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3 Tough Questions Kids Ask and How to Answer Them

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Dinosaur Questions
“What happens to us when we die?” Do your kids ever ask you questions like this? You know, ones that are hard to respond to because they touch on really important topics? When a major London newspaper ran a story about the top twenty questions parents find toughest to answer for their kids, the “what happens to us when we die” question was listed as number 11. And number 13 was “Is God real?”

Hard Questions

It’s no surprise that people think spiritual questions like these are tough to respond to. But since we as Christian parents have a Book that gives us the answers, the most difficult aspect for us may be making our answers simple enough for younger children to understand. But when we give our kids Bible-based answers, we can be confident we’re teaching them truth. In contrast, according to the article, 25 percent of parents in one survey said if they were asked, “Where do you go when you die?” they would tell their child, “You become an angel.” This correlates with another finding of the survey: When parents don’t know the answer to a child’s question, 63 percent of them will give one anyway—even if they think it might be wrong!

Most of the other questions on the list were requests for scientific explanations, such as “Why is the sky blue?” and “How do planes fly?” These can be hard to answer on the spot because we’ve forgotten (or never really understood) the scientific or technical details. But that kind of factual data is easily accessible these days. The bigger challenge for us as Christian parents is how to answers our children’s questions in a way that reinforces the biblical worldview we want them to grow up with.

Teachable Moments

When children ask questions, especially why questions, it can be a perfect opportunity to engage in biblical worldview shaping—helping them to learn to see the world and everything in it from God’s perspective. The Creation-Fall-Redemption metanarrative of the Bible has multiple layers of significance, yet it’s simple enough for even a young child to grasp:

Creation: God made the world.

Fall: People have messed it up.

Redemption: Someday God will fix it.

The key is to answer kids’ questions by telling them a small story that fits in with the big story of CFR.

Victoria Klein wrote an article in Parents magazine about questions kids often ask and how to answer them. For each of nine questions, she suggests an answer and quotes an expert’s advice on how to talk about the topic. Here are three of the questions and my suggestions for how to answer them to help kids think biblically.

1. “Why aren’t there any more dinosaurs?”

Klein cites the standard evolutionary scientific answer based on the secular worldview: Eons and eons before humans existed, dinosaurs evolved from simpler lifeforms. Then, 65 million years ago a huge asteroid crashed into the earth, resulting in climatic changes that the species couldn’t adapt to, and so they died out. But some of them “were the ancestors of today’s chickens, pigeons—even ostriches.”

The Bible tells a very different story: On the sixth day of creation, God made dinosaurs along with all the other land animals as well as Adam and Eve. So humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time. Then about 4,400 years ago, there was a worldwide Flood that wiped out almost all the land animals of every species. The animals that survived had to adjust to living in a very different habitat. Climate change brought about by the Flood (e.g., the Ice Age), disease, competition from other animals, and other factors eventually resulted in the extinction of dinosaurs.

To give a more theological answer, you might explain that the main reason dinosaurs (and other species) have gone extinct is the Fall. The Flood was God’s judgment on human sin.

2. “Why are there so many languages in the world?”

Again Klein accepts the evolutionary explanation that language developed as humans evolved and assumes that the reason for different languages is that the process occurred simultaneously in various places that were isolated from each other. The fact that the English of today is so different from the English of five hundred years ago is cited as evidence of this evolution.

In contrast, Scripture indicates that language was a gift God gave Adam and Eve when He created them. There was only one language until about a hundred years after the Flood. But then people rebelled against God at the Tower of Babel, and He punished them by dividing them into groups and making it so that they couldn’t understand each other. Those separate languages developed into the ones in use today. The existence of various languages is actually a strong argument against the notion that language evolved as an aspect of the transition from ape to human.

3. “Why do people get sick?”

Klein’s answer focuses on germs and the difference between contagious diseases and other medical conditions.

The CFR perspective on disease emphasizes the idea that in the world as God created it there was no sickness, pain, or death, but once people sinned against God, the door was opened to all of those. So in that sense, all disease is a result of the Fall—we get sick because of sin. That doesn’t mean that there is a direct cause-and-effect relationship between a particular illness and a specific act of disobedience. Job didn’t get boils because he had sinned, nor was the man in John 9 born blind because of his own or his parents’ sin. But any lack of good health confirms that we live in a fallen world.

Trustworthy Authority

What’s so important about answering from a biblical worldview frame of reference? The goal is not for children to comprehend all the whys and wherefores of the factual information we give them, but for them to absorb the way our worldview works. When they see that we examine every question in the light of Scripture, they will begin to understand that the ultimate authority is God’s Word not scientific evidence, historical documentation, or popular opinion.

