Questions to ask your kids
"How was school" gets "fine" because it asks for a summary, which is hard. These 50 ask for one specific thing instead — a moment, a person, a rule they'd change — and are grouped by after school, dinner, car and bedtime.
Easy ones, to start
Nobody opens with the hard question. These are the ones you can ask with the plates still on the table, and they still tell you something.
- Who would you like to say thank you to this week, and what for?
- What part of today would you want to tell a friend about?
- What's something about yourself that you're quietly quite pleased with?
- Who helped you today without being asked?
- What's the nicest thing anybody has said to you lately?
- Which grown-up would you swap one skill with for a day, and which skill would it be?
- What did a grown-up say today that you thought was wrong?
- Who did you sit next to today, and what are they like?
- What do you need more of at the moment: quiet, company, or something else?
- What did you spot today that you think nobody else spotted?
- What was the best five minutes of your whole day?
- What sort of mood did you come home in today, and did anybody notice?
- What's the silliest rule you can think of that would still actually work?
- What food do you think is completely overrated?
- If you got to make one new law that everyone in the country had to follow, what is it?
- If our dinner had a fancy name on a menu, what would tonight's be called?
- You get to be in charge of one grown-up for a whole day. Who, and what do you make them do?
Questions that actually go somewhere
The middle rung. Still safe, but the answer is about who someone is rather than what they did, which is the whole difference.
- Is there one thing I could do in the morning that would make tomorrow go better for you?
- Is there anything you're not looking forward to tomorrow?
- What was hard today that you got through anyway?
- Is there something you'd like to be able to tell me that feels too big to start?
- If somebody only ever saw you at school, what part of you would they completely miss?
- If the worst thing you're expecting tomorrow did happen, how bad would it actually be?
- How do you like being cheered up? What actually works, and what really doesn't?
- Is there anything you've been waiting for me to notice?
- When is it all right to break a promise?
- What do you think you got from me, and what's purely you?
- Are you the same person at school as you are at home? What's different?
- If you saw somebody being left out, what would you actually do? Not what you're supposed to say — what you'd really do.
- If your friends had to describe you to somebody new, what would they say first?
- What's the first thing you can remember? Just the first bit you've got, even if it's tiny.
- Which story about our family gets told over and over, and do you like it?
- Is there a place, or a person, that lets you be completely yourself without trying?
When something is off
The ones people skip. Skipping them is usually why the same thing keeps coming back.
- What's a rule at school that makes no sense to you?
- Did anybody lose their temper today, and what set it off?
- Did anybody say sorry to you today, or did you say sorry to anybody?
- What's the most unfair thing that happened this week?
- When you and a friend fall out, who usually fixes it?
- What annoyed you today that you decided not to mention to anybody?
- Is there anything you're still cross about from ages ago?
- When you're sure you're right and a grown-up tells you you're wrong, what do you do?
- What do I do that you find really annoying?
Where things are going
Fewer of these on purpose. A conversation that is only about the future is a planning meeting.
- What are you planning to do at the weekend, if it's up to you?
- If tomorrow went exactly the way you wanted, what happens in it?
- What's something grown-ups do that you're looking forward to, and something you're really not?
- What are you nearly ready to do without any help, and what's the last bit you need?
- What do you want to get good enough at that people ask you to do it?
- What used to be hard for you that isn't hard any more?
- What would you like to be known for?
- What do you think you'll be like as a grown-up?
Some questions are easier to answer when neither of you chose them.
Turn one over. You would not have picked it — that is the point.
Six questions from this page, face down.
On the site they live on a wheel. You spin, it lands, nobody chose it.
Does any of this actually work?
The evidence points at turns, not talking. In 36 four- to six-year-olds whose days were captured on home audio recorders and whose brains were scanned during a story-listening task, the measure that predicted greater activation in Broca’s area was the number of conversational turns the child had with an adult — independently of family socioeconomic status, of the child’s IQ, and of the sheer number of adult words the child heard. That activation statistically explained the link between the child’s language environment and their verbal ability. A parent talking a lot is not the ingredient. A question that comes back is.
Which is a specific brief for a question: it has to be answerable in a way that produces a next turn. “How was school” asks a child to summarise seven hours, which is genuinely hard, and it terminates in one word. Asking for one moment, one person or one rule they would change is easier and returns something you can ask about.
And when they look away, that is usually not evasion. Thirty-six eight-year-olds were questioned face to face and over a live video link, on arithmetic, verbal reasoning and memory questions of varying difficulty. They averted their gaze more in the face-to-face condition — but question difficulty had a far stronger effect than the social setting, in both. The authors conclude the primary function of looking away is managing cognitive load. A child staring at the floor is thinking. Filling that silence is the most common way the answer gets lost.
Romeo, Leonard, Robinson, West, Mackey, Rowe & Gabrieli (2018), Beyond the 30-Million-Word Gap: Children’s Conversational Exposure Is Associated With Language-Related Brain Function, Psychological Science · source
Doherty-Sneddon & Phelps (2005), Gaze aversion: A response to cognitive or social difficulty?, Memory & Cognition · source
A child who does not want to talk should be allowed not to, and a parent working down a list of fifty is doing an interview. One question, once, and then let it go — the point is that they know the door is open, not that you get an answer tonight.
Last checked 28 August 2026.