When Your Child Asks “Would Anyone Mind Explaining This?” — How to Handle the Questions You Can’t Answer
The first time my six-year-old asked “Would anyone mind explaining this?” I was spooning out spaghetti while her father said “bless you” after a sneeze. She sat there, a noodle dangling from her fork, and looked at both of us with that terrible polite seriousness kids use when they’re about to unravel your entire sense of knowing things.
“Who is it blessing?” she asked. “And why does a sneeze need one?”
I did what many parents do in that moment. I said something like, “It’s just a nice thing to say,” while my brain scrambled for the actual history of the phrase. But she wasn’t satisfied. She pushed her plate an inch forward and asked, “But would anyone mind explaining this? Because it seems made up. Like saying ‘good luck’ when someone stubs their toe.”
I laughed, but inside I felt that exact shiver of being caught pretending to know something. It’s a feeling that happens almost daily when you have young children. They watch the world with fresh eyes, and they don’t yet operate on the same unspoken social rules we’ve all learned to accept. So they ask the questions we stopped asking long ago. And the honest answer is—I don’t actually know why we say “bless you” after a sneeze. Not really. I have vague memories of something about sneezing out your soul, or maybe it was the plague. I wasn’t sure.
That dinner didn’t end with a neat answer. Instead, my daughter kept asking variations. “Did people think you die a little when you sneeze?” “Why do we still do it if we know it’s not true?” “If you don’t believe in blessings, can you just say ‘gesundheit’?” At some point I admitted openly, “I don’t know, Lily. That’s a really good question.”
She looked almost relieved. “So you just say it because everyone else does?”
I nodded. “I think so. Or because it’s automatic. I never really stopped to check.”
She chewed her spaghetti and said, “When do you get to check things? In school, teachers tell you and you just have to memorize it. But when you’re a grownup, do you get to ask questions again?”
That quiet moment turned into something I keep coming back to. Children don’t just want an explanation. They want to understand the rules of the world—why we act the way we do, where our habits come from, what’s real and what’s made up. And when we give them answers like “it’s just a nice thing to say,” we’re actually doing two things: teaching them that our social customs are arbitrary, and also teaching them that asking for a clear explanation is a bit bothersome. Neither of those is helpful.
So I started paying attention to every time one of my kids asked a question I couldn’t fully answer. It happened more often than I’d like. Why do we have to raise our hands if we already know the answer? Why is a “work school” different from a “school school”? Why do people say “good morning” when it isn’t actually good? At first I tried to keep my automatic pilot on—I gave short, confident-sounding answers that were often just rituals of politeness. But after the sneeze conversation, I made a small change. I started saying, “I don’t know. Let’s find out.”
That phrase became a kind of anchor. It didn’t solve the problem of knowing everything. It just made the process more honest. When we looked up the sneeze thing, we found a bunch of theories—some about the plague, some about old survival fears, some about a folk superstition that a sneeze lets your soul escape. My daughter asked which one was true, and I said no one really knows for certain. She shrugged and said, “Then people just picked one and decided to keep it.” That wasn’t factually wrong, actually.
What I realized is that “Would anyone mind explaining this?” is a much bigger request than it seems. It isn’t just, “Give me an answer.” It’s, “I’ve noticed a thing that doesn’t make sense, and I’m trusting you to either explain it or be honest about not having an explanation.” Kids are expert detectors of fake answers. They’d rather have a shared uncertainty than a confident falsehood.
After that dinner, I started using a three-step approach that works in most situations, both at home and in the classroom (I’ve worked as a volunteer at school, so I see it from the teaching side too). First, I pause before responding. Not the awkward pause that makes kids feel like they’ve asked something shameful, but a thoughtful pause that says, “This is worth taking seriously.” Second, I answer with the limits of my own knowledge. So, “I know a little, but not enough to give you the full story” instead of bluffing. Third, I ask the child what they think first, before I give any answer. That last one is a trick I borrowed from a seasoned teacher. She told me, “The instant you give an explanation, they stop wondering. Ask them to theorize first. It gets them thinking and also buys you time to come up with a real answer.”
For example, when Lily asked why we say “bless you,” I could have said, “What do you think the reason is?” before any of my hesitation. She might have made up a story, which we could then compare to what we found together. That one question turns the moment from me teaching into us learning.
At dinner a few nights later, she tested me again. “Would anyone mind explaining why we have to go to bed at eight but you and Dad go to bed at eleven? Is it because being an adult means you don’t need as much sleep?”
I did the pause. Then I said, “Honestly, I don’t know the exact science. I know kids need more sleep, but I don’t remember why. What do you think?”
She thought for a moment. “Maybe because you get tired from doing boring stuff all day, and kids get tired from running around, but running around is more fun, so you don’t want to stop.”
That wasn’t right, but it was a lovely theory. We looked it up later and found out about hormone changes and brain development. She lost interest about halfway through, but she’d already practiced something useful: wondering out loud, offering a guess, and then comparing it to a reliable source.
This same move works for teachers, too. I’ve seen a classroom moment where a student asked, “Would anyone mind explaining why we have to learn to write in cursive when we type everything?” The teacher could have gotten defensive. Instead, she said, “I actually ask myself that too. Let me think. I’ll give you an honest angle tomorrow.” Then she did go and find an answer—something about brain development and motor memory—and shared it briefly. The kid accepted it. No rebellion, no eye-roll. The teacher also asked the class, “Do you think it’s a fair requirement?” That opened up a fifteen-minute debate about the purpose of school subjects in general. It was one of the most engaged discussions they had that month.
So when I hear “Would anyone mind explaining this?” now, I don’t brace myself. I treat it as a little green light to drop the lecture voice and become a fellow investigator. It doesn’t mean I have to drop everything and provide a mini-lesson. It just means I’m allowed to say, “I don’t know, but I’m willing to not know with you for a minute.”
That has changed how I talk to my children more than I expected. I used to feel pressure to be the adult with all the answers. Now I’m starting to think the adult’s real job is to show that a good question doesn’t need an immediate answer. Sometimes it needs a phone held out so we can both read a search result. Sometimes it needs a pantry shelf cleared off so a child can test whether a spoon really is shinier than a fork up close. Sometimes it just needs a parent who sits on the floor and says, “Huh, I wonder that too.”
It’s not a perfect system. I still get caught off guard, and I still give a feeble “that’s just how it is” on tired evenings. But I’m getting better at hearing the question beneath the question. “Would anyone mind explaining this?” often means “Would anyone mind taking me and my confusion seriously?” And that I can try to do—even when I don’t have the faintest idea what “gesundheit” actually translates to. Which I still had to look up, again, yesterday.
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