Toddler Interrogations
Anyone that has (or has spent significant time with) a child around the ages of 3 or 4, is surely no stranger to the art of toddler interrogations.
What are you doing? Why do you do it like that? Where does it come from? What does it do? Can I do it? on, and on, and on.
Scientists have shown* that preschool age children ask nearly 100 questions per day.
Depending on the day, this is an amazing/annoying part of childhood development. Children are incredible at questioning everything around them and soaking up knowledge like a sponge. No one will argue that the rapid growth of children is anything less than amazing as they start to discover the world around them.
I point this out because I want to discuss two important concepts that can be learned from looking at the questioning habits of children:
- We should be more like children when it comes to questioning.
- There is a crucial difference between curious questions and deliberate questions. Adults should pursue the latter.
By taking a closer look at these two concepts, we can learn several valuable lessons about the art of questioning.
We should be more like children when it comes to questioning.
Children are not afraid to ask —no question is ‘beneath’ a child. It may be as simple as “why is the sky blue?” or it may be so deep that it blows us away, like the time I heard a four year old ask “how do we know that God loves us?”
Children utilize follow up questions to dig deeper — adults often find this attribute annoying. Have you ever been around when a kid just keeps asking Why? Why? Why?
It probably feels annoying because it pushes us into a position that we start to recognize our own lack of knowledge. Ok, so you may not know the exact science behind why the sky actually is blue! I don’t think the kid actually cares whether you know that. What you learned here is that asking the next question can lead to a place where hidden information waits to be discovered.
Children ask questions to learn, not to ‘sound smart.’ — I’m sure you have all experienced one of ‘those guys’ at the office who asks some seemingly complex question just so they can look smart when they have the answers and others do not. Although a question mark may be included, that type of statement is just posturing, not really asking.
Kids don’t do this. Kids ask because they genuinely want to know or understand something that they didn’t know before.
Children often listen closely and then connect the dots between things they learn — Have you ever heard a kid say something seemingly profound on Wednesday, then realized it relates to a seemingly random question that they asked you on Monday or Tuesday? Kids have an impressive way of stashing and recalling information when they listen to what’s going on around them.
Adults on the other hand often ask the same questions over and over. This happens when we don’t care enough to actually listen and store the information learned after asking the first time.
There is a crucial difference between curious questions and deliberate questions. Adults should pursue the latter.
The famous Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget was one of the first to study and develop theories surrounding how cognitive development in children differs from cognitive performance in adults. **Saul McLeod explained how Piaget theorized that children gather new information to “construct an understanding of the world around them, then experience discrepancies between what they already know and what they discover in their environment.”
Because of this developmental process, children are asking many questions in order to create a ‘filing system’ of the mind. Tucking information away into respective ‘folders’ to be referenced again in the future as needed. As a child grows, more of their experiences can relate back to something they’ve already been introduced to. Therefore they start to rely on the information they have already stored and don’t feel a need to ask so much about what they are experiencing.
Piaget’s theory goes on to state that by our pre-teen to adult years we have experienced enough to move into a more advanced stage of cognition. We reach the “formal operational stage” where our experiences are relatable to knowledge already collected so it can fit into our existing schema of understanding. Of course we will still have situations where we face new things, but it is easy for us to classify and relate that experience to an event our mind has already categorized. A good example would be from a trip I took to Australia recently. I was able to try some new fruit which I had never seen or heard of before. Rather than being completely bewildered and wondering where this new tasty food came from, I had the existing knowledge that different regions of the world produce different plants and fruits. I could try and enjoy this new experience without having to ask many questions about what this unknown food was, or why I’d never had it before.
In Summary
I hope that now you see that when I stated earlier that we should be more like children when asking questions, I didn’t mean we should always ask the same types of questions that children ask. What we need to do is apply the habits that children portray along with a more advanced form of questions. (aka “Why have I stopped reading intellectual books even though I enjoyed the knowledge gained when I used to read regularly?” …not… “Why does the sky sometimes turn pretty colors at night?”)
‘Curious questions’ generally pop into our minds without effort. Any information learned will most likely have no impact on our important goals. Finding answers to these trivial questions may be entertaining, but is unlikely to be crucial or valuable beyond that momentary satisfaction. (Unless your goal is to become a Jeopardy champion sometime soon.) We must think of and use more deliberate questions which have an impact on our goals. Our deliberate questions can open doors of opportunity and drive us toward new success if we start to apply the childlike habits discussed above to our more advanced situations.
- Don’t be afraid to ask.
- Follow up and dig deeper when necessary.
- Use questions as questions, not for posturing knowledge we already have.
- After asking, carefully listen to how others respond and then extrapolate information that may be hidden on a deeper level.
Becoming a deliberate questioner is one of the most valuable things you can do to improve in your life (both personally and professionally.) Just like all new habits, it won’t come without concentrated effort and a helping hand to keep you going. Please take a moment to join the Deliberate Questions Matter community so that you can receive regular reminders and suggestions to create this life changing habit.
*pg44 from A More Beautiful Question by Warren Berger
**McLeod, S. A. (2015). Jean Piaget. Retrieved from www.simplypsychology.org/piaget.html
