Kids and questions... few thoughts.. !!!

Kids these days, mostly below the age of 10 I guess, have lots of questions to ask.. and they need to know reason for everything.. as one of my former colleagues, and also happens to be my distant cousin, stated so aptly.. .. this generation is not X generation they are 'Y' generation, I mean 'WHY?' generation... :)

Pranav is little more inquisitive than usual and had so many questions since the day he started communication... no exaggeration.. :). This obviously is a tough job for any parents.. but quickly I realized one thing, getting away from them by giving a just in time reply would put us into more trouble.. :) we will end up finding ways to support what we have said earlier... and eventually kids will stop believing in us.. and I surely feel one thing, in the current way of living I mean the way the society is moving towards a situation where there are umpteen number of peer pressures that our kids have to go through and many more challenges they need to face, we as parents should have that intimacy with our children so that they can count on us for anything they need. They should be able to ask us any kind of question that comes to their mind... at least if we are not able to answer, the attention that we pay or the sincerity with which we try to give them a convincing answer should be felt by them.. its important in my opinion.

About 3 years ago, I had this discussion with one of my colleagues who has twin daughters and are 2 years younger to Pranav. She was saying that they have a question for everything like how, why for just about anything that they see, listen, learn... and I don't know how I give them answers as certain things are beyond their understanding capability.. Then I said, actually no, we should not imagine a limit for their capability of understanding, we should give them as much information as possible and put little effort to express in simple words that they can relate to. And also be cautious or rather conscious .. :) that your answer might cause few more questions to come up... :) and so also have the patience to complete the conversation and give them the information.

We do not have to expect kids to understand everything that we told, or assume that all the questions are answered and the same question will not come up again.. generally kids will take whatever that is in their limit and leave the rest of it. After sometime they might think about it and come up with a different question about the same topic, or the same question again.. in that case, refer to the conversation we had earlier about the topic and then repeat the session if required.. :) and some times kids are naughty, even Pranav is.. :) and they pop a question just to make us talk.. then say like.. we already talked about this, so now you tell me why is it like this or how is it done.. that is what I do with him... :) most of the time it works... :)

When Pranav was studying LKG, in his school he was taught phonetics.. and how to pronounce words based on them.. he used to read everything that he sees, applying those phonetics.. like reading things written on hoardings, posters, something that comes on TV, and used to ask me immediately "anTE EnTi amma.. ?" (what does that word mean?)... :) you can imagine the flow of questions I used to get.. :) and I always tried to give him meaning and also answer the questions that might follow.. :) tough job though.. :)

Then one day we were going on my two wheeler and he saw an STD telephone booth on the way.. then he immediately asked me how will you pronounce STD.. :) tough question right.. :) then I thought for a while, this kind of questions are absolutely unavoidable for me coz.. he has already made this habit of reading everything that comes in his sight and verify the pronunciation with me.. :) .. so I have to do something about it.. then I told him... STD is not a word... it is an acronym.. and it will have an abbreviation and each letter in it represents a word starting with it.. so STD actually stands for Subscriber Trunk Dialing... and of course he had difficulty in comprehending what I was saying.. and then one very good example struck my mind and I used it.. I said, your school's name is Gowtham Model School.. but on your school bus it is written as GMS right.. so GMS is not a word, it is called an acronym and its abbreviation would be Gowtham Model School.. and somehow he picked it quickly.. :) and do I have to say, since that day there were plenty of GK questions flooding to me.. about what is the abbreviation for every acronym that came into his sight... :) I answered whatever I knew and if something that is not known to me came up, I used to say "naannaa, naaku kUDA teliyadu, telusukuni cheptaanu".. (meaning - even I do not know, I will find out and let you know.. ) and I google to find the same... :) This process continues even today.. :) and needless to mention I came to know so many abbreviations because of him...

The story did not end here, one day he asked what is the abbreviation of 'Ltd.' :).... then I said, ok, not everything is a word or an acronym, there are certain short forms in use for few bigger words and Ltd actually represents Limited and Ltd is a short form written.. it took for a while for him to get this thing totally.. but now I do not get such questions..

Yeah coming back to the point I was trying to impress you upon... actually Pranav was only 5 years old when I told him about all this acronym and abbreviation jargon.. and if I I considered that he was too young to know about all these... I would have to give him an answer like 'thats the way it is, you will not understand why even if I tell you', but then that would switch off the quest, in fact a healthy one, which is not so good.. I thought 'Ok if he understands well and good, otherwise he will leave, let me leave it to him to decide.. even he does not understand now, he might know it later and can make sense out of what is said today'

I thought, my experience would help few parents, if not all :), and so I shared it.. I would be more than glad if it helps at least one fellow mother.. :)