Any parent who has experienced the endless “why?” of a child can attest to how exasperating it can be – Especially at the end of a hectic day or as you’re rushing to get out of the house.
Experts believe that these endless queries are honest attempts to get to the truth, and kids respond better to some answers than they do to others.
The finding is based on a two-part study that involved children aged 2 to 5, suggesting that our youngsters are far more active in their search for knowledge than anyone had thought.
Research efforts from the early to mid 1900s on child development reported that young children were aware of temporal relationships between two events, but couldn’t distinguish between cause and effect until about age of 7 or 8.
Later work disputed this finding, suggesting that children as young as 3 understand cause and effect.
“Even from really early on when they start asking these how and why questions, they are asking them in order to get explanations,” explains lead researcher Brandy Frazier of the University of Michigan. The new findings appear in the November/December 2009 issue of the journal Child Development.
To figure out kids’ responses to different questions, Frazier and her team began by looking at transcripts from everyday conversations of half a dozen kids, aged 2 to 4, who were talking to their parents, brothers or sisters and visitors at home. There were 560 conversations, with over 3,100 casual “how” or “why” questions.
Kids were more than two times more likely to re-ask the question after a non-explanation than when they got a real answer. The questions got explanations about 37% of the time, and this made the kids four times as likely to ask a follow up question than if they got a non-explanatory answer.
The next part of the study was lab-based and included 42 preschoolers, in the age range of 3 to 5 years old. These kids chatted when presented with toys, books or videos that were designed to create surprising, question provoking situations. The children were shown a box of all red crayons- a puzzle with a piece that wouldn’t fit –and a story about a child who poured orange juice over cereal.
Continues below…
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Why Kids Ask “Why?” Continued…
The adults had some explanatory and non-explanatory replies ready, so when kids asked about the orange-juice-on-cereal story there were two answers that could be given. The explanatory – he thought it was milk in the pitcher, and a non-explanatory – I like to put milk on my cereal.
The team found big differences in the reactions to the explanatory answers as opposed to the non-explanatory ones.
Just about 30% of the time the children would agree, nod or say “Oh” after getting a true explanation, while just under 13% of the time for the non-explanation.
More than 20% of the time the children re-asked the first question – just 1% of kids who got an explanation did the same.
The samples sizes, like the subjects, were small, so experts can’t generalize the results to all kids. Also missing are the kids’ reactions to the answers they were given.
Early results from another new study of Frazier’s point out that there is such a thing as too much information in the answers we give our kids. There’s an optimal level of detail our children are interested in, just what that level is still needs to be understood.
Daily Health Bulletin
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