CHAPTER 1: IN BRIEF

Unconditional love is expected of parents—many of us choose to be parents, and we love the people we are raising. Expressing this love should happen often and in ways that children can understand at their age level. Unconditional positive regard is different from unconditional love in that it turns an eye to the future by acknowledging the adults our children have the potential to be if they are given autonomy, respect, and boundaries along with that unconditional love.

Key Takeaways

Young children (under 7) are very literal; children between 8 and 11 can begin to understand more abstract ideas and the perspectives of other people; and children 12 and older can engage with higher-level thinking and logic.

Because children’s cognitive abilities change so much as they grow, ways of expressing love should, too. “I will never stop loving you” may be more understandable for a young child than “I love you to the moon and back” because measurement and distance are concepts they may not grasp yet.

A fear of making mistakes can stop a child from asking important questions, so as parents we should foster an understanding that mistakes happen and are meant to be learned from.

Unconditional love and unconditional positive regard happen best when parents and children have healthy boundaries and respect the boundaries of the other people in their lives.

CHAPTER 2 Curiosity

The 1984 World Book Encyclopedia was my gateway to the whole wide world. My parents had spent the earliest part of their marriage—from 1970 to about 1980—as broke college students and parents to both their own children and a whole host of foster children. When my mom graduated from her physical therapy graduate program, they decided to splurge and purchase the full World Book set and any supplementary books available. It was a beloved collection, and it survived the big move from North Dakota to rural Minnesota where it was at my disposal on the living room bookshelf for my entire childhood. My favorite volume was the one that contained the entry for “human anatomy.” Not because it was a super-enthralling read (which I’m sure it was, but I was like … six), but because of the diagrams.

See, the edition of the encyclopedia that my parents had purchased included these clear plastic pages that had the various systems of the body printed on them that stacked together to make a whole person. When you peeled back the page that had the external view of the person, you were greeted with the muscular system. Continue turning pages, and you could see the endocrine system, the vascular system, the skeletal system, and the one that fascinated me the most: the reproductive system. I was fascinated by the parts I knew I had—I had heard the word “uterus” when my mom was pregnant with my little brother. But I was even more fascinated with the part I didn’t have … a penis. There it was, in all its glory—a transparent organ with a clearly defined urethra, testicles, and major blood vessels. As you may have guessed by now, it didn’t really look anything like what a human penis looks like in real life. But to a curious kid, it told me just enough—that a penis was Very Different, but human bodies are mostly very much the same.

That curiosity was not necessarily something I was taught—it was innate. Children are naturally curious about the world—they have to be to learn and grow! Babies put a million things in their mouths to learn their texture, taste, and function. Toddlers try climbing, pushing, pulling, tearing, smashing, and a million other verbs to see how they can impact the objects in their world. Preschool and early elementary school children ask a million questions to learn about the mechanisms responsible for everything they didn’t realize existed until recently. We are hardwired to want to learn about ourselves, each other, and our world.

While curiosity is a natural drive, it still needs encouragement—especially when it comes to the drive to seek information. Our children are going to ask a million questions, but learning doesn’t just happen from asking questions. We also learn through observation and discussion. Even the most boring or mundane activity can be turned into an opportunity to encourage curiosity.

Imagine you are standing in your kitchen, peeling potatoes for dinner while your preschooler plays pretend cook next to you on the floor. You have just a few spuds left when you notice that one has started to sprout and is not suitable to eat. You could just throw away the potato and get on with your task. It would be totally acceptable to do so, especially if you’re tired and need to get dinner on the table. But if you have the mental energy, you could use that potato to engage in curiosity with your kid instead:

“Ooooo, bud! Come look at this potato!”

“What am I lookin’ at, Mama?”

You could encourage your child to compare (see what is the same) and contrast (see what is different) the sprouted potato with others:

“Well, how does this potato look, and how do the other potatoes I have left to peel look? What is the same? What is different?”

“Hmmm … well, they both have kinda brown outsides. They both have little bumpies. They are both bigger than my hands. But that one has a … what is that, Mama?”

Now you can encourage your child to come up with a hypothesis—an idea that might explain what they are seeing, and a starting point for further experimentation or testing:

“What do you think it is, bud?”

“Ummmm, a finger?”

