Why, why, why?

[breeze]

I am already going insane from this question asked by ds (aged 3.33) at least 1000 times a day (or so it seems), I try to answer his questions as best I can, but when I get the 8th Why is the toilet paper on a roll I want to scream. Any tips, or general re-assurance this doesn't last long. Thanks

Why do you want to know that???
Sorry couldn't resist

It does end, well, sort of! But when it does the questions get harder anyway! I had this with dd, who used to come up with some crackers. In the end I had to limit answers to full questions , eg Why is the sky blue? But if she just said Why? I would ignore it. That way I separated the questions she was realy interested in. from the instant reponse/wind up. In addition this helped to drive on her language skills. At 3 we were getting How does the power station make electricity, and how does the electricity get down the wires. This motherhood lark is a real education

Really suffering at the moment too Breeze. DS (3.5) asks such hard questions: "What is the sun, where does it go at night, why do we have nighttime and on and on and on". I used to ignore when I was fed up or got stuck, or I'd try and change the subject but now he gets really distressed and starts shouting at me to tell him, so I just make up the best answer I can.
He'll often ask who people are as we drive past in the car and I have to make up names for them because if I say I don't know who they are he goes into some kind of tantrum about it!!!!
Sorry, not much help. I'm hoping it will end too.

a mum,dad and 4 year old boy went for a walk
boy -"daddy,why do the cows eat grass?"
daddy-"i dont know" boy -"daddy why is the sky blue?" daddy - "i dont know"
boy -"daddy why bees make honey?"
daddy -"i dont know" mummy -"tommy leave your father alone!!" daddy-"its ok,he needs to learn!"
its a very old joke,my kids are 5 and 2 and they drive me crazy with a million whys

It was around this time we invested in a good Children's Encyclopedia - a DK one, I think. It was a good, quick answer to lots of ds' questions, 'we wil have to look that up in your book when we get home' or 'go and fetch your book and we will see if we can find the answer' it did seem to distract him from further questions and he would love just looking through the book himself. There were a few occasions where the encyclopedia didn't answer the question, on these occasions we would write his question down and look it up on the internet at the weekend - hopefully he would have forgotten about it by then but he often hadn't.

Check out Beakman and Jax for some kid friendly answers to questions about how the world and the human body work.

I found it while looking for the answer to my three year old's question - "Why is poo always brown?"

Jaybee - top idea. I'll be ordering one from Amazon later today.

Bugsy - I think the one we have is a previous version of \linkuk.dk.com/Book/BookFrame/0,1007,,00.html?id=0751328510\this one{}. I don't think link worked (is there a problem with commas within a link?). Anyway click on DK.com link at top of Mumsnet page, click on Family Reference Guide and then Dictionaries & Encyclopedias - Children's Illustrated Encyclopedia is about sixth on the list at £29.99. It says 8+ but we found the information level about right to enable us to answer his questions in quite simple language - ds still uses it now (age 9) for school projects etc. Quite pricey but you could always suggest that you want book tokens instead of Easter Eggs.
May be cheaper on Amazon.

Got my brackets wrong didn't I!!
\linkuk.dk.com/Book/BookFrame/0,1007,,00.html?id=0751328510\this one{} - still doesn't appear to work.

No worries Jaybee, I'll find it. It would be so nice to have something that I can say well lets look at our special book later instead of making stuff up!

I used to babysit a three year old. One afternoon on the way home from Kindergarten he started his "Why-Game" and I did my best to answer his questions. After some time it started getting on my nerves and I started: Why do you want to know? He: I don't know. Me: Why don't you know? Etc. He eventually ran out of answers and never made a game of it again.

It can be very annoying when your child (and all children go through that stage) of asking "why?". If I could answer my DD1 (she is now 10), I would but too often I found I didn't know the answer or couldn't put it into words. Like someone else further down the thread, I invested in a lot of encyclopaedias and Q&A books(mostly from boot sales) and now have about 5 of them. They all mostly cover the same topics but sometimes worded differently. It was quite fun to sit down with my DD1 or DD2 to try and find out the answer to what they were asking. Now if DD1 wants to find something out, she looks through the books herself. Some of them are quite tatty looking, but in my opinion, for example, what happened in history 50 years ago is the same whether it was written in a book 5 years ago or a book written this year.

JayBee, like Bugsy I think that is a really good idea. I did wonder if it was overkill getting an encyclopedia for a three year old but did not stop to think of the adults' mental health! Thanks for the tip.

And sometimes the answers you give just don't stack up, eg. why is the sky blue, answer because it is a reflection of the sea (so I'm told) but then the sea that we see is usually a greenish greyish colour(!) and why is the sea blue anyway?

Jude, try this from the scientificamierican.com site (a good one for those difficult science questions)

"The ocean looks blue because red, orange and yellow (long wavelength light) are absorbed more strongly by water than is blue (short wavelength light). So when white light from the sun enters the ocean, it is mostly the blue that gets returned. Same reason the sky is blue."