Mark KennedyYou can tell a lot about your kids by paying attention to their questions.
First, consider the fact that they’re even asking you questions is a good thing. Sullen kids are stressed kids; inquisitiveness shows that children have their basic needs met and are working on filling up their brains.
Our 8-year-old son, a second-grader, asks lots of questions that involve math and measurements. And he poses them to me with an earnestness that lets me know he is not just jabbering — he’s groping for context. During a 30-minute car ride last Sunday he asked:
“How much is our house worth?”
“What is four divided by one?”
“Why do some people say ’17 hundred’ and other people say ‘one thousand seven hundred.'”
“What is the most populous city in the world?” (I was impressed that he used the word “populous.”)
I was able to answer his questions, although Siri — the all-knowing voice on my iPhone — could have probably aced his test, too.
But I realized my son’s questions were probably code for deeper feelings:
“Is our family’s money situation OK?”
“I’m a little worried about third-grade math next year. Will I be able to handle it?”
“How big is Chattanooga, really?”
Even my 13-year-old son asks me questions with deeper meaning. On Sunday, we passed some college kids playing beanbag games outside a restaurant on the Southside.
“Daddy, how long do you think those kids will spend at that place today?”
Uncoded: “Every hour of my life is scripted, although it appears college involves some lollygagging. What’s up with that?”
I answered: “It’s hard to know how long those kids will stay. Maybe an hour — maybe all day. In college you get to manage your own time.”
When you reduce all these questions to their essence, they are about understanding scale — how much, how big, how long. At some age we stop asking questions about scale because we think they make us sound unintelligent. But that’s dangerous because then we start forming opinions based on feelings instead of facts. Math needs to be running though our brains at all times for context. Life is like carpentry, and you need your tape measure handy.
When I arrived at work Monday morning, I had a long message on my voice mail with a nice reader who took gentle issue with my column last week about the country music song “Automatic,” which pines for the good ol’ days. I had made the point that some of the old items named in the songs — such as cassette tapes and phone booths — weren’t all that great.
The caller made an impassioned argument that the “good old days” — think the 1970s — were indeed better. And there are any number of subjective ways you might reasonably come to that conclusion. But the two examples of ’70s bliss he gave were cheaper gas and the fact that he could drive a big convertible sedan all day in 1976 without fear of running into a police roadblock.
To satisfy my own curiosity, I looked up the price of gas in 1976 — about 59 cents a gallon. I also discovered that the car he mentioned got about 12 miles per gallon. Driving 1,000 miles a month at that rate, a driver would have spent about $49 a month for gas. And $49 in 1976 had the buying power of $202 today.
Today, gas is about $2.30 a gallon and a big sedan gets about 25 mpg, give or take. Consequently, driving 1,000 miles a month costs about $92 today. So, $92 a month today for fuel vs. $202 (in today’s dollars) in the good old days: Who would have thought it?
I also looked up American auto fatalities in 1976 vs. today. In raw numbers, about 30 percent fewer Americans die in car accidents per year now than in the mid-70s. Factor in population growth — there are about 100,000 more of us now — and we are only about half as likely to die in traffic accidents now as in the 1970s.
Granted, improved car safety features and seatbelt laws have a lot to do with that, but so do anti-DUI efforts such occasional police roadblock. I guess I’d trade the inconvenience of a few more police roadblocks for a better chance of making it home safely from work at night.
It just goes to show, asking number questions is a skill that we should never put on the shelf. Numbers are how we get the world to make sense.
Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645. Follow him on Twitter @TFPCOLUMNIST. Subscribe to his Facebook updates at www.facebook.com/mkennedycolumnist.