Kids ask the darnedest things

Mon., Sept. 17, 2007

Bob Minzesheimer USA Today

What about war?

Here's a tough one: "Why is there war?'

Wendell Jamieson had the most trouble finding someone to answer a question posed by Conrad Kassin, 4, of Los Angeles, after watching his cousins play a violent video game: "Why is there war?"

Jamieson says the head of the U.S. War College declined. No answer seemed satisfactory until he found Col. John J. Smith, a West Point professor and Gulf War veteran who has been thinking about that question during his 25-year career in the military.

In a lengthy answer, Smith cited "four big reasons": economics, fear, a sense of honor and different ideologies, and he said that "you can mix and match various degrees of all of those four reasons, really."

It began with questions asked by a 4-year-old:

“Why do ships have round windows?” “Is hummus like dinosaur poop?” and “Why can’t we just cook her?” prompted by a tantrum thrown by the boy’s infant sister.

The boy’s father, being a modern dad and a journalist, decided to write down the questions, no matter how strange, dark or ridiculous.

Wendell Jamieson thought it would be fun someday to show his son, Dean, the questions he asked when he was full of questions.

Then Jamieson had a better idea. He’d find answers – serious ones – to even the oddest questions. “Father Knows Less, or: ‘Can I Cook My Sister?’ One Dad’s Quest to Answer His Son’s Most Baffling Questions” (Putnam, $24.95) was released earlier this month.

The book is part memoir about being a kid with questions and being a dad without answers. It’s built around 124 questions from Dean and other children. The answers come from scientists, ship captains and movie directors.

A joint interview in their Brooklyn apartment begins with Jamieson, 41, discussing the book, and Dean, now 7, playing with his plastic dinosaurs. That is, until Jamieson says the book is as much for grown-ups as kids: “If it were a movie, it would be PG-13.”

That gets Dean’s attention: “What about PG-13?”

“I was saying that the book is more for grown-ups and older kids.”

“Why?”

“Well, it discusses some things that aren’t nice.”

“Like what?”

“Well, there’s sex and violence.”

“Like what?”

“There’s a question about what happens at a hanging.”

“What happens?”

“Well, it’s in the book.” (Frank Brown, a Washington state coroner, explains that a hangman’s rope breaks cervical discs in the neck.)

Dean’s questions show no sign of ending: “But I can read the book?”

“Yes, of course – someday.”

Jamieson, city editor of The New York Times, created a Web site (www.fatherknows lessbook.com) to solicit questions. It’s now taking kids’ questions for the paperback.

Jamieson, whose wife, Helene Stapinski, also is a writer, sought experts who don’t talk down to children and oversimplify and sugarcoat their answers.

Ella Hester, 8, of Brooklyn, N.Y., wondered, “Why did The Beatles break up?”

Hester’s father, Jere, had offered a simple answer: “Yoko.”

So Jamieson wrote to Yoko Ono – “a long, long shot,” he figured – and was surprised she replied. Her note read: “Because they all grew up, wanted to do things their own way, and they did.”

And for the record, ships have round windows because they’re less likely to crack than square ones, and dinosaur poop probably wasn’t like hummus.

As for Dean’s inquiry about cooking his sister, Jamieson found Timothy Taylor, an archaeologist who says that would be “existentially upsetting” and notes that even among the more than 70 species of mammals that are cannibals, “it would not be your sibling you would kill and eat.”

At 3, Paulina hasn’t begun asking about everything. Her father figures she’s just storing her questions to be unleashed, as he writes, “in a rushing avalanche, a cascading mountain of queries, to bury her father once and for all, to finish the job her brother began.

“Well, little one, bring it on.

“I’m ready.”