My 5 Year Old and Her Badgering Questions...

Unfortunately this is a phase that can last many years! I'm still dealing with this with my 10 year old. I will often respond with the question, "what do you think?"nor "what did I just tell you about that?" in a calm conversational way and get my son to think about the info instead of asking his question 10 different ways. Sometimes I ignore his question and change the subject. If you feel frustration, leave the room and count to 10 (it really works!).

Hang in there!

I reply, "What do you think honey?"

"The answer will be the same as the last time you asked. Do you remember what I said then?"

Really though, a lot of it is for your undivided attention. So, take a time out of whatever you are doing, sit with her on your couch and talk with her for a solid 30 minutes. No question is unimportant.

My multi-purpose sanity-saver answer was "What do YOU think the answer is?" I think a lot of times a curious, inquisitive, chatty child really wants to talk and asking the question over and over again is their way of engaging in conversation, so if you turn the question back on them, often times they'll happily take the opportunity to tell you all about what *they* think :-).

Another useful phrase is "let's look it up next time we're at the library" (yes, I know you can get instant answers off the internet, but I'm still sorta old school in believing that looking stuff up in regular books is a useful skill and something to encourage in children - also it means that I have deferred answering the question until our next trip to the library!)

And hang in there - pretty soon your daughter will be able to pepper those questions to her teachers at school so you won't have to deal with them all yourself (one of my 9YOs is an inquisitive perpetual-question machine and I find she doesn't exhaust me quite so much now that she's absorbing so much more info at school)

Edited to add: be forewarned, though, that once your daughter starts looking up answers on her own, if she's anything like my factoid-junkie 9YO, you'll soon be hearing a lot of "Mom, did you know that......." ;-) (BTW my stock answer for *that* situation is usually "No, not until you just told me!")

I always ask my 8 yr old daughter/ future lawyer if she really wants to know? Honestly when I answer a question she asks me, 9 times out of 10 she usually follows it up with ," no.... that's not what this book said. " or ," that's not what my teacher said" ARGH! Sometimes she will just keep asking me the same question over and over, but will just rephrase it slightly so it seems like a different question. If I say to her that I just answered that question, she will tell me she doesn't think my answer was right. Funny thing is that she tells EVERYONE that her Mommy knows EVERYTHING!! HA! Sure doesn't feel like she thinks that when everything I say to her is up for debate! Oh well, hopefully she will make a career out of it someday. She is REALLY good at it!

She sounds awesome!

I recall this age. Our daughter is extremely bright and always had a ton of questions. Of course we felt it was partly our fault because all of her life all we do is ask children questions. How old are you? What is your name?. Where is your nose? Where is the blue car? What should we have for a snack?

Pay back is HELL! Ha, ha, ha..

Anyway one day while we were running errands, it was 1 question after another. I had a lot on my mind and I finally said. "You know what? It is ok for people to sometimes not talk. To just sit and enjoy the ride and each others company thinking about things to ourselves."

Of course she remembers this and says she always thought it was funny, because the next this I asked was "Which book on tape do you want to listen to?"

Just hang in there and give her permission to just think about things herself. I miss all of those questions. She is now in college and it can be pretty lonely here without her. My husband and I try to give her space and not text and call her each time we really want to, because otherwise she would never get anything done!

Give your daughter a big squeezy hug and take a big sniff of her head, and tell her you are so proud of how excited you are that she loves learnning.

We have to go through the same process as you because our 5 year old is constantly doing this...I feel like it is a contest as to who can talk more plus the interuptions if my DH and I are trying to talk about something important. We've gone with if you need to talk to put your hand on our arm to let us know that you need to speak...I do get impatient to but I am trying to remember I would rather her talk about everything and share rather than becoming withdrawn and sullen teenager down the road...Yikes.

My DD is 3.5 and in that "ask the same question again and again" phase. Her favorites right now are "What time is it?" and "What does this color and this color make?" For the first one I've started telling her to look at the clock. I have to tell her a hundred times a day, I swear. but at least it gets her checking it out for herself instead of always expecting me to have an answer. As for the color thing, she's only starting to figure out that certain colors combined make certain other colors, but most colors mixed together just make brown.

Sometimes though it is something she wants that I've said no to and she's just being very persistent. After 3 or 4 times, I tell her one of the following:

"I've already told you no. I'm not changing my mind."
"That is enough."
"If you ask me again, you will go in time-out."

Maybe with her, you could just say you are done answering questions for the day and you are not going to answer anymore - then just try ignoring her. I know how great it is that they are curious and inquisitive and hopefully both my DD and yours will be great students because they are so apt to ask questions and want answers. And she is probably doing it more for attention than anything and wanting to carry a conversation in her 5-year-old way. But I feel your pain - I have a feeling my DD will still be the same way at 5. I don't mean to sound mean, but we all have our limits and sometimes kids need to learn to respect them.

