Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Asking "why"

I see this on every list for identifying gifted children. I would like to ask whose gifted kid did NOT ask "why".

I have four children and two ask "why" nonstop, and two never do. They are close in age, so I can sort of study them and compare and contrast (two sets of twins age 6 and 7). The two who ask "why" seem to use extroverted intuition and probe their environment for answers. The two who do not ask "why" appear to have introverted intuition and intuite from their own internal database for solutions to problems.

Example: at age almost 3, twin boy says "why is the sky blue?" He is my twin who asks questions. Frequent and often. His sister says "To contrast with the clouds!" . She had wondered this as well, took the information she had already been given, and came up with an answer.

As these two children progress in school, this has been a problem for both of them. Twin boy never intuits and asks others to give him answers (I turn to him and say "why do you think?" And work out from there), and twin girl daydreams and internalizes problems and comes up with wildly fascinating but completely inaccurate solutions (I ask her often to explain how she came about her answers, and encourage her to investigate her environment).

Twin girl is in the gifted program, her brother is not (I qualified into the gifted program in first grade, my husband who says he processes information the same way as our son entered much later).

I am now seeing this same pattern play out with my younger set of boy twins. I am wondering if anyone else has a gifted child who answers questions internally only and does not vocalize them, or if I am seeing a unique dichotomy associated with twins.

DS5.5 never went through asking why when he was younger (when all the other kids around were asking why why why). He always asked "how does it work?" "how is it made?" and many other specific questions. But never simple "why". He goes on asking questions non stop all day but they are always to the point where he's looking for more of a technical answer.

DS11 (2e, ASD) did not ask questions until well past age 5. Otherwise linguistically more or less on track. He was figuring everything out under his own steam. Now he asks.

DS4 does not ask questions. He obviously wonders about things and analyzes things a lot because out of the blue he will explain why a certain thing is the way it is. Lots of the time completely wrong, but usually a very detailed explanation...

DS6 does the same thing although he is not interested in explaining his theory to us...:-)

DS took a while to ask why questions...most often it was 'how questions', like Mk13's DS. He does ask 'why' now but we don't really get "why is the sky blue" type questions, for the most part. I also wondered about that phenomenon, how some gifties are 'why why why' and others not - but then again, it seems like any time you try and pigeon-hole your kid into a gifted description, it ends in failure. (for a fun example, Ruf says that gifted infants don't mouth toys, or chew on books. tell that to my DS who LITERALLY ate hunks out of his board books. But now I'm straying off topic. :D)

My twins (both are gifted; almost 7 yrs old) asked questions all of the time as toddlers and still do, but rarely is the question a simple "Why" type question. Like squishes, though, I have always explained things to them in detail, so maybe they didn't need to ask a lot of questions - LOL.

DS7 asks questions non stop and has since he started talking. It can be exhausting and I'm truly grateful for our library and google. As someone who considers herself reasonably intelligent it is rather humbling to try to keep up with him We've had to resort to digging out university textbooks to satisfy his interrogations on more than one occasion.

DD5 isn't tested so I don't know if she is gifted but she isn't like that at all. I often wonder if it is because she's been stuck listening to DS's questioning for years and either isn't interested or that she now has all the info (and more) that one could ever want after listening to our answers.

DS11 never did the "why" questions. In fact, he had problems with questions in general -- understanding the difference between the types. I'm sure it's his Asperger's. I would ask, "how do you..." and he would answer, "because...". It was extremely frustrating, trying to explain why "because" was not an answer to "how".

DD7 didn't start at two, but somewhere along the line (5?) became attached to "why" questions and every other kind, and she still is.

With our DD it was "If you give {DD} an explanation..."

the bottom line is that she LOVES didactic interaction and learning from it so much that it's like catnip to her to see how many different tangents she can create using a single answer to a question.

She does it to everyone, though, not just us. Most other people seem to find it charming, probably because she loves to elicit people's intellectual passions (whatever those might be), and people love to talk about their own passions.

Yes-- and DD has always been my little skeptic-- she does NOT accept answers that don't make sense, and truth-tests out loud by asking follow-up questions. She sometimes asks for OPINIONS-- and is relentless with others until they 'confess,' coming at things from all different angles until the person cracks...

Nobody expects {DD}, basically.