A six year old (almost 7) asked me abruptly if Sarah Huckabee Sanders was related to Bernie. What should I have told her?

A new writer for Saturday Night Live.

;>0

I feel if they are old enough to care to ask, they are old enough for an honest answer.
To your knowledge, Sarah is nor related to Bernie because her daddy is Mike Huckabee & she married Bryan Sanders who to your knowledge is not related to Bernie either.

Explain that a Huckabee is a given last name & a Honeybee is a critter so they can’t even be compared.

Boring…I know…but IF she’s going to be inquisitive, she needs to learn that not all answers are exciting.

Either that or take her to the library to do her own research because she has stumped you with her brilliant questions!!!

Always be truthful with children.

They need accurate information, and they don’t know it’s humorous to say yes.so its not funny to them. But thanks for sharing it with us, Agree a new SNL writer.

To point out WHY you should be honest with children, when my niece was 3 she was going to day care & she asked her mom why she didn’t have a penis like the other kids did. Her mom was really busy & told her that when she was still in mommy’s tummy that she had a penis but it fell off when she turned into a little girl. She cried because she wanted a penis.

Then for the next year or so she told everybody she met that she used to have a penis but it fell off. After that, her mom took the time & made the effort to NEVER brush off one of her questions ever again!!!

The truth. Ain’t no thang…

The one exception is Santa Claus. The Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy are optional.

We may WANT our children to believe in fairies and ghosts, and maybe there are. But in truth, we are not likely to encounter them in the real world. They can consign them to imagination and wonder. For practical reasons, however, children need accurate information about the world, and rarely understand what is funny to us.

Santa Claus is a possible exception because it is the one ‘untruth’ that enriches childhood.

Tell her that Sarah says that, yeah, she is indeed related to Bernie.
And thus, she ain’t.

I can’t imagine telling her anything other than the truth. Why would you?

@rebbel Your answer sounds like one of those “truth-teller” logic puzzles.

@janbb You mean the “Liar Paradox”?
“Epimenides was a Cretan who made one immortal statement: “All Cretans are liars.”

The ones where you go to a country where some people always tell the truth and some always lie and you ask for the road to Samarra.

Well, I would lie if I told you I know of this logic puzzle.
Or would I….

What about colonel Harland Sanders. Are they related?

I told her I didn’t think the 2 were related, to which she came back with “But how do you know?” I told her that it would be the sort of news that would be all over the tv. and would be an impossible secret to keep. Then she shifted to what a great name “honeybee” is. Little kids will keep you on your toes.

If this little girl had asked me, I think I would first have complimented her on her correct observations: first, that people who are related do often have the same last name, and second, that she has been paying attention to what’s going on in the larger world.

I wouldn’t use the presence or absence of TV coverage, though, as proof of anything at all. Instead I would probably have said that there are a lot of things that are true in one direction but not the other. For example, a lot of cars are red, but that doesn’t mean that all red things are cars.

I might even introduce a Venn diagram, which I think a 7-year-old could understand: this big circle is all the people with the last name of Sanders, and this little one is all the people who are related to Sarah Huckabee Sanders. The circles overlap, but see? There are some people related to her who aren’t named Sanders, and there are lots of people named Sanders who aren’t related to her.

You can look up information about both of them and see that as far as it goes, they don’t appear to have any relatives in common.

Maybe they did, way back somewhere, but so did lots of other people, and it isn’t important now.

And I would encourage her to keep asking questions. She’s good at it. Noticing the possible connections among things is a great way to learn, as long as you watch out for attractive but misleading similarities.

@stanleybmanly I appreciate what you’re saying. Before my divorce, my stepdaughter lived with us. She shot out questions in rapid fire…often before I could think of the answer she was answering her own question & spitting out the next one. This little girl finds you intelligent so you should feel honored!!!

not so fast. I don’t think she finds me one bit intelligent. I was available and “All Things Considered” was blaring on the radio. The thing that puzzles me is that you would think she was too young for Bernie to be in her head when he was news. When I see her again, I’m going to dig into that. But she’s very sharp, curious (nosy) and shows great promise as a future predatory lawyer. I should probably stay away from her. I have a very funny story from the Nixon years about my attempts at little kid indoctrination.

At 7 my biggest question was WHY I had to be in bed by 9:00. I had NO clue who was President. Then again, I was 10 before we got our first TV & I was only allowed to watch the shows my parents chose.

that’s how we all grew up, but kids pick up on stuff. We didn’t want to be in the same room with my parents when other adults were visiting, and after feigning politeness would flee as though we were on fire. But my mom would talk for what seems like hours to her coworker Bernice, with the result that simply playing in the next room, we kids were pretty much up on all the intrigues at the local V A hospital.

Those were the days :)

How about Carter Page and Lisa Page ? Are they related ?

Yes, we’re all related somehow.