My 4 year old keeps asking people this question.
"Do you know everything?"
He asks it with the innocence of someone who genuinely wants to know. It's like he's searching for someone who has the meaning of life or something.
Today, he's asked the UPS man, the house painter across the street and a cop.
He keeps asking Dave and I, also. We tell him the truth, that we don't know everything and nobody does. We tell him if anyone tells him they do know everything, they are lying. I think he believes us but only a little. Because he's still searching for that omniscient person.
Still learning, Ruth!
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6 comments:
Me too-
that is-still learning and also looking for the omniscient one.
It's nice to hear that story.
That's profound, really.
He's a deep thinker, that one. I used to ask my mom stuff and then say, You should know, you're a teacher. (She taught 1st grade.) It made sense to me that anyone who was a teacher should be extra knowledgable, but really I was just being a condescending little 7-yo twit.
Tell him my e-mail signature line: Believe those who seek the truth. Doubt those who find it. (Andre Gide)
Yeah, deep thinker. Isn't it around 4 that they start losing that innocence? You could tell him that you know a lot of different things, and everybody knows some things... Maybe ask him what it is he wants to know about and you can help him find the person that can answer his question.
That seems like a very intelligent question to me. He's trying to figure out whom to believe. I like your response, too. We tell our kids the same thing about religion and religious questions: people believe lots of different things, but no one really knows the truth, and if they say they do, don't believe it. Search for yourself and make your own decisions about what you believe. (My mom was raised Catholic, my dad was raised Muslim, and my husband is Jewish, so this is the only answer that makes sense in our family.)
That post brings back good memories for me. When I was little it was joked that my Grandfather knew everything, and one of my first feats of logic I can remember was figuring out that wasn't strictly true (he didn't know what I did yesterday ;)
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