The Child Who Asked for the Boring Answer

A father of a seven-year-old girl had, since her infancy, made it his private pride to answer her questions cleverly. She was a curious child, prone to asking large questions at inconvenient times — why is the sky blue, what is a soul, where do numbers come from — and he was, by profession, a writer, so he had a large stock of nice sentences with which to answer them. He would give her metaphors, small poetic gestures, occasionally a fragment of something he had read. His answers were, he thought, beautiful. He thought his daughter would remember them for the rest of her life.

One evening, walking home from a park through a wet November street, the girl asked him why leaves changed colour. He drew breath and began, as he always did, to construct something. Something about how a tree, faced with the coming cold, sends its green pigment down into its roots for the winter, revealing the yellows and reds that had been hidden underneath all along, like a face beneath a mask. It was, he thought, one of his better ones.

She listened for about three sentences, and then, holding his hand, said quietly, 'Daddy, can you just tell me the real answer?' He stopped walking. He said, in some confusion, that this was the real answer. She shook her head. She said, with the particular seriousness of a seven-year-old who has been thinking about a thing for a while, 'The other kind of real answer. The boring one. The one with the science.'

He stood in the wet street and understood, in a single embarrassed moment, several things he had not previously understood about the education he had been providing to his daughter. He had, for six years, been treating her as a small audience for the sentences he liked producing. He had been rewarding her curiosity with performance. She had, patiently, absorbed a great many performances. What she was now telling him, with more tact than he deserved, was that she had noticed that his sentences were the wrong shape for the questions she was actually asking. She wanted to know how the world worked. He had been giving her, instead, small pieces of himself.

He walked her home and, over cocoa at the kitchen table, gave her a very ordinary six-sentence answer about chlorophyll and shortening daylight and the pigments that had, in fact, been in the leaf all along. He drew a small diagram on the back of an envelope. She asked three follow-up questions. Each of them was better than the one before. She went to bed happier than he had seen her, for weeks.

There is a form of parental affection that is, in fact, a small vanity. It is the desire to dazzle the child. To be, in the child's eyes, the wise one, the clever one, the one whose sentences will be remembered. The desire is not evil, but it is the exact wrong shape for a child's real work, which is to build, out of ordinary boring facts, a working model of the world in which they will have to live. The child does not want you to be the wise one. They want the world to be the wise one, and they want you to translate. If you can catch yourself in the middle of constructing something beautiful, and instead give them the boring answer, with the diagram on the envelope, you will have done more for them than every clever sentence you had planned to make them remember. They will not remember your sentences. They will remember, for the rest of their life, that when they asked about a leaf, they got a leaf.