This exercise can go on for as long as you like—you could take it through most of the stages of the scientific method if you wanted to! Asking the child to test their finger hypothesis by seeing if the potato can point to or grab anything. You could have them collect data by identifying all the things a finger can do and seeing how many of them a potato “finger” can do. You could then help them analyze that data and determine that it doesn’t seem to be a finger because it lacks the ability to do all the things a finger is able to do.

You can also decide to share the answer with your child—letting them know that while a finger is an interesting hypothesis, what they’re seeing is a sprout, and it means both that the potato probably isn’t good to eat anymore and that if you plant the potato, it could grow into a plant and make new potatoes. Both courses of action are reasonable in part because your end goal of encouraging curiosity has been achieved in either case. I am of the opinion that as a parent, choosing to move through each day with this kind of curiosity has a twofold benefit: First, it encourages your child’s natural curiosity and helps them maintain their desire to continue learning about themselves and the world around them. Second, when you are modeling curiosity on a daily basis, it helps them learn what healthy curiosity looks like and how to go about seeking their information in a healthy way.

Modeling is a form of social learning—where people learn by watching other people—first studied in children by Albert Bandura in 1961. What modeling means in the context of this book is that children are watching how parents treat curiosity—how they behave when asked questions, and how they seek to answer their own questions. Children then use those observations as a blueprint for how they should engage with their own curiosity.

There is also a secret, hidden benefit to choosing a life of curiosity—it helps you learn new things, too! As we’ve already discussed, children are going to ask their caregivers as many questions as they feel comfortable with, and many of those questions are going to be about big ideas and how things work. If you choose a life of curiosity—thinking about things that you don’t know and looking up the answers for yourself—you can be ready to guide your child through finding answers to their questions. And sometimes, you will be able to supply the answers yourself!

When we practice curiosity ourselves and model the protocol for finding the information we seek, we’re also building a sort of mental parachute. We’ve all been at our “why” breaking point—when our child has asked the question that finally sends us over the edge and we cannot answer any more. We are tired of trying to think of the answers, and we’re definitely not in the mood to look things up. If we have modeled for our children how to seek information from reputable sources and to ask interesting questions, we can redirect “why” into other outlets to save our own sanity.

“Why, Mama?”

“Instead of telling you, I want you to try to think of all the reasons that might be why it does that. Then when I’m done going to the bathroom, we can talk about it some more.”

Or:

“Why, Mama?”

“We’ve already talked about why—I want you to think of a different question. Maybe wondering how it does that is something you haven’t considered doing!”

Having these phrases and protocols at my disposal saves my sanity and helps me maintain the sometimes delicate lines of communication with my children. While I cannot claim that I have never lost my patience and told my children I just need a break from the questions, I try to keep that kind of “answer” to an absolute minimum.

You see, I worry that if we show our children that asking us questions is annoying or burdensome or unappreciated, they may choose to stop asking us questions. And while that might feel good in the short term—I simply do not need to look up the name of that video game character’s third cousin’s second wife—in the long term, it leaves us with children who do not want to ask us about things they saw on the internet or heard from a kid on the playground. In fact, they may feel like their best source of information is the internet or that kid on the playground, and that can have undesirable outcomes.

My “kid on the playground” moment happened when I was about ten years old. I was playing at a park near my childhood home when Sharon, one of the big kids, showed up. It was the heat of August and we were all clambering for either the swings or the slide—anything to get the wind moving on our faces. Sharon, who had just turned thirteen, was recently back from camp and was taking any chance she could to share with all of us kids who had never been to camp (and likely would never be able to afford to go) how cool her experience was.

“Yeah, it was amazing. We slept in cabins and cooked on fires. It was so cool. And there were boyyyyys there.”

“BOYS? You went to a camp with girls and boys?”

“Uh, duh. I’m way older than you guys.”

“Why does it even matter that there were boys there? It’s not like you could kiss any of them or anything.”

“You guys are such babies,” Sharon said defensively. “There were boy campers there and boy counselors.”

The other kids seemed to know this was a Big Deal. I had no clue why this mattered, but I was listening intently to her story at the bottom of the curly slide just the same.

“Yeah, and the boy counselors were soooooo hot. One of them told me I was sexy.”

The other girls oohed and ahhed over this information, as if to lament, if only a boy counselor would call them sexy, life would be complete!

Sharon continued: “Yeah. And that boy counselor showed me his sperm. It was swimming around in his hand.”