EDITED TO ADD: Yay Elaine C.! I remember saying "What do YOU think?" to my stepson all the time! He used to drive us insane with all his questions, especially when he was perfectly capable of answering them himself!

my 8 year old has always asked alot of questions. and i answer every one of them. he now understands that when i say i don't know that we can look it up on the computer or he can ask some one else. don't stop answering her questions-she is learning from you. and if the why question becomes too much just keep asking her why!!! she'll get the hint!!!!

Well, you did much better than I usually do! I normally just say, "I've already answered that question - stop asking." Or "if you ask me for X one more time, the answer goes from a yes to a no, so be patient." I have had to follow through a couple of times, so she's lost out on watching a movie or getting dessert, but I feel like she needs to know that I'm not going to forget her if she leaves me alone for one bloody second, and she needs to learn to wait.

I think it's ok to lose your temper occasionally. She was being annoying. That's the natural consequence. As long as you're not being mean to her, she'll get it.

edited to add: I think it might be helpful to clarify what kind of annoying questions she was asking. Because I read it as the annoying "what are we having for dinner?" "when's dinner" "can I paint?" "can I paint now?" "how about now?" kind of question. But I think if she's asking questions that she really either doesn't know the answer to or is just generally being inquisitive, then it's good to turn it around on her so she can kind of "think aloud."

I'll let you know the answer when my 23 year old grows out of this phase :) We would say "I hear you asking (whatever the question is). We can't do that because of (reasonable answer). Please tell me what I just said." It helped. Sometimes he just wanted to know he was being heard and that we understood his concerns. Did we lose our tempers? Oh yes. Did he keep it up? Yes. ADD had a lot to do with it in his case, but lots of kids go through this as a phase. She may just be flexing some new intellectual muscles.
Good luck!

Right there with you! Some days are just hard! My son keeps asking the same question over and over expecting a different response! Be consistant and the phase should end! Argh! Frustrating I know!

sounds like you got some good responses from others. i'd like to add a mommy tip, i have a 16 yr old, 14 yr old and 3 yr old. i've made mistakes and sometimes feel guilty for how i handle things or respond to things, but being a mom will be the toughest and most rewarding job u will ever have. it doesn't sound like you handled the situation as badly as you feel you did. 1st, you have to be a little easier on yourself, if you didn't mistreat her (and it doesn't sound like you did) then you don't need to feel bad. 2nd, one of the biggest mistakes i made was not making sure i took time to take care of me on a daily basis. you have to take care of yourself 1st in order to give your best to your child or anything else. it's like being on an airplane that gets into trouble and they announce that eveyone needs to put on their oxygen mask. our 1st inclination is to put masks on our children before we put ours on, but if we do that we may not be able to help them at all. so take time to take care of you. as a mom, we have so many responsibilities, the biggest 1 being raising our children, and this can be a very overwhelming job. my mom told me a long time ago that raising a child would be the toughest job i ever had and boy was she right. i don't know what your daughters questions were or what else might have been going on at the time of her "driving you crazy" but i realized with my own children going thru the "drive me crazy" phases (and i still have them), depending on what's going on, i have to make myself stop whatever i'm doing, give them my undivided attention and try to redirect them to something that will occupy them. if i'm doing something i might even get them involved in helping me do whatever i'm doing. it's ok for children to ask questions, but it's not ok for them to constantly be annoying. it's our responsibility to teach them not to be annoying. if she's an only child she's probably use to getting the attention she wants when she wants it. the "dragonfly" idea is a good idea, but because she's 5, she may not have the patience to give you enough "mama space", so try incorporating some of the other suggestions along with the "dragonfly" cue and i think you will see some positive results. sounds like you're a good mom, so don't beat yourself up too bad.

No help here but.....I couldn't help but laugh and smile at this one....I am going to use dragonflies for my 5 children! You just made my day!! :)

My sister would make a "no question" rule for awhile, but my mom thought that was cruel...LOL
My daughter was terrible with this when she was 5. Finally, I learned to respond with "You tell me!" if I had just answered it, and if she remembered the answer, she would tell me, and our conversation turned into a more normal conversation. As long as I kept interacting with her, she was fine. I learned that the repeated questioning sometimes seemed to be a way of getting me (or my sister or my mom) to have longer conversations with her, but she just didn't know what else to say to get me to talk, so she took up this annoying game. When I was able to steer the conversation elsewhere, while still giving her attention, she seemed plenty satisfied.

You have a lot of answers so I'm sure you know- you are not alone. My daughter is also a very inquisitive little creature. I agree with several of the Mom's here- turn the question back to her- "you tell me". For our sanity my husband and I will sometimes say something like "you have a 3 question limit during this car ride- choose carefully" - this is good because it really makes her choose what she wants to say- it makes her think. Most of the time when she is repeating questions or asking questions she already knows the answer to it's just because she has a really hard time sitting quietly and needs something to fill the silence. In these cases- I'll try to start a converstation with her so that we are talking but I"m not being drilled with annoying questions. We also like to give her a little taste of her own medicine sometimes and give her a string of questions that we already know the answers to making sure to repeat several in the course of 3 minutes or so. This may or may not really help her understand but it's a little comedy relief :)