Bored Panda contacted Sean Duffy, an associate professor of psychology at Rutgers University, to find out why our little devils tend to point out very odd things. “We are all interested in some profound questions as to what it means to be—be being an important verb. But kids do ask the strangest questions: the universe, why does it exist? Will the sun die in my life time? Will our efforts to curb climate change really make a difference?” In fact, “children today are a lot more aware of the challenges of the future than previous generations”, says Sean Duffy. “Just imagine our fathers or grandfathers in the 1950s even considering climate change. They had their own challenges—communism, the Soviet Union—but they live in a different context than their grandparents in the 1960s.”
Let your child discover their own challenges of existence. “Every parent must understand that they created in their children a new world. They had their own universe of morally ambiguous situations, whether it be the fall of the Berlin Wall or 9/11... every generation has to realize its own uncomfortable place in the order of things.”
It’s okay not to have the answers to all the things your child asks, because “there are no simple or easy answers to any of the myriad complex of unanswerable questions.” The professor explains that “we live in a universe of moral ambiguity and that our culture and society has provided only weak answers to existential questions.”
