Eight Questions About Everyday Life That Kids Always Ask

Simple answer, yes! A better question for a parent would be “Do I look like an inbred chimp when I chew gum?” which could lead to an answer in the affirmative but might well cast a shadow on the family tree. Chewing gum can not be digested. However, it isn’t half as sticky as those school trousers that had to be put in to the freezer so the gum could be chipped off later might suggest. The walls of the intestines are slippier than the gum is sticky. So, if you swallow your gum it will not stick to the lining of your stomach as Grandma might suggest, there to be joined by its fellows as time goes by and turn in to a huge bouncy basketball. Gum goes straight to the, err, bum.

This is a question to which every sensible parent should know the answer. A (gentle) slap on the head and a retort “because it does” has been rumored to offend small children, even though it is a perfectly acceptable answer to most adults. Believe it or not the fizzing is a reaction to pain, albeit a very small amount of pain. Like fizzy drinks, where the carbon dioxide in the bubbles turns in to something quite nasty sounding called carbonic acid, sherbet does something similar. Aside from the E numbers, there are two ingredients in sherbet that do this, the evil twin coupling of citric and tartaric acid. The fizz you experience is actually the tongue getting irritated. So, pain is used in the pursuit of pleasure. It’s amazing how worryingly grown up the little dears can be in some ways.

This one is an absolute gas! Literally! When we take an onion and chop it up we can immediately smell it. This is because it releases chemicals and it releases even more of them once our digestive juices get going. Gas is the form that some of these chemicals take and guess where they end up? Yes, gases go upwards (generally!). So the onion gas goes from the stomach back up to the mouth and is released in the form of a burp. Occasionally, when a double pepperoni with extra onion has just been consumed the burp may take the form of a belch, which is like a burp only longer and offends your Grandma. This is a just punishment for the lies the old one spoke about your gum. The gas will dissipate eventually, but is renowned for not doing so when an important event, such as a hot date, is forthcoming.

Most people, adults and children alike, will answer that it gets expelled from the plane and hurtles to the ground where it can, if you are very very unlucky, hit you on the head. Apart from the joyous images that this places in the mind’s eye, it is very much a myth, a legend, an untruth! The “it” in question is stored on the plane for the duration of the journey in tanks underneath the toilet. When the plane lands some unlucky guys have the job to pump it out. Sometimes ice falls from a plane’s wings and this is often misunderstood to be the (previous) contents of the vehicle’s latrine. Sorry to disillusion you.

That’s a good one! Why do you like your Big Mac and fries? It’s all about pleasure, but not like the fizzy sherbet pleasure where some small pain is also involved. This is just sheer unmitigated pleasure for its own sake. Now this sounds a little like drugs are being condoned here, which of course they are not. Scientists believe that there is some sort of “pleasure pathway” in the brain. So, when we were evolving – and not very bright, this pleasure pathway ensured that certain things were done for the simple reason that the species needed to continue. We need to eat, we need to drink and we need to have sex to make sure that there is a next generation so the brain makes these things give us pleasure. Scientists think that when people become addicted to something like, say, crack cocaine, it happens in the same way but the effects are far from beneficial! So, just as we get hungry when we do not drink (and hunger is not a pleasant felling!) so the drug addict gets withdrawal symptoms when they do not take their drug of “choice”.

“Ah, small child! Because that is what it is supposed to do!” Once again, a similar answer to the sherbet conundrum – but one which will lead to general intellectual dissatisfaction in the cerebellum of the enquiring infant. Which is good, because it is the brain – again – that lies at the root of our answer. When someone drinks say, neat vodka, this vodka gets in to the blood stream very quickly. It hits the brain soon after and when there it reduces the amount of water in the bits of the brain which determine the way we think – and therefore, behave. In this way it relaxes a person and they can lose some or all of their inhibitions. This person will then think they are the funniest person on the planet ever – but to onlookers they can be more like one of the planets funniest animals instead. The lack of water, incidentally, is not restricted to the brain. As alcohol is a diuretic it takes water from all over. Someone on vodka will need to urinate more than usual and because they are letting out more water than they are taking in then there body becomes dehydrated. In grown up, everyday language, the resulting effect is known as a hangover.

Any parent who had ever baked cookies will have been asked this one. “Magic” may be an appropriate answer for a four year old but the more enquiring will not have their intellectual appetite sated by that. It would be like telling them that Father Christmas is real or something. Well, the real answer is that the chocolate does indeed melt. There is a big but coming, you can tell! But, it is held in its place by the dough around it. Baking chocolate has an advantage too – it has previously been tempered. That makes it sound as if it has been put in a corner because of bad behavior but this is in fact a process. When chocolate is tempered that means it has been heated and cooled a lot already and this process has made little crystals inside it that are very hard to break down. That makes the chips in your chocolate chip cookie a lot more difficult to melt than ordinary chocolate!

Because you do! Now, good night! Seriously though, if your child is of school age then she/he will need about ten hours sleep each night. That means if you are waking them at seven they will need to sleep straight through from nine in the evening. This does not take in to account to any ritual your family may have about getting ready for bed, so you may need to start the process an hour or two earlier than this. So, when the little cherub demands why you get to stay up and they must go to bed, explain this plainly to them. They will fail to understand this – not because they are stupid, it will be quite deliberate. Then, utter the word that echoes through human history in parent-child relationships – “because”. Full stop. End of.

Good night!