"I keep six honest serving men, (They taught me all I knew); Their names are What and Why and When And How and Where and Who." - Rudyard Kipling 1865-1936, Just-So Stories
Asking questions is one of the most important activities of childhood. Through the questions children ask, we gain access to their world. The question, "why" is evidence of intellect and of a quest for knowledge. It is confirmation of consciousness, curiosity and intellectual capacity. "Why" is uttered and asked at an extraordinarily young age. For the world is vast and the questions about it are many when everything is new.
Asking "why" is more than asking a question. It is understanding that there is a reality outside of oneself, a world beyond oneself where there are things to be learned, rules to be understood, reasons why things happen, explanations to be gained and puzzles that other people can solve. It is recognition of other people's knowledge and a wish to acquire information from them.
While the child does not conceptualise its questioning in any of those formal terms, it is from a complex cognitive perspective that children's questions are asked.
And they cover all branches of learning, which is the most fascinating thing. There is nothing simplistic in the spontaneous questions children ask, the topics they cover or the range of information they seek.
They are the questions of humanity: the universal questions of life and death, of philosophy, of astronomy, biology, psychology, genetics and eschatology. Where do people come from? Why do people die? What keeps stars in the sky? Where do animals live? How do flowers grow? What makes people sad? Why are people different colours? Does death hurt? What happens when we die?
Developmental psychologist Jean Piaget saw the child as a scientist, endlessly experimenting to understand the world. He understood that children were not passive recipients of information but active explorers, using all their natural abilities and environmental advantages to understand the world.
The tiny child grasps, shakes, tastes, smells, notes the colour, weight and shape and investigates every object in its sights. This is how it learns the similarities and differences between objects. This is how it comes to classify and categorise them mentally. According to Piaget, children learned by the processes of assimilation and accommodation.
They assimilated new information into the map or schema they were developing about the world and the people and objects in it, and accommodated new ideas as they learned. This began at birth.
Language development and the emergence of abstract questions in children highlight how amazing the human brain is. Between the ages of three years and five years, children may add more than 50 new words to their vocabulary each month, the number of words depending on the child itself, their exposure to language, and the amount of interaction with adults who are listening to and expanding that child's vocabulary.
Mothers and fathers ask even the tiniest babies if they are hungry, if they are sleepy, helping the child to understand sensations, emotions and satisfactions in itself: "Who's hungry now? Who's cross? Who's wishing mum and dad would hurry up with food? Who's feeling better now after that?"
With particular modulation and inflection of voice they talk to their babies all the time "as if" they can understand and in so doing the child becomes attuned to the sound of the human voice, to the language of its culture, and to using language to achieve what it wants. The word "no", acquired so early in life, is one example of the child's understanding of the power of language in interaction with others.
Why is the sky blue, a child asks? This question not only points to the child's observational skills and the diversity of the child's mental processes but to the degree of trust the child has in the parent's power, omnipotence and all-knowing intellect.
But not all things that are blue are the sky and not all skies are blue. Little by little, day-by-day, the unfamiliar becomes familiar, the classifications increase, the categories expand. The more questions that a child asks and the more answers adults provide, the more the child learns about the world.
Asking children questions and answering the questions that they ask are key developmental gifts parents can give their children.
Yet the child must also learn in time that there are questions to which there are no answers: that life is not just about finding answers but knowing that there are questions that we do not have answers for. There are questions that we do not yet have the imagination to ask.
It is the human process of questioning that is important. It begins with a child's outstretched hand. And if our "reach should always exceed our grasp", then keep asking questions, children: ask what and why and where and when and who. For you will ask what we have forgotten to be curious about and what we have not yet dreamed of even asking.
Clinical psychologist Marie Murray is director of student counselling services at UCD Mind Moves
Marie Murray