Why Kids Struggle to Ask Questions They Don’t Know Exist: Simple Tips for Parents
Last Tuesday, I sat across from my 10-year-old, Eli, at our kitchen table, crumbs from his after-school granola bar sticking to the edge of his science worksheet. His assignment was a 300-word project on our local watershed, and he’d already pulled up Google, typed “what is a watershed,” and copied the first sentence of the top result word for word into his document. Then he just stared at the screen, fingers hovering over the keyboard.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “You need another fact, right?”
“I don’t know what else to look up,” he said, shrugging. “That’s all it says you need to know.”
That line hit me. I remembered doing a similar project when I was his age, back when we had to walk to the town library to check out books for homework. I’d gone looking for three basic facts about watersheds too, but I’d pulled the wrong book off the shelf by accident: a tattered paperback about how local cities were working to stop fertilizer runoff from killing salmon in the river. I spent an hour flipping through it, left the library knowing more about salmon spawning than watershed basics, and left with a question I never would have thought to ask before: why does my soccer field’s fertilizer end up in the fish’s home?
Eli never would have stumbled on that right now. His Google search auto-completed “what is a watershed” before he finished typing, served up the most popular, basic answer first, and there was no reason for him to go looking anywhere else. That’s when I started noticing it: we’re losing the ability to discover things we didn’t know to ask about.
I volunteer in Eli’s 4th grade class once a week, and a few weeks ago, the teacher did an activity where she asked kids to write down any question they had about bees before starting their unit. Half the class wrote down the same two or three questions: what do bees eat? How do they make honey? A third of the class turned in a blank sheet and wrote “I don’t know any questions to ask.” No one asked why some bees are black and white, or if bees sleep, or why they die after stinging you—questions that don’t come up unless you stumble across something that makes you curious enough to ask.
It’s not that kids are less curious now. It’s that curiosity often starts with an accident. You’re looking for one thing, you bump into something else you didn’t know existed, and that’s where the new question comes from. Before search engines, that happened all the time. You’d go to the library for a book on volcanoes, end up next to the rock hounding section, and come home with a new hobby. You’d flip through a TV guide and stop on a documentary about space that you never would have searched for. Now, every algorithm is designed to give you exactly what you’re looking for, as fast as possible. There’s no room for the accidental bump into the thing you didn’t know to ask.
I started testing small, low-effort changes with Eli and the kids I volunteer with, nothing that adds extra time to already packed days. The first thing I tried is the random book rule: any time we go to the library for an assignment-related book, we each have to grab one book from the same floor that has nothing to do with what we came for. We don’t even have to read the whole thing, just flip through it for five minutes. The week Eli did his watershed project, he grabbed a random graphic novel about sewer system workers off the shelf, which led to him asking why our town doesn’t flood after big storms like the one in the book. That question ended up being the core of his project, and he got a comment from his teacher saying it was the most original work she’d seen.
Another thing I started saying, instead of “good job” when Eli says he’s done with his homework, is “what’s the weirdest thing you found while you were working on this?” It’s a simple question that makes him stop and think back, instead of just closing his laptop and running off to play. Last month, when he was working on a pyramids project with his friend, they both finished their basic facts in 10 minutes, and I asked the question. They both stared, so I showed them how to scroll to the bottom of the Wikipedia page and click any random “see also” link that sounds weird. They clicked “animal mummies” and spent the next 25 minutes geeking out over the fact that Egyptians mummified crocodiles and cats, not just pharaohs. Neither of them had ever heard of that, because they never would have thought to search for it.
Small environmental changes help too. I turned off autoplay and the recommended video sidebar on Eli’s YouTube account for school work. Instead of the next video popping up automatically, he has to pick one that sounds interesting if he wants to keep looking. It’s a 30-second change in settings, no extra work, but it makes him actively pick something new instead of just being served what the algorithm thinks he wants.
I don’t do this every day. Some nights we’re rushing through homework to get to bedtime, and I let him copy three basic facts and call it done. I’m not trying to fight algorithms or technology entirely—we use Google and YouTube for school every single day. But I’ve noticed over the past few months that Eli will sometimes bring up a weird random fact he found just clicking around, unprompted. Last week he told me sloths grow algae on their fur to blend in with trees, something he found when he clicked a random link while working on a rainforest project. He grinned and said, “I never even knew I wanted to know that.”
It’s still a work in progress. Some weeks we forget the random book rule, and some kids still turn in blank question sheets at school. But those 5-minute detours, the ones that don’t count for a grade or check any box on a to-do list, are the ones that teach kids that there’s always something new to find that you didn’t know to ask for.
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