When my daughter displayed her first bursts of curiosity it was merely cute. “Ah dis?” she asked, pointing at anything and everything that she did not recognize or had no words for. “Doing? Doing?” she inquired of grownups engaged in unfamiliar tasks. “Talking about?” she wondered, when the conversation went over her head.
But then came the money questions, early and often, about why some people had a summer house and why we didn’t have a basement with toys in it like her cousin did. These were much harder to answer; to me they cut to the core of the choices we had made as a family and, ultimately, our values.
While the inquiries made me uncomfortable, Susan Engel, in a new book called “The Hungry Mind: The Origins of Curiosity in Childhood,” makes the case that there is no such thing as an inappropriate line of questioning and that we should declare nothing at all off limits to our children.
“If you turn them away, you’re shutting down curiosity, which is the most powerful mechanism for learning,” she said. “Nobody would say that they don’t want their kid to be a learner. Yet parents do this thing where they close down the discussion on certain topics, which makes it clear that you can learn just so long as you don’t learn the thing that you most want to learn or only learn the things that I’m comfortable talking about.”
Her stance is a good reminder of the reason why tough questions about money or sex or war make us uneasy: They are as much about values as they are about the topics at hand. All the more reason, then, to answer them squarely. “It’s this golden opportunity for conversation,” she said. “Would you rather that somebody else talk to your kid about these things?”
Though Ms. Engel resists a precise definition of curiosity, she does note in her book that it tends to spring from surprise when something unexpected happens. I thought of two broad categories when this happens with money. The first is when children discover that their family doesn’t have enough money to buy something they want or is able to purchase or experience something that seems incredibly expensive. The second comes when parents refuse to buy or do something for children, even though they know that their parents could afford it if they thought it was appropriate.
Ms. Engel, 55, a senior lecturer in psychology at Williams College and the mother of three grown children, suggested a third big category: When parents are inconsistent. “I worried aloud all the time about whether we had enough money for this or that,” she said. “And then suddenly I’d say, `Let’s go out to dinner!’”
This phenomenon is almost certainly universal, but it need not make us all hypocrites. We all have our quirks, and it’s fine for our children to witness them and challenge us, even. “It’s an anthropological inquiry on their part — what do you value, when do you control your impulses,” Ms. Engel explained. “The whole topic of money is such an interesting invitation for parents to think about how their life looks to their child.”
Many parents don’t mind answering money questions but worry if their children seem obsessed with it, lest they raise an Alex Keaton. Ms. Engel isn’t sure we can do much about it and doesn’t think we should want to anyway. “I think it would be a terrible thing to try to change a child’s intense interests,” she said. “It’s one of the greatest gifts a child can have, and you should thank your lucky stars that your kid has one.”
That said, she said that she would have been disappointed if one of her children had gone off to college wanting nothing more than to make a lot of money. Still, that isn’t necessarily the logical end point for children who focus on the topic; they can study economics, social work, urban planning and plenty of other topics that are driven by money but don’t lead to careers where earning piles of it is the primary goal.
She added that we should relax, too, if our children seem not to care a lick about financial matters, even though there is ample evidence that we sometimes talk about money more with boys than with girls and that they may come to expect lower salaries as a result.
“I am totally uninterested in cars, but I am able to buy one,” Ms. Engel said. “Kids can’t be interested in everything. If you’re interested in money, cool, but if not, it doesn’t mean that you won’t be able to function in that domain. It just means that it’s not something that really intrigues you.”