A book can help with
For the child who wants to know how, and what, and above all why.
Some children come with a question permanently loaded: why is the sky blue, where does the rain go, what’s inside a worm. It can be exhausting by teatime, but that endless curiosity is one of the best things about them, and the way you meet it teaches them whether wondering is welcome.
Books are the perfect partner for a curious mind. They feed the questions and spark new ones, and they show a child that not knowing something is exciting rather than embarrassing, it’s just the start of finding out. These celebrate the askers and the finder-outers.
Here’s what I’d reach for. Find your child’s age and start there.
What is in there
A toddler’s curiosity is mostly physical, a flap to lift or a thing to press. Neither of these asks its question in words, and both get answered by a small hand.
A child writes to the zoo asking for a pet and the zoo keeps sending the wrong animal, each one behind a flap. The whole book is one question asked over and over, which is exactly how a toddler thinks. It survives being read forty times, which not every book does.
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Press the yellow dot, turn the page, and there are two of them. Shake the book, tilt it, blow on it. It hands a small child cause and effect and then lets them run the experiment themselves.
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Why, why, why
For little ones it’s about being told, in a story, that all that wondering is a wonderful thing and not a nuisance. These do exactly that.
Ada asks ‘why’ about absolutely everything and follows her questions wherever they lead, even when they land her in trouble, in a rhyming celebration of a properly curious child. It tells a young questioner that their endless wondering is a gift, not a nuisance, and that scientists are just people who never stopped asking. Bright, rhythmic and much loved.
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A boy called Liam is curious enough to tend a scraggly patch of plants he finds on a forgotten railway, and slowly his curiosity turns a grey city green. It’s a gentle, gorgeous story about where a bit of wondering and pottering can lead. Good for the child who likes to poke about and see what happens.
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Finding out
Older children can chase a question into a proper book, whether that’s a true story of curiosity paying off or a book of the very questions they keep asking.
The true story of a boy in Malawi who, curious and determined, taught himself from library books to build a windmill that brought power to his village. Told for younger readers, it’s proof of where curiosity and stubbornness can lead, even with almost nothing to hand. Genuinely inspiring, and a brilliant answer to ‘why bother finding out’.
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A cheerful book of exactly the sort of questions children actually ask, from the Science Museum, answered properly and with plenty of laughs. It rewards a curious child with real answers to the gross and glorious things they’ve always wondered about. Perfect for dipping into, and for the reader who’d rather have facts than a story.
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Proper questions
Older children want the actual answer rather than a tidied-up one, and they can tell straight away when they are being fobbed off. These take them seriously, in argument and in story.
Tyson’s adult bestseller rewritten for young readers, on what the universe is made of and how anybody managed to work that out. Full colour, with the hard parts explained rather than skipped over. Good for the child who has started asking things you cannot answer.
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Real philosophers hooked onto questions a child already has, in chapters of a few pages each. It is on this page because it treats wondering as something you get better at rather than something you grow out of. Better a page at a time than straight through.
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Fred has always wanted to be an explorer, and then the plane goes down over the Amazon and he is one, with three other children and no adults anywhere. What turns the book is the map he finds, and what the jungle teaches them about paying proper attention to things. Rundell writes the forest like somebody who has been in it, which she has. A crash and a dead pilot in the first chapter, so know that going in.
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Reynie answers a newspaper advertisement looking for gifted children seeking special opportunities, sits a very strange test, and ends up undercover at a boarding school with three others who passed it too. The puzzles are laid out for the reader to solve alongside them, so it is not a passive read. Long, and better for it.
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Something to do together
A ‘wonder jar’ to fill with the questions a child can’t stop asking, plus a few good places to go looking for the answers together. I’m making it now, and it will live here soon.
The most useful thing you can do with a curious child is keep the questions welcome, even the hundredth one, even the ones you can’t answer. ‘Shall we find out?’ is very nearly a magic phrase.
So let ‘I don’t know’ be the start of something rather than the end of it, and hand them the books and the questions in equal measure. A child who learns that wondering is a good thing rarely stops.
For you, the grown-up
There’s a companion page for grown-ups over on the main Book Quote Therapy library, with books for adults reawakening their curiosity.
Read the grown-up version →These pages are written for the grown-ups looking after a child: parents, teachers and carers. A good book can sit beside a worried child, though it never stands in for a real conversation, or for proper support when something feels too big to carry alone.