What tough question has your child asked recently? Were you able to answer it from a biblical worldview perspective?

5 Ways to See if Your Child is Learning

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Have you ever instructed your child to clean their room without checking on their work? Would you let your child bake some cookies by themselves before you observed that they’ve mastered measuring ingredients or using the oven? In the same way, we have to check on our children to make sure they’ve learned what we’re trying to teach. What we need are assessments.

An assessment is simply a way of finding out if your child learned what you set out to teach. Most of the time we think about assessments as only tests and quizzes. In reality you can assess what your child has learned in a number of ways, some of which are fun for her.

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What Kinds of Assessments?

So if we want to see if our children, particularly the young ones, have learned something and we don’t want to give them quizzes every day, how do we see what they’re learning? We can use an assessment that matches our child’s way of learning. Here are five fun ways to see if your child is learning what you’re teaching.

  1. Ask Questions

Most children know far more than they can write on the page. So ask them questions that they can respond to verbally.  You shouldn’t grade these questions. If your child reads about the life cycle of a butterfly in science, ask them what the four stages of the butterfly’s life are. If they miss the question, have them reread the appropriate paragraph. Our teacher’s editions provide great suggested questions you can use to see if your children understood what they were reading.

  1. Draw pictures

This is what I did with the 5 themes for Heritage Studies 2. I didn’t expect my daughter to memorize a definition she could write out on a test, but I wanted to see that she got the ideas. So I had her draw pictures of something from history, geography, culture, economics, and American citizenship. My daughter likes to draw, so she loved this activity.

  1. Act out an idea

If you want to see if your child understood a story they’ve read, have them act it out. If your child likes pretending, they’ll love playing the story, and you might get a chuckle yourself. In the meantime, you’ll know they understood the Reading story.

  1. Make something

When we learned about producers and consumers in Heritage Studies 2, I had my daughter create a “business” and a flyer that advertised what she could produce. She decided to make paper dogs and sell them for 10 cents each. I bought one of her paper dogs and asked “who was the producer, and who was the consumer?”

  1. Use the skill

When your children learn how to use a math concept, have them use it. So if we’ve baked 24 brownies for Bible Club and we’re expecting 18 children, I ask my daughter how many extra brownies we should expect to have. If we have 13 children, I ask if we have enough brownies to give each child two.

Can you think of other fun, hands-on ways to assess what your child’s learned?

Are You Asking the Right Questions?

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Much of your child’s success in learning depends on the questions you ask him and how you ask them. Research shows undisputed benefits from asking questions to develop reading comprehension. These questions help children of all ages put what they’re learning into a context that they can discuss, and those who answer comprehension questions learn more subject matter than their peers who do not. Asking your child questions also helps him discover his own ideas. It also gives him an opportunity to explore his creativity and to sharpen critical-thinking skills.

But like most homeschooling parents, you already know the need to ask questions to ensure that your child is learning. In order to teach effectively, you also need to know that you’re asking the right kind of questions. Consider these steps to improving your questioning method.

1. Develop your child’s thinking skills by asking questions that go beyond content.

  • Use questions that require comparing, evaluating, and discerning. (Why? What if? What is the evidence? What are the alternatives? What are the implications? What do you think is right?)

2. Give your child time to answer.

  • Don’t expect an immediate response. Five or six seconds of silence is not much time to allow for a well-developed response.
  • Be willing to accept an unconventional answer. Don’t dismiss an answer simply because it didn’t use the terms in the way that you wanted. Your child may be thinking along the right lines but maybe unable to express the answer in the correct terms. Take the time to help your child restate his answer.

3. Help your child think toward the right answers.

  • If your child doesn’t understand the question or answers incorrectly, ask simpler questions that help build up to the question you asked initially. If your child has trouble explaining why a sentence is grammatically incorrect, ask about the functions of the words in the sentence (which word is the verb? Is it transitive or intransitive? If it’s transitive, doesn’t it require a direct object? Is there a direct object?).
  • Demonstrate for your child how you arrive at conclusions by walking him through your own questioning process (how you decided to make a difficult purchase or what leads you to endorse a particular political candidate).

If you help your child by demonstrating good questioning practices, he will not only learn course content but also learn how to ask questions in order to arrive at the answers for themselves. And isn’t that the whole point?

For more insights on questions, consider the discussion sections in our BJU Press curriculum Teacher’s Editions.