Children's Ways / Being selections from the author's "Studies of childhood," with some additional matter

by James Sully

The Pertinacious Questioner.

The effort of the child to understand the things about him grows noteworthy somewhere near the end of the third year, and about the same time there comes the questioning "mania," as we are apt to regard it. The first question was put in the case of a boy in the twenty-eighth month, in the case of a girl in the twenty-third month. But the true age of inquisitiveness when questions are fired off with wondrous rapidity and pertinacity seems to be ushered in with the fourth year.

A common theory peculiarly favoured by ignorant nurses and mothers is that children's questioning is one of the ways in which they love to plague their elders. We shall see presently how much truth there is in this view. It may be enough here to say that a good deal of this first questioning is something very different. A child asks you what this thing is you wear on your watch-chain, why you part your hair in the middle, or what not, because he feels that he is ignorant, and for the moment at any rate he would like to get his ignorance removed. More than this, his question shows that he thinks you can satisfy his curiosity.

Questioning may take various directions. A good deal of the child's catechising of his long-suffering mother is prompted by a more or less keen desire for fact. The typical form of this line of questioning is "What?" The motive here is commonly the wish to know something which will connect itself with and complete a bit of knowledge already gained. "How old is Rover?" "Where was Rover born?" "Who was his father?" "What is that dog's name?" "What sort of hair had you when you were a little girl?" This kind of questioning may spring out of pure childish curiosity, or out of some practical need, as that of acting out a part in play. Thus a Kindergarten teacher was wont to be besieged with questions of this kind from her small boys when playing at being animals: "Do walruses swim fast or slow?" "Do lions climb trees?"

One feature in this pursuit of fact is the great store which a child sets by names of things. It has been pointed out by a French writer that the form of question: "What is this?" often means, "What is it called?" A child is apt to think that everything has its own name. One little boy explained to his mother that he thought all the frogs, the mice, the birds and the butterflies had names given to them by their mothers, just as babies have. Perhaps children when they find out the name of a new thing feel that they know it, that they have been introduced to it, so to speak.

Another motive in this early questioning is the desire for an explanation of what is seen or heard about the reason and the cause of things. It takes the well-known forms, "Why?" "Who made?" and so forth. Who that has tried to instruct the small child of three or four does not know the long shrill whine-like sound of this question?

Nothing perhaps in child utterance is better worth interpreting, hardly anything more difficult to interpret, than this simple-looking little "why?"

Let us in judging of this pitiless "why?" try to understand the situation of the small searcher confronted by so much that is strange and puzzling in nature, and in human life alike. Just because he is born a thinker he must try at least to bring the strange thing into some connection with his familiar world. And what is more natural than to go to the wise lips of the grown-up for a solution of the difficulty?

The demand for the reason or explanation of a thing may be satisfied by a bare reference to some other thing which is similar and so fitted to throw the light of familiarity on what is new and strange. For example, you may sometimes still a child's questioning as to why pussy has fur by telling him that it is pussy's hair. A child may find an appeasement, too, of his logical appetite in learning that what is new and strange to him comes under a general rule, that, for example, many other animals besides pussy have fur.

Nevertheless, I suspect that a child's "why?" aims farther than this; that it is only fully appeased by a knowledge of what we older folk call a reason, that is to say of the cause which originates a thing, and of the purpose which it serves. It is easy to see, indeed, that this questioning curiosity of the little ones is largely directed to the subject of origins or makings. What hours and hours do they not spend in wondering how the pebbles, the stones, the birds, the babies are made!