Something that has bugged me and nagged at my “mommy instinct” for a long time (since The Kidlet was about 3ish?) is the fact that he can never answer the question “why?”. He can tell you “when” or “where” or “what”, but never “why”. This also includes the question “how?” because “why/how” are pretty much the same thing (in a general sense).
For a long time I’ve dismissed this thinking that sometimes the question “why” is so abstract that maybe its a difficult concept for a kid to explain. I mean, a lot of times we don’t know “why” something is, it just is. It really does take some complex thinking to explain some things, right? Makes sense to me.
But now this not understanding of the “why” concept is having an impact on his homework. For example, today he had to read a short paragraph about the history of baseball and answer 9 questions. The last two questions were sentence-writing questions (instead of multiple choice). The question he had to answer was
How did baseball begin?
He tried a variety of answers, all of which I marked wrong and asked him to erase/rewrite. His answers included “Baseball is a sport,” “Baseball is a game Americans like,” and then in a desperate attempt to correctly answer, “How baseball began was it was a game”. I finally had to talk him through the critical thinking, until I coaxed him into the answer, “Baseball began in England and it was called rounders. Then New York renamed it baseball because the rules changed.”
OK, so still not a perfect answer, but IMHO it’s a decent attempt to answer the question and it contains details that support his answer that came from the original paragraph he read.
Then we had the question
Why do you think the major-league baseball teams were formed?
His answers included “Major-leagues are part of baseball,” and “In the 1850’s they were formed,” and then “The Cincinnati Red Stockings were the first baseball team”. Finally after going round and round between the two of us, he came up with the more-correct answer “So they could have more teams and people could watch more baseball.” Again, still not perfect, but an answer that I feel is acceptable.
Not including homework, The Kidlet has never been able to answer the question “Why?/How?” for anything. It could be for the most benign thing or for something that is important - “WHY do you want a piece of candy, The Kidlet?” and he will answer, “Why I want a piece of candy is because I want it.” Again, a somewhat abstract question… but then ask something that really doesn’t have an abstract answer - like, “Why didn’t you do what I asked you?” ends up with the answer “Because I wasn’t doing what you asked me.”
I’m starting to wonder if this inability to understand/describe/answer a “Why?/How?” question is not as ‘normal’ as I’d thought. He didn’t go through a very big “why? Why? WHY?” phase as a toddler, but I didn’t think much of it at the time. Now I’m wondering, did we skip something that is now becoming a problem?
Anyone else noticed this problem of understanding “WHY?”
2007/11/29 18:54
Hannah has a problem with this as well. I thought it was an age thing, but I don’t know.
2007/11/29 21:55
Jess -
What do you do? Do you try to explain to her what ‘why’ means? We’ve tried to do this over and over and it seems that it only confuses him more. Finally today I printed out a little sheet that says:
WHO? = Tell me the person or people.
WHAT? = Tell me about it, describe it.
WHERE? = Tell me the place.
HOW? = Tell me the cause.
WHY? = Tell me the reason.
I taped it to The Kidlet’s homework area as well as in one other spot where he sometimes sits to do work. I don’t know if it will help…