How to Have a Grand Conversation

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]hese days, it feels like I am constantly talking with other moms about educating our children, and there is one question that comes up a lot. It is always some variation of: How do I talk to my child about ideas? Charlotte Mason says that ideas are the food of the mind, and many of these women are quite good at conversation. But when they are attempting to talk to their children and the response is something along the lines of, Can I have a cup of milk?, they start to think they’re doing it wrong.

I like to talk about ideas because I like to think other people’s thoughts after them. But I can’t say I’ve always been able to get my children on board. Lately, however, it’s been going a lot better, and I attribute that to two questions I’ve learned to use.

My theory is that if I can get my children to have a habit of talking about ideas when they are little, it’ll come naturally to them when they are older.

The first question was one I learned from the immortal Andrew Kern and it is: “Should x have done y?”

The second one has really enhanced the conversation I was getting out of the first, and it is from the brilliant DHM over at The Common Room: “Does that remind you of anything else?”

Allow me to give a recent example of this, a conversation with my child who is perhaps my most difficult to converse with on a deeper level.

We’ve been reading slowly through John Ruskin’s The King of the Golden River, about one chapter each lunchtime. We were taking a drive, and I decided I’d try to talk with her about it.

“Do you think that Gluck’s brothers should have taken his golden mug and melted it down like that?” I asked her. I told her in advance that I was going to talk to her about the book so that the question didn’t seem to come out of nowhere.

“No!” she exclaimed.

And said nothing more.

Not deterred, I asked her why not, and she declared that it was mean and selfish and all sorts of awful things, but of course his brothers were always like that.

“What do you think about how Gluck responds?” I asked her. {Because it’s not a formula. We really can ask questions other than the two I mentioned. I’m only saying this in case you are like me and sometimes Follow Rules Religiously.}

“He’s always so nice and kind,” she said. “He never does means things back to them, no matter what they do.”

I, of course, was thinking about Jesus at that point, but I was more interested in what she was thinking.

“Does that remind you of anything else?” {Education being the science of relations and all…}

“Cinderella,” she said, without skipping a beat.

And then nothing more, of course.

I decided to push a little more. “Why?”

“Because her stepsisters are so mean to her and she is always kind back, too.”

And that was it.

But wasn’t it a good conversation? Now, if I had been at home, I would have been tempted to tell her that that reminded me of a verse, and then we could have talked about how Jesus responded to other people, or how Paul instructed us to never return evil for evil. But in and of itself, even without all of that, it was a truly good conversation.

I feel like these questions have become the aces I keep in my sleeve. I can always pull them out when I need them, and they invariably lead my children and I into great conversations.