Not all questions need answers

Especially when you’re raising a person

We are addicted to answering questions.

We answer without any hesitation, usually when someone’s barely finished speaking.

As if our job as parents, as teachers, as adults, is just to explain and answer.

But every time we do this, especially with a child, we quietly crush the very thing we’re meant to protect: their wonder, their confidence, and their comfort with exploration and not-knowing.

Even though it feels like it, we’re not helping. We’re actually interrupting something sacred.

And most of us don’t even realize we’re doing it.

The Puzzle

My daughter and I were doing a puzzle she knows well, where a baby elephant is walking behind its mother, holding her tail.

She turned a piece around in her hand, looked at me and asked: “Is the baby walking the wrong way?”

I pointed. “No, she’s following her mom, see?” She nodded, turned the piece back around, and kept going.

It took me a second to realize what I had done.

She wasn’t asking me for facts, information, or my expert puzzle knowledge. She had started telling a story. Something imagined, creative and uniquely hers.

I just hadn’t recognized it.

And with it, And with it, the spark was gone.

The Pigeon

We talk about pigeons a lot, my daughter and I.

A lot of different pigeon species live in our neighborhood and she’s good at telling them apart. She loves hearing their coos and pointing them out.

A pair of wood pigeons (mommy and daddy, as she calls them) hang out in the tree next to our house, and sometimes on our roof. We often go and look.

One day we were walking outside when she saw the two of them sitting on a roof. Then one flew away. She tilted her head and said, mostly to herself: “Where is the other pigeon going?”

I stayed quiet.

A few seconds later she said, “I think she’s going to look for some food. Some seeds I think.”

She stayed with the question, and I didn’t take it from her.

I didn’t fill the silence, I didn’t interrupt her imagination. No story or spark was crushed.

Nothing spectacular happened. She just… kept wondering.

The Problem

She asks me questions all day. Some are for fact-checking, double checking, or reassurance.

But many of them are wide-open, wonder-based, and for thinking out loud. They often act (and sound) more like daydreams than questions.

But I only pick up on that when I pay attention and really listen.

If I don’t, I end up steamrolling her with my ‘brilliant’ answers all day.

I didn’t go to school to become a parent, and if I hadn’t been trained as a coach, I don’t think I would’ve ever known this crucial difference at all.

I’d still be doing what I see so many people do: blindly and bluntly answering all questions in a microsecond. Like they’re on a deadline.

And I get it.

You’re busy. Plus, humans are wired to predict, solve, and move on anyway.

We’re not bad parents. But we do need to notice and step out of our habitual reflex to respond.

Because if we don’t slow down, we’ll keep mistaking their wonder for a problem to solve.

Killing their spark in the process.

The Practice

In that moment, I didn’t say anything and just watched her stay with it.

The pigeon was gone. But the question stayed.

And so did her wonder.