“When you tell the kid that Earth revolves round the sun, the kid asks, why?”
“When you tell the kid not to eat without washing hands the kids asks, why?”
Our first reaction to such a question is fairly straightforward. “Wow! What an inquisitive child!”. We always encourage inquisitiveness from children and everyone agrees that an inquisitive child is more intelligent. Lets try to explore this argument from yet another perspective.
Lets try to redefine the question in a fairly different way. Imagine, your kid runs across the road and a vehicle is speeding towards the kid and you ask the kid to return back. Would you encourage the kid to ask why, or just return back without asking any question? While the scenarios appear completely different for a rational human, for a kid, it’s the same. Kid has not accumulated enough information to rationalize such a situation.
By centuries of evolution, the child’s mind is programmed to listen something without questioning certain facts. But, ever changing evolution has made kids also more and more intelligent than what kids used to be thousands of centuries back. Consider, you tell your kid not to touch fire because its hot or do not walk near cliff since falling off from cliff is highly probable. Any kid who applies an inquisitiveness to such situations is very unlikely to survive.
So, how do we encourage kids to be inquisitive as well as be abiding to factors such as those mentioned above without questioning? One way is to make kids listen whatever you say till say an age of 5. But researchers argue that you cant raise a kid by denying his/her ability to freely think and question.
While there is no simple way of answering such complex questions, good parenting which at times is a fair blend of both encouraging inquisitiveness and at times discouraging inquisitiveness for such extreme cases is fairly important. Isn’t parenting an Art?
