Why kids can’t always explain what’s going on in their heads (and what actually helps)
The other morning, I had a student sitting at his desk with his arms crossed, staring at the ceiling. His name is Leo, and he’s eight. He hadn’t done any of the morning math sheet, and when I crouched next to his chair and asked what was going on, he just shrugged. I waited. He shrugged again. Then he said, “I don’t know.”
I’ve heard that phrase a thousand times. From my own kids at home, from students in my classroom, from the neighbor’s kid who suddenly refuses to get out of the car at school drop-off. “I don’t know” is, on the surface, frustrating. As an adult, I want to say, You must know something. You’re sitting here, you’re frowning, you clearly feel some kind of way about this worksheet. But the truth I keep relearning is that Leo wasn’t lying or being difficult. He genuinely didn’t have the words.
We tend to assume that children experience their inner lives the way we do — with a running commentary of thoughts, feelings, and explanations. But a lot of kids don’t. They feel things as physical sensations, or as a vague heaviness, or as an impulse to push the paper off the desk. When an adult asks a rapid-fire series of questions — What happened? Are you upset? Did someone do something to you? Why won’t you just tell me? — the child’s mind doesn’t always have a neat answer ready. The question feels like being asked to describe a dream you’ve already forgotten. There’s a shape there, but no words attached.
Leo eventually told me, in bits and pieces, that he was worried about his dog, who had been sick over the weekend. But that information didn’t come out because I asked the right question. It came out because I stopped asking questions and started simply sitting next to him, doing my own work, letting the silence stretch. After a few minutes, he said, “My mom said the vet might have to do surgery.” That was the real thing. But he needed time and the absence of pressure to find it.
What I’ve learned, both at home and in the classroom, is that “I don’t know” often means one of several things. Sometimes it means “I don’t have the vocabulary yet.” A seven-year-old who is feeling jealous of a new sibling doesn’t always have that word in their emotional toolbox. They might say “I hate dinner” or “I don’t want to go to school” when what they actually feel is being left out. Sometimes it means “I’m overwhelmed and my brain is full of static.” And sometimes it means “I know what I feel but I’m afraid to say it out loud because I don’t want to be wrong.”
As parents and teachers, our first instinct is usually to help the child find the right words. We offer suggestions: “Are you angry? Are you tired? Did something happen at recess?” That can work, but it can also put the child in a position where they just pick whichever option seems closest, even if it’s not accurate, just to end the conversation. I’ve had students nod along to my guesses and then, days later, reveal that they were actually upset about an entirely different thing.
A better approach, I’ve found, is to lower the demand for explanation altogether. When Leo was stuck, I said, “You don’t have to tell me. But you’re allowed to sit here for a few minutes, and when you’re ready, you can start with just one problem.” That gave him an out. It also gave him permission to not have a coherent story for what was going on. He didn’t have to perform his emotions for me.
At home, I’ve started doing something similar with my own kids. When my daughter comes home from school and slams her backpack down, I used to ask, “What’s wrong?” That usually resulted in a grunt or a dramatic collapse onto the couch. Now I try to narrate what I’m seeing instead of questioning her: “Looks like the backpack hit the floor pretty hard today.” That sounds a little strange at first, but it works. It shows her that I’m paying attention, and it gives her the option to correct me or elaborate — without feeling interrogated.
Visual tools help too. In my classroom, I have a small feelings chart — not the big round one with twenty emotional faces, but a short list of words like “tired,” “restless,” “confused,” “scared,” “annoyed,” “sad,” and “okay.” When a kid is struggling, I’ll point to the chart and say, “See if any of these match.” That’s usually easier than asking an open-ended question. For younger kids, even offering simple physical descriptors can help: “Does your body feel jumpy? Do your shoulders feel tight? Is your tummy doing anything weird?” That gives them a way to describe an internal state without needing to name the emotion itself.
I’ve also learned to watch the timing. Asking a child to explain themselves in the middle of a meltdown is like asking someone to do calculus while being waterboarded. Their frontal lobe is offline. The explanation, if it ever comes, happens later — usually at bedtime, or in the car, or while they’re playing with Legos. That’s often when the real information surfaces. When my son was five, he got very upset about having to put his shoes on, which escalated into a twenty-minute fight every single morning. I kept asking him why, and he kept screaming. It wasn’t until one evening, while he was building with blocks, that he casually said, “You know that red line in my sock? It hurts my toes.” The whole meltdown was about a seam. He hadn’t known how to say it in the morning because he didn’t understand that a physical discomfort could be put into words.
That’s the other thing to remember: kids often don’t know the difference between a thought, a feeling, and a physical sensation. It all just feels like something wrong. Our job is not to force them to articulate it in the moment. It’s to help them build the capacity over time.
One of the most useful things I’ve started doing is giving kids the language after the fact, once the storm is over. Later in the afternoon, when Leo was back to normal, I said, “This morning seemed really hard. If you had to pick a word for how you felt, what would you guess?” He thought about it and said, “Worried.” I didn’t push. That one word was enough. He’s gradually getting better at noticing it in real time, but it’s a slow process.
There are still days when I ask Leo what’s wrong and he says, “I don’t know.” There are days when my own daughter gives me a one-word answer and disappears into her room. I don’t think we ever fully outgrow the difficulty of explaining ourselves. Adults have the same problem — we just have more practice and a bigger vocabulary, and even then, we often say “fine” when we mean something entire different.
What keeps me going is remembering that the “I don’t know” isn’t a rejection. It’s a developmental stage. It’s a sign that the child is still learning how to translate their inner world into words others can understand. The best I can do is to make space for that translation to happen slowly, without making them feel like they’ve failed for not having an answer yet.
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