Raise an Inquisitive Child – Curiosity is often described as one of the most valuable traits a person can possess, yet it is also one of the easiest to accidentally undermine in children. The questions that seem inconvenient at busy moments, the interests that are unusual or hard to support, the relentless ‘why’ that trails through a five-year-old’s day — these are not obstacles to family life. They are the raw material of a genuinely inquiring mind.
Raise an Inquisitive Child
The Origins of Curiosity
All children are born curious. It is not a quality distributed unevenly by some random process of nature. It is a fundamental characteristic of the developing human brain, which is wired to seek out new information and make sense of the world. What varies is how that curiosity is received, shaped, and sustained as children grow.
Research by child development psychologist Susan Engel found that curiosity in the classroom declined significantly as children moved from early years through primary school. This was not, she argued, because children became inherently less curious. It was because the school environment increasingly rewarded right answers over interesting questions, and compliance over exploration.
Creating a Home That Honours Questions
Responding to a child’s question with genuine interest, even when you are tired or busy, sends a powerful message about the value of curiosity. You do not need to have the answer. ‘That’s such an interesting question — I don’t know, how could we find out?’ is an excellent response that models intellectual humility and collaborative inquiry simultaneously.
Surrounding children with books, interesting objects, access to the natural world, and a variety of creative materials gives them the raw inputs for curiosity-driven exploration. Limiting screen time and creating space for boredom — which is the incubator of curiosity — is equally important.
What Schools Can Do
The best schools understand that academic rigour and intellectual curiosity are not in competition. They create conditions in which children are expected and encouraged to go beyond the prescribed content — to ask questions that take the lesson somewhere unexpected, to pursue tangential interests, and to engage with ideas rather than merely to learn them.
Channing School is renowned for fostering exactly this kind of active intellectual engagement. Find out what makes Channing distinctive at https://www.channing.co.uk/