What's The Strangest Question Your Kid Ever Asked You?
Kids want to know stuff. And they figure out pretty quickly that one way to learn it is to ask us, their trusted parents.
So they ask. Oh my, do they ever ask.
Parenting has a hilarious blog post up today about whether or not it’s OK to dodge some of your kids’ questions. My answer: it had better be.
If I were patiently answering every question my preschoolers had ever asked me, we’d be sitting together chatting about why the sky is blue and where babies come from long after these kids have grown up. There are just too many questions to ever answer them all.
Some are simply unforgettable.
My current favorite is the Human Dictionary trick. My four-year-old is insatiably curious about what words mean. Big words, little words, words she’s never heard before and ones she uses every day. She wants to know, and she knows I have the answers.
“What does ‘fierce’ mean, Mommy? What does ‘sky’ mean? What does ‘proper’ mean? What does ‘I don’t know’ mean, Mommy, what?”
It’s not that I don’t know what words mean, but defining them on the fly turns out to be harder than it looks. And those questions are too adorable to ignore.
Not that every question I get is so easy to answer. In nearly a decade of parenting I’ve been asked about god, fairness, healthy food and human reproduction. The question I was least prepared to answer definitely resulted from my 7-year-old daughter reading a sex ed sign in a college restroom.
Like most of us, I try to field the big questions with respect and as much grace as I can muster. Why do people die? How are babies made? Is God real? What about fairies?
But the little ones? The questions about why paint dries and how high the sun is and whether or not it might really be OK to eat only cookies for dinner? I cannot answer every question my children ask me.
We’ve all been peppered with a thousand unanswerable questions from our kids. Which ones stand out in your mind? What’s the strangest question a kid has ever asked you?
When my oldest son was around 10, in the car, he asked how gay men could make love, LOL.
What are jails, mommy?
I started to say what my own mother had said, but then I recalled that we had a friend in jail, someone my children knew and liked. Someone who, as it happens, I was pretty sure had done the crime — which, if I were king, wouldn’t even be a misdemeanor, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.
So I wasn’t going to say, “A jail is where we put very, very bad people.”
I struggled awhile and said something convoluted and wishy-washy about ‘people who do bad things that our society doesn’t like’, trying to emphasize ‘keeping our families safe from people who are mean’ rather than ‘every jailbird is a bad person.’
“Oh,” said my then-8-year-old. “So we don’t know what to do about bad grownups.”
I thought we were done, but then he added. “Just like grownups don’t know what to do about bad kids.”
After explaining sex and birth to my five year old he had lots of questions. One of my favorite was when he was asking a lot of details about birth he said, “That sounds messy, how do you clean it up? A wet vac?”
I once asked my mother how they used to execute people before electric chairs were invented. I was about six. No, I don’t know why I knew about electric chairs at that age, but I imagine it had something to do with my brothers.
My daughter asked, out of nowhere, in JUNE if Santa Claus was dead. We were standing in line at the grocery store and that got some weird looks.
One of the twins asked what a date was, after hearing it on TV, when he was four. I answered that it was when a guy and a girl went out to together, to have dinner or ice cream or go to dance or whatever as a way of getting to know each other better and having fun together. I added that sometimes it’s two people going out together, sometimes it’s two guys and two girls, and that’s a group date. The other twin piped up that “Oh, we’ve been on a date before.” Really? “Yes. Auntie T and Auntie J went with me and my brother to go get ice cream and we went to a monster dance. Two boys, two girls, dancing, ice cream…date!”
My 4 year old asked me why kids cannot see Santa. I just told him that it is not that he does not want to be seen but that if every kid saw him, he will not be able to go around the world in one night because he will want to stay and talk to each one of them.
My favorite was courtesy of my 4 year old daughter: “Does poop have bones?”
The most interesting from my 4-year old in recent memory was “What happens if you replace all the boy chemicals in a boy with girl chemicals and put the boy chemicals in the girl?” He’s been curious about hormones.
The funniest from my 2-year old has been “Do you have a broken penis?”.