when you’re at a bookstore or library, make a rule that you have to walk through one section you wouldn’t normally go to on the way to check out. If your kid is there for graphic novels, detour through the geology section. If they’re there for sports biographies, stop in the poetry corner for five minutes. No pressure to check anything out, just flip through one random book that catches your eye. Last month, Lila detoured through the local history section at our town library and found a scrapbook from a 1950s beekeeper’s club that had hand-drawn pictures of all the local flowers bees like. She ended up doing an extra credit project on local pollinator plants just because she stumbled on it.
The most concrete thing I’ve changed is what I say when my kids ask me a question. Instead of just giving them the answer or telling them what to search, I add one extra line: “What else do you think we might want to know about that?” It’s a tiny prompt, but it models that asking the first question isn’t the end of curiosity. When Lila asked me how much honey a single bee makes in its life, I told her I didn’t know, then said, “What else do you think we might want to know about that?” She thought for a minute and said, “Do different bees make different tasting honey?” That led to a whole afternoon of reading about how clover honey vs manuka honey gets its flavor, something none of us would have looked up if we’d just stopped at the first answer.
I know this isn’t a huge crisis that needs solving. Search engines and tutorials make life easier, and there’s nothing wrong with getting a fast answer to a specific question. But the skill of finding questions you didn’t know you had is how people come up with new ideas, how you find hobbies you love, how you end up caring about things you never knew existed.
Some days, Lila still just types the exact assignment question into Google and calls it done. Some days, Javi still just fixes his dirt bike and doesn’t wonder about anything else. But every once in a while, Lila will come to me, holding her phone, and say, “I was reading about bees and I found this thing—did you know octopuses have three hearts? I didn’t even know I wanted to know that.” That’s enough for me. It’s not about turning every kid into a researcher. It’s just about keeping that muscle from getting too weak to use.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Why Kids Don’t Ask Questions They Don’t Know Exist: Parenting Tips For Boosting Curiosity