This caught my attention. Not for the reason that it likely made you stop in your tracks—as an adult reading this book, you’re thinking, Oh my God, if that’s true, then that child was abused at summer camp. Did anyone report this? Is she okay? (From all accounts, this event never took place—she later stated that she made it up because she wanted us to think she was “grown up” after coming home from camp.) No, the reason I was paying even closer attention was that I knew you couldn’t see sperm with the naked eye. I had read about it in the World Book Encyclopedia! I didn’t have the guts to call her out—the other kids were taking everything she said as gospel, and I didn’t have the social status to go to war with her and all those other kids. Instead, I just made a mental note to never believe anything she said ever again.

As an adult, I have wondered about Sharon and her knowledge of the world at thirteen years old: Why did she know the word “sperm” but not how small they were? Why did she know that they “swam” but not that they were not like tadpoles in the palm of someone’s hand? And if she wasn’t comfortable finding that information for herself, why had no one in her life taught her about how any of that worked? I know now that the answers to all of these questions are likely wrapped up in the stigma around talking about sex and bodies, especially with children.

Curiosity is completely natural, even curiosity about bodies and sex. Our job as caregivers is to ensure that our children’s curiosity is guided in the direction that is healthiest for their brain development and that will facilitate their emotional and physical safety. Because curiosity about bodies, both intellectually and physically, isn’t inherently sexual—it protects our health, too. Consider how people with breasts are encouraged to do self–breast exams to look for lumps or changes that might be signs of cancer. Think about how we are taught to pay attention to our bowels and take notice if things change as a sign of nutritional demands, developing cancer, or other needs. And think about how we assess our bodies for injuries: “When I press here it’s tender, but it wasn’t before.” Without a healthy knowledge of our bodies when they are functioning at their best, we will be left unaware of changes that could be life-threatening. And how are we going to know our bodies if we are not encouraged to reflect on and explore them?

This exploration starts at a very young age—it is completely normal for a baby to stare at their hands, chew on their feet, or reach into their diaper and grab their penis or vulva. Toddlers and preschoolers continue this exploration and may discover that some sensations feel better than others. As children grow, they will continue to explore their world … and their bodies. As I’ve said before, this exploration is normal and natural, and can be directed into a healthy respect for self. Rather than treating a child’s curiosity about their body like something that doesn’t exist, acknowledging it and setting boundaries acts as a protective measure, showing the child that you are not going to shame them for being curious and that you are there to keep them safe (which we will discuss in chapter 5).

Remaining receptive and setting boundaries for safety is doubly important when it comes to your child’s intellectual curiosity. If we have encouraged curiosity in daily life and shown a willingness to answer our children’s questions, then we are likely to be at the top of our children’s lists of People Who Can Help Me Understand My World. Because, as we know, their world changes incredibly fast. They go from “What is this thing?” to “How does this thing work?” and eventually to “How do I make this thing work with someone else?” And if our children are coming to us with their questions, they are less likely to turn to spaces and people that may not have the ability to answer accurately, or, worse, do not have their best interests in mind—their friends, older children, the internet, or unsafe adults. Better that I be the one explaining to my child, accurately and compassionately, what an orgy is, rather than some faceless person on the internet.

A word of caution, though, when it comes to curiosity—the internet is a wild place. Even if your child has very strict and limited access to the internet (like mine), they will still hear things that you never expected—usually from peers whose access is more loosely monitored. Even though I am online a lot, some of the songs, sayings, and trends that have made it home with my children have taken me completely by surprise. I’ve had to google more than one Classic Vine to fully understand what they’re saying. Because you may be seeing things that you never thought you would, I think it’s worthwhile to familiarize yourself with Incognito Mode on your browser when you are seeking new information online. One rogue keyword typed in a search box, and suddenly you’re receiving advertisements left and right for erectile dysfunction … and you don’t even have a penis. (Yes, this happened to me in the course of writing this book—I’m hoping to spare you the same fate.)

As much as we may not want to admit it, we should also teach our children how to navigate seeking information on the internet. I remember being completely opposed to the idea when my eldest child was in elementary school—if he had questions, he could come to me and I would make sure he got only accurate information! While I hope he will still come to me for the big stuff (as he has in the past), it has been important for us to establish rules and measures regarding information from other places.