14 DAY TRIAL // A new scientific study has recently revealed that the real reason children ask 'why' all the time is because they want to get to the truth, and not to step on their parents' nerves. The research has also demonstrated that the small ones appear to react better to some answers than to others, which is really puzzling. This basically means that the children in the investigation, aged two to five, were a lot more active in their knowledge-gathering processes than experts had previously anticipated, LiveScience reports.
“Even from really early on when they start asking these how and why questions, they are asking them in order to get explanations. Kids are playing more of an active role in learning about the world around them than we may have expected,” University of Michigan expert Brandy Frazier, who has also been the lead researcher of the study, explains. As soon as the kids in the study started being given answers, they continued to probe further and further into different subjects, demonstrating that they were in fact interested in the truth about the matters, and would stop at nothing to get it.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons why some parents get mad, or lose their patience when their young one starts asking them questions. They feel the answers could be inappropriate for the child's age, so they prefer interrupting the discussion than going down this path. Details of the research appear in the November/December issue of the respected scientific journal Child Development. Still, the scientists caution that the study sample was too small to allow for the generalization of these findings.
In the experiments, the investigators asked parents to provide them with transcripts of what their children asked and talked about at home, while conversing with parents, siblings or friends. The team determined that the children were a lot less likely to ask the second question again if they got a real response. If they were just being led on, they continued to repeat the same sentence from time to time, until a satisfactory answer was given to the query. “It seems like kids might have an optimal level of detail they're interested in,” Frazier says.