Have any of my dear trauma mama friends noticed their kids
tend to ask a lot of crazy/silly questions?
Does it seem to increase even more when you’re stuck inside the car with
them? I can pretty much guarantee every time I am alone in the car with The Princess, the questions will
start. Even when there are five of us in
the car, she asks more crazy/silly questions than she does when she’s at home,
for example.
Both of my hurt kids use questions to bait me into an argument.
Kid: “Mom,
do you think it’s going to rain today?”
Me, looking up at a lot of gray clouds in the sky: “I don’t know, but it
sure looks like it.”
Kid: “No, it’s not. The weather man said it would just be cloudy.”
UGH.
Those are questions to argue. But
that’s another topic and I’ll write about it on another post, later.
Remember, I raised four boys before bringing home The
Princess and Youngest Son. I’ve been
through the silly questions stage a few times before.
With the older boys, however, constant silly questions stopped by the time
they were about four years old. The Princess
experienced a great deal of her trauma at age three. If kids get “stuck” emotionally at the age
which trauma occurs, then the constant questions would be normal for her
emotional development. The thing is, I
don’t want her to stay there. (Selfishly, that’s for my sake more than it is for hers.
Okay, not really. But yeah. Kind of.)
We’ve taken to being silent when The Princess asks a silly
question – one that doesn’t need an answer – one she can figure out herself –
one she already knows the answer to, but just wants to hear the sound her own voice, so she asks. Silence bugs the crud out of The
Princess. But silence helps her to
realize she’s being silly. Oh, she still
tries to cover herself and does the baby voice and says, “What? Why won’t you answer me.” Still, we are silent. (It’s usually about then that one of the
boys [usually Youngest Son] will say, “Duh.
THINK about it!”)
One technique I read somewhere suggested parents give a child who
asks constant questions a limit to the number of questions they can ask at a given time. For example, say you’re driving
across town. You might give your child
an eight question limit. This will make
them think (if they’re able) about whether or not they want to use one of their
questions, or whether the thing they’re asking is worth their time (and
yours). I just may try that when I pick up
The Princess from school today. I haven’t
thought about trying it for a while. I
think if we make a game out of it, and I don’t make it too big of a deal, she may
actually start to think. It’s worth a
shot.
I also haven’t thought about why she may increase her
questioning while riding in the car. I
realized today that her anxiety does indeed seem to increase when riding in the car. She’s not usually obviously nervous, nor does
she SEEM stressed out, but she does get more animated and she really does talk a LOT
more in the car. It could be the
confined space. It could also be that
the first time she rode in a car at age three, she was being taken away from
her first mother. Riding in the car could be a trauma trigger. What do you think?
