Shortly after our daughter was born last year, I asked my wife a question. "When she grows up, how do you think she will disappoint us?" Without saying anything, my wife gently extracted our baby from my arms, and held her tightly. "We'll never be disappointed in her, you inhuman bastard."
But children have disappointed their parents for generations, I say. And while, like all right-minded people, I'm appalled by parents who get upset when their kids don't become doctors or footballers or whichever career they had them marked down for, I also know we all have hopes for the kind of character our offspring will become. We want them to be kind. We expect them to be intelligent. A sense of humour would be nice.
"But of course she'll be kind and intelligent and funny," my wife says. "She's my daughter." OK, fair point. But what if she's incurious? What if she doesn't want to know what an alpine mountain looks like or what stars are made of? What if she remains stubbornly uninterested in why Hamlet pretends to be mad or why churches have spires? What if she regards all that "Why" and "How" stuff as, essentially, a waste of time?
As even my wife agreed, that would be difficult to accept. The questions of children can become annoying, but I'd rather my daughter asked too many questions than too few. The only thing worse than having to explain to your child how babies are made would be a child who didn't want to know.
While it's hard to argue with F Scott Fitzgerald's contention that when it comes to people there is no difference more profound than that between the sick and the well, I'd put the division between the curious and the incurious not far behind. Curious people are more alive, somehow; their eyes are lit from behind. They know more about more, which makes them more interesting. They are also more interested – in you, in what you do or care about, in whatever topic floats across the dinner table or through the bar. The incurious are frustratingly, depressingly inert. Nothing you say can get them off their script, elicit a startling insight or provoke a perceptive question. They just are, in the way a grey English sky just is.
As for Io (the name, if you're curious, is from Greek mythology), the signs are good. When we take her out, kindly strangers remark, "Oh, she's so curious!" Of course, this may be a polite way of acknowledging the fearsome interrogatory stare she has been fixing on them for half an hour. But she also loves reading – well, she loves books. At home, sometimes we'll suddenly wonder where she's gone and realise she's crawled away to be with Meg and Mog and the Gruffalo. I imagine her in conversation with a friend, down at the baby pub: "Of course, once you have parents, everything changes. You have much less time for reading."
But if Io's curiosity levels are high, that doesn't mean they always will be. Curiosity is a mercurial quality, which rises and falls throughout our life, depending on what we're doing, where we are and who we're with. This is both reassuring and daunting. Reassuring because it turns out that we, as parents, play a big role in the development of our children's curiosity. Daunting because doing so involves a sustained and conscious effort.
Curiosity starts with the itch to explore. A 1964 study found that babies as young as two months old when presented with different patterns will show a marked preference for the unfamiliar ones. The instinct to explore grows into an instinct for inquiry. Some time after their first birthday, children start to point at things, looking up at their parent as they do so. One of the main reasons babies point is to signal interest, to say, "I want to know about that – what is it?" Before they are able to speak, they are asking a question with their finger.
Whether they keep pointing depends on how their parents react. Teodora Gliga, a developmental psychologist at Birkbeck College, London, says that if babies are given the object they are pointing to, they learn that the function of pointing is getting things. If they are told the name of the object, they come to think of it as a way of getting answers. What happens if they get neither? "They stop pointing."
Soon enough, they're asking questions. Lots of them. In 2007, Professor Michelle Chouinard analysed recordings of four children interacting with their respective caregivers for two hours at a time, for a total of over 200 hours. She found that, on average, the children posed more than 100 questions every hour. Some of the questions were requests or calls for attention, but about two thirds were designed to elicit information: "What is the name for that?" Asking questions, says Chouinard, is "a central part of what it means to be a child".
As Paul Harris, of Harvard University, points out (the curious never stop pointing), asking a question requires an impressively sophisticated mental process. "The child has to first realise that there are things they don't know ... that there are invisible worlds of knowledge they have never visited." They also have to realise that other people, like their parents, are holders of important information, and that language can be used as a tool to pull that information out of them.
Like pointing, children's questioning is deeply affected by whether they grow up in a curious household. A 1984 study by the British researchers Barbara Tizard and Martin Hughes found that children in middle-class households asked more curiosity-based questions than children in working-class households. This wasn't necessarily because they were getting more answers: the working-class mothers were just as likely to answer their child's questions. It was because they were getting more questions.
By the time children from curious households go to school, they have a head start on their peers. Having absorbed more information from their parents and carers, they know more, which means they find it easier to learn more. As the educational psychologist Daniel Willingham says, when it comes to learning, there's a powerful "rich get richer" effect; the curious kids get more return from the same effort than kids with a lower base of knowledge. That makes learning more satisfying for them, which in turn feeds their curiosity.
You see what I mean about daunting? What parents do in those early years plays a pivotal role in determining whether they will become curious teenagers and curious adults.
Nurturing children's curiosity is hard work. But having talked to the experts, I'm painfully aware that when I ignore my daughter's inquiries, I may be stunting her desire to know. The best way for parents to encourage children's curiosity is to stay curious themselves, but that's also harder than it sounds. As we get older, we have a tendency to fall back on what we know, but curiosity is like a muscle: it atrophies without use. To keep it strong, we need to adopt the perspective of young children, and remain intensely conscious of what we don't know.
I'm appallingly under-prepared for all those questions that are about to start coming at me. I don't know what stars are made of, or who did what to whom during the wars of the Roses. I'm not even sure I know why the sky is blue. Down at the toddler pub, Io may soon be confiding her concerns about her dad's slow cognitive development, and asking if anyone knows a good private tutor. So at least I have a powerful motivation for staying curious: I don't want to disappoint my daughter.
