The one question my son asks me that I simply cannot answer

My two-year-old son Archie has recently learnt the word “actually”, which was actually quite cute to begin with but has actually become pretty annoying. Unlike the rest of the household, he doesn’t need time to warm up in the morning, so the questions begin when he opens his eyes.

“Where are we actually going?” he will ask as I lift him from the cot and transport him to the lounge. There, he will sit with his mother and watch an episode of Bluey as he did yesterday, the day before, and every other day in recent memory.

In between “What’s that?” and “Where are we going?” comes a line of inquiry designed to cause an existential crisis. Credit: Michael Howard

While I heat his milk, staring at my reflection in the microwave, wondering where everything went wrong, he pipes up from the couch. “What are you actually doing?”

It’s a fair enough question and one I ask myself regularly, but before I can answer, he’s onto the next one. “What are we actually watching?”

These types of exchanges are typical of his age and further proof that hanging out with a toddler islike being cornered by a drunk stranger at the pub. Both are prone to drooling, dressing in pyjamas and rambling questions with no real point.

In fact, if you were to design a Venn diagram with Frustrating One Way Conversations as the intersection and Drunk Strangers at Pubs and Toddlers as the two central circles, there would likely be significant overlap. See below.

I made this Venn diagram myself and I am very proud of it.Credit: Thomas Mitchell

And much like being trapped with a drunk stranger at a pub, Archie barely listens when I respond, yet I persevere: “We are going to the lounge. I am heating your milk. We are watching Bluey.”

As far as I can tell, answering these questions, even if it means repeating myself on a loop, is better than ignoring them. But everything changed recently when my son stumbled across a line of inquiry that shocked us both.

While I was lying on the lounge nursing a moderate-to-severe hangover, he pulled up next to me, put a chubby, clammy paw on my cheek and casually delivered this line that ruined my life: Why are you?

For a moment, no one spoke as the words hung in the air, but then, sensing he’d rattled me, Archie doubled down: “Dad, why are you?”

It turns out you are never more primed to have an existential crisis than the day after the night before. You’re already so vulnerable, so tired, so hungry; all it takes to tip you over the edge is a tiny person innocently inquiring about why you’re alive.

Without warning, your crippling hangover is now compounded by the crushing realisation that life lacks meaning, personal identity is a construct, and every existing thing is born without reason.

To make matters worse, my hesitation doubled as an invitation for Archie to seize upon the question and fire it back at me incessantly until it was all I could think about.

According to Dr Paul Harris, a Harvard child psychologist and author of the article “What Children Learn from Questioning”, children ask about 40,000 questions between the ages of two and five. Harris claims that during that span, the questions shift from simple factual ones (what is this?) to the first requests for explanations.

But nowhere in Harris’ research does he mention that your child might ask the same question 40,000 times a day.

Aware that two-year-olds can be painfully persistent, my only option was to look online for an answer that would satisfy him (and me). It wasn’t lost on me that, in some way, this was the adult version of Archie’s incurable curiosity. Google has long been my all-knowing parent, and not for the first time was I desperately pleading with it to tell me WHY.

Unfortunately, unlike real parents, Father Google knows too much, and finding the correct answer proved difficult in a sea of so many wrong answers. Wading into the nightmare that is toddler advice websites, I was shocked by how others had tackled this issue.

Take this from a mother of two: “I would say, ‘You, my dear child, are the hero of your own story. You get to choose what epic adventures you undertake, what evils you fight, and how you fight them!’ ”

Eventually, I came across a suggestion from clinical psychologist Linda Blair, who recommended that the best way of responding to a ‘why?’ question is to turn it back on to your child, like a UNO reverse card.

Heeding Linda’s advice, I waited until the next time Archie asked, ‘Why are you?’ and then returned serve. Without missing a beat, he turned to me and said, “I don’t know … actually.”

At least we have that in common.

Find more of the author’s work here. Email him at [e-mail] or follow him on Instagram at @thomasalexandermitchell and on Twitter @_thmitchell.