When Your Kid Asks A Question You Can’t Answer: Parenting Tips For Unexpected Kid Questions
Crushed goldfish crackers dust the edge of our kitchen table, a half-full sippy cup of chocolate milk leans to one side, and I’m squinting at a last-minute work email from my boss when my 7-year-old, Lila, looks up from drawing rainbow ponies and asks, “If I die, will I still be able to taste chocolate?”
I almost choked on my own coffee. We’d buried my great-aunt exactly one week earlier, and Lila had come to the service, sat through the whole thing coloring in a notebook and eating a lemon drop I’d slipped her. I’d assumed the whole event had gone right over her head, that she was just there for the cookies after. This question came out of nowhere, sharp and specific, nothing like the generic “what happens when you die” I’d braced myself for one day.
My first instinct was to brush it off. The words “Oh honey, you won’t have to worry about that for a hundred years” were right on my tongue. But I paused when I saw her face: her colored pencil was hovering an inch above the paper, her eyebrows pulled together like she’d been turning this over for days. This wasn’t a random thought. It was a question she’d worked up the courage to ask.
So I closed my laptop, pushed the spilled crumbs into a pile with my hand, and said the first honest thing that came to me: “That’s such a good question. I’ve never thought about that before. Can you tell me what made you ask that?”
She nodded, like she’d been waiting for me to ask. Mia from her class had said when you die you go to heaven, but you don’t have a body there. If you don’t have a tongue, she reasoned, how do you taste chocolate? And chocolate is her favorite thing in the whole world—better than birthday cake, better than ice cream, better than the new unicorn squishmallow she begged for last month. This wasn’t an abstract question about mortality. It was a very concrete worry about losing the thing that makes life good, as far as she was concerned.
I sat there for a full 10 seconds, my mind blank. My husband and I don’t agree on much when it comes to religion and death, and I didn’t want to accidentally say something that contradicted what he’d told her, or lie just to make her feel better. I’d read so much advice about talking to kids about big topics that said you have to be honest, you have to reassure them, you have to give them clear answers. But no one ever tells you what to do when the question is nothing like what you expected.
Then I remembered a trick a first-grade teacher friend told me once, when I complained that Lila always asks wild questions out of the blue. She said most of the time, kids don’t actually want your answer. They just want to be able to ask the question, and talk through what they’re already thinking. So I said, “You know what? I don’t know. No one really knows, right? Different people think different things. What do you think?”
She thought for a minute, tapping her pencil on the table. Then she said, “I think your soul remembers what chocolate tastes like, even if you don’t have a tongue. So if you love it that much, you can still taste it. Right?” I told her that made way more sense than any answer I could have come up with. We talked for another two minutes about whether I’d be able to taste my coffee if I died, whether our old cat who ran away two years ago can taste tuna now, and then she went back to coloring her ponies and we left for soccer practice on time.
That moment changed how I handle all the unexpected questions Lila throws at me, and it’s taught me more about how kids think than any parenting article I’ve read. The biggest mistake I used to make was jumping to answer before I even understood what the question was. The first concrete thing I do now, when a question catches me off guard, is ask them to tell me more. It buys me 30 seconds to stop panicking, and it almost always reveals that the question is rooted in something small and specific, not the big scary concept I’m already braced for. When I answered right away without asking, I’d end up talking past what she actually cared about, leaving her feeling unheard even if I thought I’d given a good answer.
Second, it’s okay to say you don’t know. I used to think that if I admitted I didn’t have an answer, Lila would feel unsafe or insecure. But making up an answer that doesn’t fit what she’s already heard from friends or other family members leaves her more confused than just saying no one has the answer to this one. It also models that it’s okay to not know everything, which is a lesson she’ll need way more than a made-up answer to one question. I don’t have to be the person who has all the answers to be a good parent, I just have to be the person who will listen to the question.
Third, meet them where they are. You don’t have to turn a question about chocolate and death into a 20-minute lecture on religion or biology. If their question is rooted in the small, happy things that matter to them, that’s where you talk. You don’t have to drag it up to the adult level of abstraction to make it meaningful. Kid logic makes perfect sense to kids, and forcing it into an adult box just shuts the conversation down.
It’s been three months since that afternoon at the kitchen table. Lila drew a picture of us in heaven holding giant chocolate bars a few days later, and it’s still taped to our fridge. Sometimes she brings up the question again, sometimes she doesn’t. I still don’t know if dead people can taste chocolate. But I know that when the next weird, unexpected question catches me off guard, I won’t rush to brush it off or make up an answer. I’ll just ask what she thinks, and that’ll be enough for now.
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