So Many Questions

“Mommy, why is she saying ‘I’m so fancy,” Emma asks from the backseat.

“Uh….she thinks she’s fancy,” I leaned over and changed the radio station.  Yes, I was listening to Iggy Azalea’s ‘I’m So Fancy,’ in the car with my children.  Is that so wrong?  It probably is. 

“Why is she saying I-G-G-Y?” Emma asks a moment later.

For that one I really had no answer.

Just because I had kids doesn’t mean my love for bad pop music has gone away.  I’ve always said the day I hear, ‘Hey baby drop it to the floor,’ from the backseat is the day that I will stop.

So that basically happened.

I have never heard Scott giggle so much.  Later on he told me that I totally deserved that line of questioning.

I did.

Emma is in that ‘questioning stage.’  Every conversation is a litany of ‘whys.’  She asks me stuff that I know that she knows the answer to.  Which is frustrating.  Or the exact same ‘why’ question that she has been asking for the past several days.  I often get hung up on some of the ‘whys,’ when I know that the true answer to what she is asking is a concept that is way too large for her to understand.  I know that it is developmental, and I take deep breaths and try to not let the constant ‘whys’ get under my skin. 

I can remember asking ‘whys’ all the time as a child.  I remember wanting to know the deeper meaning, why did they do that in the story?  What was their motivation?  What were they thinking?  I just wanted MORE.

So I Googled it.  ‘Why do children ask so many questions?’  I wanted to know what developmental function was driving a child’s need to constantly pepper you with questions.  I was given a few links to question and answer forums.  Quite a few of them said some version of ‘kids don’t know much and that’s the only way they have to gain knowledge.’  I thought that was a bit arrogant and weak.  Kids know a lot, they have lots of ways to gain knowledge (sight, touch, taste, observations, etc.), and, I mean, I know I am a god of knowledge, but I don’t know everything.  I clicked enough to find this webpage.  I do know what it feels like to answer a child and receive a deflated response from them.  I guess I had thought that was because the answer wasn’t quite as magical as they thought it would be.  I liked the thought that they are just trying to engage you in conversation and they don’t have a better way of going about it.  I’ve tried just exploring her questions with her, especially when she asks the same question over and over again.  I know that child has a mind like a steel trap, I am pretty sure that she didn’t forget the former answer.

But it remains annoying.  Which is hard.  Because it’s just a stage.  I don’t want her to internalize my annoyance and begin to believe that she is annoying.  She is just four, and four year olds do annoying things.  The other day I had about quite enough of it, I turn to her and say,

“Why are you asking me so many questions?”

“Because I just don’t know what is going on all the time,” she responded. 

There you have it.  From the mouths of babes.