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Aww struck: A new book puts together some of the best questions asked by children
The queries in Questions Without Answers are endearing. But they are also a reminder that children are tiny empiricists; some of nature’s smartest survivors.
* Are you the same person when you’re sleeping?
* Why did animal control send a person to help that squirrel? Wasn’t there an animal that could help him?
* Will I grow tall like papa? Will I grow a beard like him? Will we have to fight to see which one of us is the real papa?
It’s been an incredible four years of crowdsourced responses, since the poet and author Sarah Manguso first posted her query on X: “What’s the best question a child has ever asked you?”
She was stuck at home in LA at the time, home-schooling her then-eight-year-old son, Sam, amid the pandemic, while going through a divorce, and working on a novel about domestic abuse.
“I really needed a side project that was simple and fun,” she says.
While wondering what that could be, she came upon a list she had made years earlier, of strange questions Sam had asked her, between the ages of three and five.
“They were cute, like anything a child does. But they were also cute by the word’s original definition, from the word acute: swift and piercing, they cut to the quick,” says Manguso, 51.
It struck her that other parents likely had such lists too, and so she posted her question.
The responses that poured in were quirky, funny, endearing, and surprisingly probing.
There were questions about why we have a neck, where animals come from, and about parents’ lives before they became parents (”Was mom a baby once, too? Did I play with her?”). Some were eternal puzzles, the answers to which we all wish we knew (“What is a country?”; “How do you know when it’s time to leave a party?”)
Reading through them, Manguso realised she had found her next project.
She hired two research assistants, and together they spread the net wider, to Reddit and to online childcare community groups and parenting pages. Over the next three years, the trio documented and sorted through submissions. The result is Questions Without Answers (April 2025), a collection of over 150 of the best one-line queries, each brought to life by humorous and whimsical illustrations by cartoonist and regular contributor to The New Yorker, Liana Finck.
TINY ASK FORCE
Questions Without Answers is a sharp pivot for Manguso.
Her previous books (there are nine of them) include Two Kinds of Decay (2008) about her experience with a rare autoimmune condition, chronic idiopathic demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy; 300 Arguments (2017), her musings on writing, desire, ambition and failure; and Liars (2024), a novel about a woman’s struggle with marriage, motherhood, self-deception and abuse.
Yet her latest does present the reader with an interesting challenge: to revisit how they view children. What we see as “little cherubs” and “pictures of innocence”, Manguso argues, are really some of nature’s most intelligent survivors, evolving fast and struggling to make sense of the world they must learn to navigate.
“I wanted to challenge the idea that children are adorable little idiots. They are all actually little empiricists,” she says, laughing.
As they go about studying their world, from their admittedly limited points of access and understanding, what emerges in the questions is how meticulously they add up the details, to arrive at conclusions that may be entirely inaccurate, but are often dazzlingly logical nonetheless.
Learning, experience and socialisation begin to kick in by the time a child crosses the age of six, hence many of the questions in the book come from children six or younger.
The queries presented in Questions Without Answers are divided into six categories: People, Animals, Things, Big Things, You and Me. Each category represents a core focus area.
With questions about people or communities, for instance, children are often seeking to understand where they fit in, and what they should expect. (“How does dating work? Do adults just claim each other?”; “What makes a language ours?”)
With animals, there is an attempt to understand this two-way relationship, as well as the animal’s place in our world. (“Did horses know they were in a war?”; “How do you get the meat off the animal without hurting it?”)
Things and Big Things are attempts to understand ideas: “Are bubbles in drinks their thoughts?”; “What is a moment?”; “What was the first song?”
The sections You and Me reflect that universal and unceasing human effort to figure out what we’re doing in this body, on this plane. Questions include some that are terribly common among adults too, such as “Why am I crying?” and “How do I know if I’m happy?”
GRIM REAPERS
Queries about death, interestingly, abound, as children seek to make sense of the idea of being here, but only temporarily.
“If you cut off my head really quickly, would I still know I was dead?”
“When you die, can I come with you?”
“If I didn’t need you anymore, would you die?”
“There is a wonderful flatness in emotional amplitude to the questions children ask,” Manguso says. They have not yet learnt to fear the abyss that represents all that we don’t know. She hopes her book will allow adults to revisit that sense of surrender to curiosity.
Perhaps it will also serve as a reminder, as she puts it in the book, “that when I feel bound up and inarticulate, when I have nothing to add, I too might begin with a question.”
