The Hard Question I Can’t Answer Yet As A Parent: What I Do Instead
The crumbs of my son’s after-school granola bar are stuck to my jeans, and his soccer cleats are clanking against the back of my seat when he asks it. We’re three blocks from the elementary school, just passing the blue clapboard house where Mrs. Henderson lived until last month, when the cancer she’d been fighting got too bad. “Mom,” he says, staring at the “for sale” sign propped in her overgrown front yard, “why did she have to get sick? She was nice. She gave me extra cookies every Halloween.”
I fumble for a second. I’ve got an answer for most of his questions. I can tell him why we don’t eat raw cookie dough, why his baby teeth fall out, why the neighbor’s dog barks at the mailman. This one sticks in my throat. I’ve heard all the go-to lines: Everything happens for a reason. She’s in a better place. Sometimes bad things just happen. None of them feel right to say out loud. A month earlier, he’d asked the same core question when his favorite goldfish, Bubbles, died after two years in his tank. I’d said “Sometimes fish just get sick, even when you feed them right” and he’d gone to his room and closed the door for an hour. I knew that answer wasn’t enough then, either.
I used to scroll through parenting posts that said you have to meet every question with a clear, comforting answer. I thought if I didn’t have an answer, he’d feel unsafe, like the world was a scarier place than I could fix. But after the goldfish incident, I started trying something different. That day in the car, I turned down the radio, pulled over at the stop sign, and said “That’s such a good, hard question. I don’t know the answer to that yet.”
He was quiet for a minute, picking at a loose thread on his faded soccer sweatpants. Then he said “I think it’s because the world runs out of nice people sometimes. Like how we run out of milk on Tuesdays.” I didn’t correct him. I didn’t argue that that’s not how biology or cancer works. I just said “That makes sense. It feels that unfair, doesn’t it?” He nodded, and started talking about how Mrs. Henderson helped him reattach the chain on his bike last summer, when I was busy with his little sister’s fever. He said she’d promised she’d come to his first soccer game of the season. By the time we pulled into our driveway, he’d stopped staring at that for sale sign, and asked if he could have a cherry popsicle before homework.
That’s when I realized something I hadn’t before. Most of the time, when kids ask these big unanswerable questions, they aren’t actually asking for a fact. They’re asking to be allowed to feel the unfairness of it, to have someone sit with that discomfort with them instead of brushing it away. I’ve tested this out a few times now, and it works more often than not. When my 10-year-old niece came over crying a few weeks ago, asking why her parents had to get a divorce when all her friends still have both parents at home, I didn’t launch into the well-rehearsed explanation about how sometimes grown ups fall out of love and it’s not your fault. I just said “That’s the hardest question I’ve ever heard, and I don’t have an answer for you. What’s the part that hurts the most right now?” She ended up talking about how she won’t get Saturday morning pancakes with both of them anymore, a small, specific hurt I never would have guessed was bothering her if I’d been too busy giving her an answer to listen.
The thing that surprised me most is how easy this is, once you stop trying to come up with the right answer. I don’t do anything fancy. I just follow the same simple pattern every time, and it doesn’t take any extra planning or special training. First, I don’t reach for a platitude. I don’t say everything happens for a reason, because that makes it sound like the bad thing was supposed to happen, which doesn’t help when you’re 8 years old and missing the lady who gave you extra cookies. Second, I just say I don’t know. I don’t make up a story to fill the awkward quiet. Third, I ask them what they’re feeling, instead of rushing to change the subject or fix their mood. It’s just that simple.
I still feel like I’m doing it wrong some days. Last week, he asked me why some kids don’t have enough food to eat when there’s grocery stores full of food everywhere, and I said I didn’t know, and he crossed his arms and said “You’re supposed to know these things.” That stung. I sat with it for a minute, didn’t try to defend myself, and said “I know it feels like I should, doesn’t it? I wish I did. It makes me mad too.” He nodded, and we talked about the food drive at school we were going to that weekend, and that was that. It wasn’t a perfect moment, there was no big heartwarming resolution. But it was better than if I’d given him some half-baked answer about policy and poverty that he couldn’t wrap his head around at 8 years old.
I still have a lot of questions I can’t answer. I don’t know why bad things happen to good people, why kids get hurt, why families break apart. I don’t know if I’ll ever have those answers, even when I’m 80. What I do know is that holding space for the question doesn’t mean I’m failing as a parent. It means I’m teaching my kid that it’s okay to not have all the answers, that it’s okay to sit with hard feelings instead of rushing to fix them. Some days, that’s all any of us can do.
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