The 'why' is everything

My eyes droop as I reach for the kettle for what I can only assume is the fifteenth time today.

My three year old stands diligently next to me, delicately inspecting the transforming dinosaur toy he'd received from the grandparents for Christmas last year.

About three days later it had been unceremoniously stuffed to the back of one of our many 'miscellaneous' drawers and I'd assumed he'd forgotten it existed.

Until this morning, when he inexplicably demanded through a mouthful of cereal to know precisely where it was.

My wife had silently nodded that unique nod of parental understanding when I offered this as the explanation as to why all of the miscellaneous drawers were now emptied all over the dining room floor, with the two year old sifting through the debris like a hyena looking for carrion.

We finally found this dinosaur after forty minutes of rather one-sided searching, with half the search party periodically getting distracted by other newly rediscovered toys, but then insisting we still needed said dinosaur. He'd squealed in delight upon discovering it, and since then it had been non-stop questions regarding the social behaviours, evolutionary strategies, mating rituals, egg-maintenance habits and comparative tooth-to-foot-size ratios of a variety of species of robot dinosaurs that I was unaware existed until this moment in time.

The intensity of his questioning made my recent professional anaesthetic exam feel like a gentle counselling session.

I'd naively thought that the benefit of these mythical beasts being mythical is that I could just make up answers as I went along, provided I made sure to remember my answers for when I was grilled about them again next week.

But not only would  he decisively tell me I was 'wrong' when I answered questions about things that I'm fairly certain don't and can never exist, but he would then double down and serve up the follow up question, which was invariably 'why?'

Here's a sample of our conversation

"Daddy, why do robot dinosaurs blink?"

"That's a fantastic question, why do you think they blink?"

"No you tell me" (Damn)

"Well maybe they might need to clean the lenses of their camera eyes by blinking every so often"

"Why?"

"Well maybe it's raining and they're getting raindrops in their eye-cameras?"

"No. Are robot dinosaurs electric?"

(I struggle with the change in direction but we muddle on)

"They might be, most robots are electric but I suppose you could power them using something else like coal, oil, or maybe even wind"

"Why?"

"Well because you just need a source of energy, to move the robot-dinosaur's parts, but you could probably get this energy from different sources if you needed to"

"This one is electric, so it can't go in the bath"

"Fair enough that sounds sensible"

"Why is it electric?"

"Because you just said it was electric"

"Why?"

"I don't know - you said it - what made you decide it was electric?"

"He told me"

"That's cool! I didn't know robot dinosaurs could talk"

"Why?"

This is the point at which you've joined us where I'm now reaching in desperation for the kettle, as only the soothing jolt of vastly over-brewed coffee is going to get me to the end of this interrogation session.

But the truth of the matter is I love it.

It shows the absolute delight in the young mind of learning purely for learning's sake. He's clearly working hard to process every answer I'm giving him, regardless of how ridiculous it may seem, or whether it is of any real-world use, because he just wants to understand.

This is the peak of education, it simply cannot ever get better than a relentlessly hungry brain with a seemingly indefinitely capability to assimilate new information, and it all starts with 'why?'

This is why we're homeschooling, because I know nobody on earth, not even the most diligent teacher that money can buy will be emotionally invested enough to continue answering these questions until 7.45pm, when the only reason he stops is because he's collapsed asleep in bed, ready to kick off again in eleven hours time.

I promise we're not pushy parents.

We're not pushy parents, because we don't need to be pushy - he's pushing us harder than we'd ever hope to push back.

What we fear is a classroom environment where he tries to ask more than one 'why?' question and is promptly told to 'stop talking' or 'stop disrupting the class', thereby quashing any hope of nurturing that chain of thought to its full potential.

It is absolutely exhausting, but I know I'll be sat there in three weeks' time questioning whether I'm doing the right thing, and he'll gleefully exclaim that robot dinosaurs probably run on electricity but maybe they run on wind instead, and that I still didn't tell him why they blink, and it'll all be worth it.