The Gift of Big Questions

Learning to hold difficult topics with curiosity and gratitude

Sisters at school, 2018, Alicia Stoller

“…When will I die? she asks.
When I was a child, I churched

my hands, I steepled my hands,
and all the people were inside,

each finger a man, a woman,
a child. When I die, will you

still love me? she asks.”

~Maggie Smith

There is an anecdote that the educator Vivian Gussin Paley shares in her book, A Child’s Work, from a letter she once received about a kindergarten classroom in London. In this classroom, over a year after 9/11, a boy wrote a story about a plane that crashed into a building and the firefighters who put out the fire. As is the custom in classrooms inspired by Paley’s method of storytelling, the class acted the story out as a group. Despite some reticence, noting that the teachers didn’t even realize the children were aware of 9/11, the adults in this classroom chose to trust the children to hold a difficult story. In the letter Paley received, the teacher explained, 

“I worried about trivializing a serious event but decided to trust the child who told the story. He wanted to be the plane and he showed me where he wanted the building to be. He was very clear about the stage directions so we started acting it out. 

The boy, as the plane, flew to the spot where the building was and then gently curled up in a ball on the floor. I brought up five children to play the people. They took their roles of being hurt very seriously and when I read, ‘They got to die’ they lay down in total silence. The room was hushed. Then I called up another five children as firemen who walked among the bodies of their classmates, holding hoses and putting out the fire. We all watched in stunned silence. 

It was the closest I’ve been to tears in the children’s storytelling and acting. Then a girl asked, ‘Can we do it again?’ I said, ‘I’m curious to know why you are so keen to do that story again.’ She came and sat next to me and she said, ‘Because it’s really interesting.’ So we did it again. Because the child was right, where I was confused. The children knew we had tapped into something really powerful, something that school and adults don’t often let us tap into, a way of exploring our fears and the things we don’t understand.” 

It is not uncommon for children, even very young children, to raise topics like this in the classroom, either through their play or in more direct questions. We are only a few weeks into a new school year, and I’ve already talked with several teachers about classroom conversations in which frightening real-world events were raised by the children. These moments can be jarring for adults, particularly for parents. 

We have a natural desire to protect our children from events that inspire fear and sadness, and we often think that children have less awareness of the world than they actually do. But children are experts at taking in information. This is, in fact, what they are neurologically best at, because it is central to the complex developmental experience of human growth. Children are acutely attuned to the world around them and take in far more than we realize every moment, more than we take in as adults, in fact. As we age, we develop the ability to filter information and focus on what we deem relevant. Children take in everything and constantly try to make sense of it, because they are compelled by their rapidly changing brains to do so. This includes bits and pieces of information about topics that we might hope would sail over their heads—snippets of our adult conversations, bits and pieces of news stories they overhear or catch glimpses of on our screens, and observations of the world around them as it unfolds.

And, while there are certainly things it is worth shielding children from, for the most part all these little overhearings and observations don’t reflect failures of parenting. They are inevitable. Our children inhabit the same world we do, and their collections of information about adult life become the breadcrumbs they use to lead them to new questions and hypotheses, as they seek to make sense of their experiences and their future. This is exactly what children are supposed to be doing; it only becomes problematic when, startled by their unexpected awareness, we are tempted to hush their questions—questions which frequently arise in the classroom, rather than at home.     

There are many reasons, I think, that children’s stickiest questions and wonderings often surface in the classroom. Classrooms are sites of exploration, and as such the nature of the classroom environment signals to children that this is a place where curiosity is welcome. Their encounters with peers at school also provide necessary opportunities for children to cull their individual breadcrumbs and sort them into a more complete picture, assembling new understandings through their shared evidence gathering, like reporters or detectives compiling their clues and piecing together a more complete story.  

Teachers, as they learn to expect that these inquiries will arise in various forms in the classroom, are usually not especially phased by them. We know that this process of investigating and experimenting with the mysteries of their world is central to the role of development and of rich learning environments. And we learn to listen closely for topics and queries that might require a more attentive guiding adult hand, as well as for those that simply need more time and space for exploration.  

What I find teachers tend to worry most about in these moments is not the children’s awareness or even their own ability as educators to hold and guide delicate topics when they surface. Rather, anxiety tends to bubble up for teachers in their anticipation of how parents might react when they hear about these classroom conversations. Often, teachers are not even worried about the reaction to their handling of the moment, but simply about the potential response to a difficult topic having come up at all, knowing that it may be viewed as a failure on their part to control and contain the content of classroom discourse.   

In my experience, these moments do often lead parents to question the competence of the teacher and also to look askance at the parenting in other families. They become angry that another child’s awareness of a difficult or complex topic has intruded upon their own child’s knowledge. Over my years in school leadership, when a teacher showed up at my office door wide eyed and worried, it was often because they were attempting to craft a message for parents explaining how a tricky topic or question had arisen. Teachers recognize that these moments are not only appropriate and inevitable but ripe for learning and community building. Yet they are rightly concerned that this is not how they will be received. 

