How to Explain Complicated Concepts to Kids: Simple Lessons I Learned From My 7-Year-Old
Last month, I was wiping crumbs off the kitchen table after after-school snacks when my 7-year-old, Clara, leaned forward and asked, “What is cancer, anyway? Lila’s grandma died from it, and no one will tell me what it is.” I froze mid-wipe, reaching for my phone before I even thought about it—my first instinct was to pull up a kid-friendly medical article that would get it right. I started reciting something about tiny cells that grow out of control, and after two sentences Clara blinked, crunched a goldfish cracker, and said, “Why can’t doctors just cut them out like my wart?” I kept going, adding something about mutations and spreading, and her face closed up. She pushed her plate away and said it didn’t make any sense, and I could see her eyes starting to well up. I’d just overwhelmed her with words that meant nothing to her, trying to be accurate instead of being understood.
I’d been here before, back when I was student teaching 3rd grade. I’d spent a whole week making a slideshow about climate change, full of pretty pictures of glaciers and graphs of rising temperatures, and halfway through my presentation I noticed half the class was drawing rainbows on their notebook margins. After class, my cooperating teacher, Ms. Lopez, leaned against the desk and said, “You’re trying to teach 8-year-olds like they’re college sophomores. You don’t need all that.” She told me what she does when she has to explain something big: start with what they already know, not what you know. I’d forgotten that lesson until Clara’s cancer question.
I put my phone down, pulled her chair closer, and tried again. “Remember when you fell off your bike two months ago and scraped your knee open? Remember how it scabbed over and grew new skin to fix it?” She nodded, lifting her knee to show me the faint pink scar. “Your body knows how to stop making new skin once it’s fixed. Cancer is when that stop button breaks. It just keeps making more and more cells, even when it doesn’t need them, and those extra cells bunch up and get in the way of the parts of your body that are supposed to work.” I paused. “Doctors can usually cut that extra bunch out or give you medicine to fix the stop button, but sometimes the extra cells spread all over before anyone finds them, and they can’t fix it. That’s what happened to Lila’s grandma.”
Clara stared at me for a few seconds, crunched another goldfish, and said “oh. Okay. Can we make chocolate chip cookies after homework?” That was it. She didn’t need to know about chemotherapy, or genetic predisposition, or the national cancer research budget. She just needed a simple, relatable answer to the question she actually asked, and that’s what she got.
I’ve been testing this trick out for the last month on every random big question Clara throws at me, and it works almost every time. Last week, she looked at her grocery store receipt and asked why we had to pay extra money for tax, why the price on the tag isn’t the price we just pay. I almost started talking about public services and government budgets, then caught myself. Instead I said, “Remember how your class all chips in a dollar every month for pizza day? Everyone gives a little so the whole class can have pizza and plates and napkins. Taxes are like that. Everyone gives a little bit of extra money when they buy things, and that money pays for the playground you go to after school, the fire trucks that come if there’s a fire, and your teacher’s salary. If no one chipped in, we wouldn’t have any of those things.” She nodded immediately and said “oh, so if I don’t pay tax there’s no slide?” Yep, that’s the gist of it. She didn’t need to know about progressive tax rates or municipal bonds that day, and if she asks more later, I’ll tell her more then.
The biggest mistake I see other parents and new teachers make is thinking we have to get the whole concept out in one go, that we’re failing if our 7-year-old doesn’t understand the full complexity of climate change, cancer, taxes, or why we have to move away from a friend. The specific things that work for me are so simple I almost can’t believe I didn’t see them earlier. First, always tie the new concept to something they’ve lived: scraped knees, class pizza parties, family movie night votes, the blanket that makes you too hot at night (that’s how I explain greenhouse effect, by the way). Second, only answer the question they actually asked, not every related question you think they should have. If they want more, they’ll ask. Third, it’s totally fine to say “I don’t know the answer to that right now, let’s figure it out together” or “that’s a really big question that’s hard to understand when you’re little, I’ll tell you more when you’re older.” No need to make up a confusing lie or dump a bunch of jargon to sound smart.
I still mess it up, of course. Two weeks ago I tried to explain how presidential elections work, and I got so caught up talking about Democrats and Republicans and the Electoral College that Clara started asking when we could get ice cream. I restarted, said it’s just like when we vote for what movie to watch on Friday night—everyone gets one vote, the person with the most votes wins, and that person helps make the rules for everyone. She got it immediately.
Last night, Clara crawled into my bed after a bad dream and asked if kids can get cancer. I didn’t pull out the statistics. I just reminded her of the wart she had on her hand last year that the doctor froze off, how that was an extra little bump of cells that wasn’t supposed to be there, and how almost all extra bumps on kids aren’t cancer. She nodded, curled up next to me, and we watched 10 minutes of Bluey before she went back to her room. I don’t have all the answers, and I know I’ll mess up a hundred more explanations before she’s grown. But so far, meeting her where she is instead of dragging her to where I think she should be works a whole lot better than any textbook answer I could ever memorize.
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