Between the ages of 2-5 years, a child asks around 40,000 questions on average, and this pattern of asking endless questions declines when he starts school.

Given this fact, Warren Berger has raised an interesting question:

“Have the kids stopped asking questions because they have lost interest? Or have they lost interest because the rote answer-driven school system doesn’t allow them to ask enough questions?”

To answer this question let's first see what their brains are up to when kids ask questions?

Paul Hairs, a renowned Harvard child psychologist states that questions are a tool for kids to feed their curiosity. By asking questions kids make their own catalog of information & learn about the world.

In an experiment, Michele Chouniard (2007), a researcher & a psychologist, collected more than 200hrs recordings of four kids interacting with their caregivers.

She learned that, with familiar adults at home, kids asked 1-3 questions per minute.

After analyzing more than 25,000 questions Chouniard categorized questions into two types:

1) Practical questions

• Asking for help (can you do this?)

• Permission ( Can I take a candy?)

• Clarification (What do you mean?)

2) Information gathering questions

About two-thirds of the questions were asked to gather information.

Most questions were FACTUAL, inquiring about:

• names (What’s that?),

• functionality (What’s this for?),

• location (Where is baba?),

• or actions (What are you doing?).

These simple factual questions dominate kids’ lives until they turn three.

Once turn three, kids ask explanation-seeking questions.

• Why can’t I eat candy?

• How did God make us?

• Why is the moon following us?

Paul says that, based on Chouinard’s data, it is assumed that if these four kids spent, on average an hour per day asking questions, their caregivers would have the opportunity to answer more than 20,000 explanation-seeking questions before their 5th birthday.

But these kids, who ask endless “Why” and “What if” questions, stop asking them as they navigate high school.

What kills their curiosity?

Here are the potential reasons, Haris identified, that make kids ask fewer questions at school?

👉 In a school setting a teacher surrounded by a dozen or more kids can not practically answer all questions by all kids thus fewer opportunities for dialogue.

👉 The teacher doesn’t know the knowledge base of an individual child and it makes satisfactory answering more challenging.

👉 Teachers tend to talk more than the child. Children are expected to listen.

👉 Teachers ask more questions and the child’s primary role is to answer them. And most of the time teachers expect a specific answer, sometimes in vain and sometimes needlessly.

What can we do nurture kids' questions?

Our responsibility as a parent or a teacher is to provide a supportive and nurturing environment where kids can ask questions without being judged and frowned upon.

Nurture their curiosity from their early tendency to ask questions and learn about the world.