4–11 YearsCommunication
Questions to Ask Kids Instead of “How Was School?”
The standard question reliably produces the standard answer. Questions specific enough to be answerable, and why the timing matters as much as the wording.
"How was school?" reliably produces "fine", and then everybody feels slightly disappointed. The problem is not the child. It is that the question asks for a summary of seven hours, which is a genuinely hard thing to produce on demand at the end of a tiring day.
Specific questions are answerable. Here are ones that work, and then the thing that matters more than any of them.
About the day's shape
- Who did you sit with at lunch?
- What was the most annoying part of today?
- What made you laugh?
- When were you bored?
- Did anything happen that was unfair?
About people
- Who was kind to somebody today?
- Did anybody get in trouble? What for?
- Who would you like to sit next to tomorrow?
- Is there anybody you feel sorry for?
About the work
- What was the hardest thing you had to do?
- Did you learn anything you did not believe?
- What did you get wrong today?
- If you were the teacher, what would you have done differently?
Sideways, which often works best
- Tell me one good thing and one bad thing.
- What would you rate today out of ten, and what would have made it one point higher?
- If today were a weather forecast, what was it?
- What is something you know now that you did not know this morning?
The part that matters more than the question
When you ask. The moment a child comes out is the worst time. They are tired, hungry, and have been performing socially for hours. Feed them, let twenty minutes pass, and ask later.
Where you ask. Side by side beats face to face, every time. The car, a walk, washing up, driving somewhere. Children say considerably more when they are not being looked at, and adolescents say almost nothing when they are.
How you react to the first thing. The whole conversation is decided here. If a child mentions something small and gets a lecture, an interrogation or visible alarm, you have taught them what happens when they open a subject. If they get interest, they open another.
Ask one, not six. A list of questions is an interview, and children can tell. One question, a real pause, and a willingness to let the answer be short.
And say nothing sometimes
The most reliable way to get a child talking is to be available and unbusy, and to not ask anything at all. A great deal of what parents want to know arrives twenty minutes into a car journey, unprompted, after the questions have stopped.