Why?

We’ve all been asked and asked it ourselves. If you’re parenting anywhere between toddlerhood and teenagedom, you have probably heard it multiple times within the last hour. “Why?” It is an ever-present question. Maybe there is a somewhat universal answer.

Why do we have to do chores? Why do I need to take a shower? Why do I have to eat vegetables? Why do I have to do this math? Why does it matter if my room is messy? Why do I have to get up so early? Why can’t I have just a little more screen time? Why is she so mean to me? Why should I apologize? Why do you care what my hair looks like in this picture? That’s just a little sound-byte sampler from the past 24 hours with my own three kids (ages 7, 10, and 12-going-on-20).

Do you remember asking why as a kid? Does the answer “Because I said so!” echo in your memory? How about when you were asked as a child to answer those why questions? I am pretty sure my own childhood refrain of I-don’t-knows and just-becauses isn’t all that unique. As parents, we tend to dismiss these whys as mere annoyances. Sometimes I feel like my kids’ questions are like those slippery banana peels in the cartoons. I swear they toss the questions out just hoping whatever parental mission I’m on will slip right out from under me. But what if we stop dismissing why as a mundane question and instead shift our thinking?

If we really embrace the question “Why?” we might empower our kids to think differently too.

Why do we have expectations for our children around chores, homework, hygiene, nutrition, and behavior anyway? Here’s a hint. It’s not about exerting control over our children. It’s about equipping our children with experience and expertise, knowledge and wisdom, health and wellness, habits and mindsets. Through chores, we aim to nurture a sense of shared responsibility for our home. Why homework? Because education is not just a responsibility; it is a privilege and an opportunity that begets more opportunities. How about hygiene? Well let’s be honest, “boy smell” is a real thing and none of us are interested in capturing the scent for a new “sweat, mud, and musk” candle, but the real reason is hygiene is all about health, as is nutrition. As for behavior, I think parents are all doing our best to raise children to be good people - the kind of people we can trust to care for each other, care for us, and care for our community/our future/our world.

The answer to “Why?” seems to often have something to do with taking care - taking care of ourselves, taking care of the people and spaces around us, taking care to maximize resources and opportunities for positive outcomes for ourselves and others, taking care of our relationships. Taking care is a way of giving purpose to our actions.

So, how do we upgrade the pesky whys to the purpose-giving whys?

First, I think, as parents, we have to have patience and perseverance to endure the pesky whys. Adam Grant recently summarized three signs that someone is worth learning from. He said someone worth learning from:

• Encourages you to think for yourself, rather than expecting you to think like them

• Aims to have many teachers, not just many disciples

• Admits when they're wrong, instead of insisting that they're right

Let’s be people worth learning from and model these traits. That means we, as parents/teachers/coaches/mentors, have to not just tolerate the whys, but encourage them. We have to respond to the whys with an open mind and an optimistic outlook about raising free-thinking, capable, competent humans (not disciples). We have to remember that when we embrace the whys from both the adult and child points of view, we can learn from our children as much as they can learn from us. And sometimes, often in my house, we have to admit when something we do or say maybe doesn’t pass the why test.

Howard Gardner proposes nurturing five minds in our children - the disciplinary mind, the synthesizing mind, the creating mind, the respectful mind, and the ethical mind. He argues that synergy among these minds, in individuals and collectively in a population, enables us to thrive personally and professionally. It may seem like a stretch, but chores really are about ethics. Showers are about respect. All those pesky whys we get are fleeting opportunities to nurture these five minds. If we pause, embrace the question, and examine the learning opportunity presented, we help our children find purpose in both asking and answering “Why?”.

Adam Grant offers more wisdom here. In reflecting on a podcast conversation with Brene Brown, he wrote, “It takes courage, humility, and integrity to favor hard questions over easy answers, learning over knowing, and getting it right over being right.”

Maybe the universal answer to “Why?” is “because we are striving to get it right” so we can thrive in this life we are living together.

Now, I’m not aiming to answer those bigger, metaphysical types of whys. I definitely have the courage and humility to leave those questions unanswered. But for now, for my family, I am going to settle on answering “Why?” with “I’m glad you asked” and “because we are striving to get this right”.

P.S. Stay tuned for my kids’ reactions to this new mantra. I can picture the eye-rolls already, “Yeah, yeah...because we’re striving to get right...we know, Mom.”