Nurturing Curiosity in Children

A letter from our Founder, Vassili Philippov .

What do parents of grown-up children most often regret? Not having given their loved ones more of their most valuable, most limited, most precious resource: their time.

Please allow me to ask you: how much quiet time do you spend with your children? I’m talking about time spent unhurriedly, unpressured, without concrete goals or strict limitations. Every day has its activities and business and bustle. But the calm, quiet times can be equally important, if not even more so.

Our children are constantly inundated with new information. Facts, formulas, rules, history, one after another after another. But many important things that are indeed much more interesting for kids—topics that can really inspire their interest in science and how nature works—can get lost in the noise.

And trust me, even kids who say they are not interested in science become very involved when you start discussing such questions with them. Even my youngest, who’s not the biggest fan of science in general, is eager to discuss questions like:

? what is infinity?

? is there anything larger than infinity?

? can we travel in time?

? what would happen if you entered a black hole?

Don’t worry if you don’t know the answers to these questions yourself. The “right” answers are not the most important part. Indeed, we still do not know the answers to most of these matters. But it is a chance for your children to think about these things, to share their thoughts with you. It is a chance to devote some of your own time to examining these questions, too. Not even simply discovering something new, but doing it together—sharing the experience of mutual discovery with your child, quietly and unassumingly, with a simple question as the catalyst.

And there is no better time for such talks than bedtime. As night falls, the cosmos emerges—the perfect backdrop for questions about infinity and the universe. And when kids are already in bed, everything urgent about the day is behind you, both for you and for them. You can devote to them every bit of attention and encouragement they deserve. Just try today with one of these questions, and see where it takes you.

These questions may not teach your children useful facts, but they might inspire their curiosity. They can spark their interest, in reading, in the pursuit of these truths. Such queries might inspire them to cultivate in themselves an interest in the things around them, in how the world works. And this interest, in particular, is a characteristic that really sets the amazingly bright people and the best specialists in any area apart.

Happy experimenting,

P.S. Just some more ideas on what to discuss:

? why do we feel pain?

? do animals have feelings?

? why is sugar so delicious?

? how can we build a perpetual motion machine?

? is there anything truly infinite in our world?

? how can we be sure that atoms exist if we’ve never seen them?

? how do we see? What does it mean to ‘see’?

? there are billions upon billions of other stars and planets—why haven’t we found life out there?

? imagine you fell asleep and woke up 100 years in the future. What do you think you would see?