Has a kid ever asked a question that made your brain bleed?

Sometimes I wonder if those are just temporary lapses in judgment or “brain farts”. Similar to when we accidentally do something really dumb, then realize what we just said/did immediately after. Once I was scraping food into the garbage off a plate, but threw the silverware in the garbage after.

One time when I was in high school, a girl sitting next to me asked me how to spell cat. I was baffled. I just told her to think about it for a minute lol.

Neat question, and yeah I think they are trying to mess with us at times.

I don’t think they are trying to mess with your head. I think kids are new to the world and look at things in very different ways to adults as they try to puzzle it all out. We once asked my son who was maybe around 6 if he would like to go to day camp and he said, “No, I’d rather go to sleep-away camp because if I went to day camp I would miss you too much but at sleep-away camp, I’d just be sleeping anyway.”

This is the son who now works for Google in Paris.

Any kid worth his salt asks these questions.

By tomorrow, today is yesterday, isn’t it?

When my son was really young he would say something a bit odd that freaked me out a bit. He would hug me and say, ‘I’m so glad I picked you.’

@janbb: “I don’t think they are trying to mess with your head. I think kids are new to the world and look at things in very different ways to adults as they try to puzzle it all out.”

I know. I wasn’t seriously asking if they were trying to make us lose our minds. :)

And just to be clear – this is the amazing, beautiful thing about childhood. The contact high is intense. In a way, kids can shake our tired, habitual patterns and reveal things that we hadn’t considered…or don’t consider on a regular basis.

I love how my youngest has no clue what time is. Here’s a kid living in the present more than I could even imagine. He may be told that we’re going to climb a mountain on Saturday. By Tuesday, he’s got his supplies all packed and is confused why we’re getting ready for the school bus.

My kids will earnestly ask questions that are awe-inspiring or can be scary. But I always approach them as completely legit, great questions. When I was fairly-new at the parenting thing, I recall my 4-year daughter asking me, “When people die, where do they go?” 60-seconds into an impromptu age-appropriate loose discussion of the issue, she asked me if “wood was made of metal”. How people could be bored with kids is confusing. You need to be on your toes. Your mind is about to be blown on a regular basis.

The thing that strikes me is that it’s charming when kids do it, but when an adult makes another adult think like that, it’s frowned upon, if not considered outright offensive. It almost begs the question as to whether society frowns upon insight and tries to beat the inquisitiveness out of us by age 12.

True, @jerv . Grown ups can do it, but they have to become court jesters to do it, ie: Stand up comics.

No, a bleed on the brain or hemorrhage, could lead to a stroke & would require immediate medical attention.
Any child capable of causing that, simply by asking a question, must be possessed by demons.

Dude that second one. I have heard all sorts of stories about kids saying things that make it sound like they’re remembering past lives. Some of them describe how they died in graphic detail. I’m a skeptic but that’s still freaky.