Big Questions from Little Children

Children wonder about every aspect of life, and sometimes their questions can be hard to answer

Children ask many questions; funny questions - hard questions. Even quite small children often think big thoughts. One should therefore not be surprised if a question like "who made the cheese?" is followed by "who made the sky?" or "does God like the Teletubbies?"

People of various religious backgrounds have tried to provide some good answers on different websites, and you can find lots of hints and information on your children's religious education using the internet .

Naturally a conversation with a child who asks these big questions requires a certain amount of background knowledge to avoid the worst misconceptions. For the very biblical Christians, several big sites offer answers to all sorts of questions. Parents within this category will probably find it sensible to begin the virtual search for answers on GotQuestions.org, where countless questions are answered biblically. The answers on this site are mainly for adults and tend to take the form of small-scale theological theses with many references to the Bibel.

From ChristianityToday the advice is that parents need be clear about their own beliefs. Only then will they be able to give simple answers to children's big questions. The site Big Questions, Simple Answers has a whole section about Christian education with articles on family faith, inspiration, advice from experts and relevant news articles.

ChristianAnswers are even more detailed in the section called "Parenting". The section is not merely concerned with specifically religious questions in the upbringing, but also practical situations like choice of a babysitter and how to make a child stop swearing - everything from a Christian perspective.

Further, ChristianAnswers provides a Christian list of answers to the many questions from children. The list is comprehensive and contains both questions about God, about biblical events and persons, about natural phenomena, about entertainment and a lot of other things. The questions and answers are all based on biblical Christianity. The Harry Potter books for example are condemned as occult fanaticism, and school-children are instructed on what to do if their teacher believes in evolution.

You cannot find quite as specific advice and answers in Beliefnet's article Don't Be Afraid of the Big Questions, in which a female Jewish rabbi recommends (as the Christians did, too) that the children's religious questions are taken seriously and answered to the best of the parents' ability. She illustrates some overall guidelines parents should have in mind. Even though the focus is directed at Jewish parents in particular, these advices may be useful - regardless of religious background.

As becomes clear in the article on Beliefnet, a great deal of the questions from children are about death. A very informative site about children's understanding of death is found on HospiceNet. Here you find information on how to support children who have been closely affected by death. The information is segmented into age groups.

What happens when life ends is one of the many questions the Unitarians deal with on their American homepage. Unitarianism is known to be a religion without norms and dogmas. Some readers might therefore wonder why the Unitarians offer religious answers to childrens' questions. Their answers can be found on the site Between Sundays: Answering Kids' Questions and are focused on children who read, listen and express themselves and do various creative exercises.

Should you have reached the end of this surfguide and be thinking that you still don't know whether God likes the Teletubbies, there is no reason to despair. FamiliesOnline answer this and other similar questions in the article The Big Questions. The author definately thinks God likes the Teletubbies, for "Teletubbies love each other very much and is therefore an excellent example to us all".