Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Do your kids ask questions like this?!

Do your kids ask you questions often that you don't know the answers to? My son is four and he's starting to do it almost daily now! I feel so, I don't know, not smart?

The latest questions that boggled my mind:

1. Does God, our Heavenly Father have a Father?

2. Does Heavenly Father Have a wife?

THere ha ve been lots I have to look up, but those were two, I had to just tell him what i believe, and what made sence to me, or ask, what do you think.

What kind of questions will he have when he grows up?!

What have your kids asked you?

Yes, we get existential questions too. Not those specifically, but other God questions and things like "what's on the other side of the universe." And when he was 3 and our dog died and I was explaining death, he wanted to know how people would see each other again in heaven if their eyes didn't work after they were dead. (Thanks a lot for that little bit of theology, DH. lol. YOU try explaining souls to a 3-year-old.)

I don't know if this is a GT thing or just a preschooler thing.

You are not alone I feel "dumb" all the time LOL. My DS6 even told me I should take the dumb test on the computer!

What are calories? was a recent question.
of course I hesitated and he said "is it good or bad"
That was really what he wanted to know.
So I said "good" he then says "Oh so pepsi one calorie is not good then"
Eh and I let it go at that. Oh well. Sometimes it is too draining to really explain stuff.

We definitely get questions like that here. One of the more recent questions was "What was Jesus' last name?"

You are definitely not alone in feeling "not smart". I very often will tell my DS5, "Wow, that's a good question, I don't really know." If it's something that we can look up, we do it together on the computer. Of course I'm waiting for the day when he realizes that the number of questions I don't know is greater than the number I do know... :-)

The fact that they are asking as a toddler is suppose to be a link to gifted. The average child usually asks around 7 or 8.

Tonight it was "Is God a Man or a Woman?"
I stumbled around with "we really don't know...usually we refer to God as him...but since God isn't human maybe he's neither a Man or a Woman...or maybe he's both"

That of course didn't suffice, so DD4 changed the question to "Is God a boy's name or a girl's name?"

My children constantly remind me of how little I know. I keep fighting the urge to pretend there are pat answers to these kinds of questions.

My DS torments me with abstract concepts! You try to define Honesty, Loyalty, Respect Etc. We all know what they are but just try to put them into words!

I remember when my DS was a pre-Ker. He asked DH, "Why are we here?" DH was putting DS to bed. DH asked him, "WHy are we in this bed? In this room? In this house?" But it wasn't any of those. He insisted, "No, why are we HERE?"

When he was just over 3 and I had just read him a kid's book on pregnancy and childbirth, DS4 asked me "Where did people come from? How did they get here to earth?" More recently, it was "who invented people?" I also get lots of questions about bodily functions, like "Why do you hiccup?" and "Why do you laugh?" which I can't answer.

We get a lot of these questions, all the time, from our oldest (now 5). It was one of the first things that made me really wonder about him and suspect he was different. I was pregnant with his brother who was born right at his second birthday. During the pregnancy he asked question after question about fetal development, what it was like for his brother in utero, how he was breathing, eating, etc. It was a little bizarre, and now I know that it was also unusual b/c his older brother didn't care a lick about these things when I was pregnant with our youngest (middle brother was also less than 2 at the time). He also asks us lots of tough questions. Things like, "When was I first alive?" I always answer his questions honestly, often times saying things like, "People disagree about the answer to that question, some believe . . . and some believe . . . " Or I say things like, "Well, some people think . . . , but no one really knows." Recently, he got frustrated with the "no one really knows" response and said, "Mom, why are there so many things that no one knows the answer to! I wish we knew the answer to everything!"