06/06/2026
What happens when we ask fewer questions??
Questions are a huge part of how we interact with our children. They’re often one of the first ways we try to encourage children’s communication, check their understanding and support their learning.
But here's something that may surprise you; sometimes, asking fewer questions can actually help our children to communicate even more!
For adults, answering questions feels fairly automatic. However, for our younger children, answering questions can be hard work. To answer a simple question a child may need to:
• understand the words being used in the question
• work out what information is being asked for
• retrieve that information from memory
• organise their thoughts
• find the right words
• put those words together into a sentence
• feel confident enough to respond
Now don't get me wrong—questions absolutely have their place. Questions help us connect, learn and share information.
However, when most of our interactions with young children become a series of questions, we can accidentally turn conversations into quizzes.
So, what can we do instead?!?!
💬 Try making more comments and questioning less! Commenting helps to give children language and model vocabulary without our putting them on the spot; thereby reducing pressure. It allows us to show interest without requiring an answer and creates opportunities for children to join in if they want to.
For example:
❌ Rather than asking, "What colour is the car?"
✅ Try and comment, "That's a bright red car!"
❌ Rather than asking, "What are you building?"
✅ We could comment, "You're making a very tall tower."
❌ Rather than asking, "What's the dog doing?"
✅ We could say, "The dog is digging in the mud!"
❌ Rather than asking, "What did you draw?"
✅ We could comment, "I can see lots of circles on your picture."
Commenting allows us to model new vocabulary, sentence structures and ideas to our children. We also find that when adults comment more and question less, many children actually being talking more themselves. This is because when we are commenting, there’s no pressure to ‘get the answer right’ and conversations are more of a shared experience. When comments used match what the child is doing/what they’re interested in, you will also find they are more keen to communicate.
This doesn't mean we should stop asking questions altogether. However, we should remember that some of the richest language learning happens when we:
🎨 Talk about what your child is doing.
📚 Describe what we see
🚗 Share your own thoughts and observations.
⏳ Pause and wait to see if your child wants to add something.
Next time you’re playing with your little one, challenge yourself to see how many comments you can make before asking a question. You might be surprised by how much more they have to say!