A full embrace of children’s curiosity can be more challenging for parents than it is for teachers, because when we feel that the protective bubble we instinctively want to maintain around our children has been punctured, something is fractured in our own view of the world, as well. It is easy to look for someone to blame when this happens. 

But these classroom moments, when the big questions of the world make their way into the block corner, a playground game, a storytelling exercise, or a morning meeting conversation, are gifts not threats. As parents, we have to develop the courage to view them that way, or we risk instilling fear, not in our children, but in their teachers, and this leads to important conversations being cut short. When this happens, children are robbed of an opportunity to find the meaning and reassurance they are seeking, and they learn, instead, that certain topics are taboo. In our rush to protect them, we leave them to make sense of their questions and worries on their own, and we short circuit future conversations.

Despite our own fears and our understandable desire to shelter our children from difficult realities, there are many reasons to consider these tough moments gifts. These experiences provide evidence that the classroom feels like a safe and trusting environment to our children. We may worry that they indicate the opposite—that these topics introduce fears into the classroom that will make it a less protected space and make children feel more afraid. But a child’s willingness to raise a complex or even scary reality within the walls of their classroom, in fact, demonstrates their confidence in the environment and their assurance that the teacher will listen and keep them safe. Additionally, the teacher’s willingness to engage in these conversations signals to the other children, regardless of their awareness of the topic at hand, that school is a place where they, too, can ask difficult questions. 

These moments are also gifts because they allow us entry into children’s thoughts and feelings, which are not always transparent or easily decipherable. Young children live in their imaginations, and their wonderings and understandings are often masked by characters and fantasy that can make it difficult for us, as adults, to know what is really going on in their minds. Older children, who have already gleaned that some topics are unmentionable and are keenly aware of how they are perceived by both peers and adults, often keep their curiosities and worries to themselves. When children, at all stages in development, raise difficult topics in their classroom, we are granted a window into their hearts and minds, and this gives us more power, not less, to care for them. 

When one brave child raises a difficult question or idea in the classroom among peers, they also open the door to conversations that other children need to have but were, perhaps, either too nervous to raise themselves or too mired in confusion to articulate. While we may worry that children learn about topics they could have remained innocent of in these contexts, more often than not what actually happens is that their own fears and wonderings are given voice, which is a relief. When someone else names an unspoken fear, it helps us to know that we are not alone. This is why the children in the London kindergarten were so eager to repeat their somber reenactment of 9/11, despite its inherent darkness. A well had been accessed by one child that all of the children, it turned out, needed to explore.

School is the place where children have the opportunity to take their questions and their unsettling experiences of the world, which often feels very big and overwhelming, and make them into something that can be held, examined, internalized, and understood. This is one of the highest purposes of any educational environment. As the teacher in London explained, the story and reenactment served a greater purpose than helping the children to process a singular event. She said,

“It also meant something else, that school was a place where you could feel very personally involved. For all my years in the theater and my belief in its value, I feel that right now I’m able to see its truest and deepest value. How amazing that this lesson comes from the age group listened to the least.”

These moments among children open something up that can be freeing to us, as adults, as well. They can make us anxious when they surface. But, when we are able to soften those boundaries a little, we often find that children have the capacity to grant us permission to explore ideas that we also need to understand more deeply, and there is reassurance and a sense of community in this experience for us, too. In asking whether they are alone in their fears, children assure us that none of us needs to be. 

When children raise difficult or unsettling topics in the classroom, I often return to a reminder from one of my own teachers, Jonathan Silin, who says,

"In the face of uncertainty, it is our willingness to approach the unimaginable and our commitment to bear witness that we can offer students of all ages. This is our most effective antidote to troubling histories and the difficult present. We cannot offer certainties nor can we promise to fix the world. But surely, surviving and bearing witness are reciprocal acts and we can say to our students, ‘Yes, this is how it is.’ And we can affirm: ‘Yes, we are here beside you. We can testify to your experience and to ours. Most importantly, we can teach you the skills and offer you the resources for telling your own stories...’"  

So, when topics that spark adult worry or discomfort arise in your child’s classroom, take a moment to remember that this is a gift. It is a gift that allows us greater insight into our children, a gift that can reassure us that they feel their classrooms are safe and their teachers are trusted, and a gift that even has the power to offer us comfort and community as well. 

And when the world incites fear in our grown-up hearts, I hope we might summon the same courage and curiosity that our children do, to name our questions and find others to sit next to as we explore them, instead of building higher and higher walls around ourselves and our loved ones.

Wishing you the courage to permit difficult conversations and the community to share them with,

Alicia

P.S. If you’re new here or missed a few notes along the way, you can explore the archive of previously published essays anytime.

---

If you enjoyed this post and are not already a subscriber, please consider subscribing to Notes on Hope.

And if you think someone else in your life might enjoy reading Notes on Hope, please share. It’s always easier to hold onto hope when we’re not doing it alone.