about 25 times per hour. If we make
the relatively conservative assumption
that these four preschoolers spent, on
average, an hour at home each day
with a familiar caregiver, that caregiver
would have the opportunity to answer
more than 20,000 explanation-seeking
questions before the child reached his
or her 5th birthday.
Given these huge numbers, it seems
likely that children can learn a lot from
asking questions. Of course, exactly
what they learn depends on how their
questions are answered.
The Effects of Answers
Frazier, Gelman, and Wellman (2009)
extended Chouinard’s analysis by
studying the various replies that
children received, especially to their
explanation-seeking questions. Not
surprisingly, children didn’t always
obtain satisfactory answers. Sometimes, parents simply said they
didn’t know the answer. Sometimes,
they implied that the question was
misplaced—for example, the child
might ask, “How can snakes hear if
they don’t have ears?” and be told,
“I don’t think they can hear.” Still,
children did receive an informative
reply to about one-third of their explanation-seeking questions.
How children responded to these
answers tells us something about why
children ask questions in the first
place. If they ask questions simply
to get an adult’s attention, we might
expect them to have responded in
much the same way to satisfactory
and unsatisfactory answers. In fact,
however, these children reacted
differently. If they received a satis-
factory answer, they often expressed
agreement or followed up with another
question on the same topic. But if they
received an unsatisfactory answer, they
were more likely to offer their own
explanation or to ask their question
a second time. Apparently, when
children ask a why or how question,
they’re genuinely seeking information.
A study conducted by Barbara
Tizard and Martin Hughes (1984)
suggests that family background is
likely to affect the interplay between
children’s questions and the answers
they receive. When these researchers
recorded English 4-year-olds talking to
their mothers at home, they found that
middle-class children were more likely
than working-class children to ask
explanation-seeking questions. They
also noticed that mothers who asked
a lot of questions had children who
also asked a lot of questions. By implication, children may be influenced by
messages they receive about how to
have a conversation. If their mother
uses language to gather information,
they are more likely to do the same.
More recent data point to another
likely factor—the way that parents
respond to their children’s questions.
Kathleen Corriveau and her students
examined child language recordings
in which family background had
been systematically varied: Half of the
4-year-olds came from middle class
professional homes, and half came
from lower-class, nonprofessional
homes (Kurkul, Ward, Dwyer, &
Corriveau, 2015). The two sets of
children were similar in terms of the
relative proportions of simple, factual
questions they asked as compared
with more complex, explanation-
seeking questions. Further, both sets
of children received more satisfactory
than unsatisfactory replies to their
factual questions. Finally, when they
received unsatisfactory answers to
such a factual question, both sets
of children typically responded by
repeating or elaborating on their initial
question or by supplying their own
answer, confirming the pattern of
selective reaction found by Frazier and
her colleagues.
When it came to the way parents
responded to the explanation-seeking
questions, however, social-class differences emerged. Middle-class parents
provided more exemplary answers
and fewer unsatisfactory answers. In
addition, when the two sets of children
received unsatisfactory answers, they
reacted differently. The children from
lower-class families often repeated
their question but never volunteered
an explanation of their own. In contrast, the children from middle-class
families volunteered an explanation
just as often as they repeated their
question. In sum, the middle-class
children were more likely to receive a
helpful explanation and more likely to
generate one for themselves.
Here, we begin to see how Rousseau
misread children’s development.
He assumed that answering children’s questions would lead them to
defer to adult authority. But these
Surprisingly, there has been a long tradition
of skepticism about the value of children’s
questions as a learning tool—variously expressed
by philosophers, educators, and psychologists.
