The Ten Most Annoying Questions My Kids Ask Me

All kids ask questions, as they should, but some ask some more than others. And some ask the same ones over and over, like half-trained parakeets one breath away from strangulation.

A small category of questions exist that try my patience, and the older my kids get, the more these questions annoy me. Maybe I’m the only one. Please tell me if that’s true so I can find a walk of shame and hang out there alone while all the other mothers affirm their little interrogators.

My automatic response to these questions is to grit my teeth and, at times, reply sarcastically. At first glance, some of these questions are genuinely responsible and desirably inquisitive, if they had not already been answered a thousand times!

The answers are truly pretty simple. Kids should know them, or at least they should be able to figure them out. Or they should wait and be surprised. But they should not, under normal and reasonable circumstances, ask these questions to their parents.

There are 2 reasons why.

One, their dad will not know most of the answers. The two answers he does know will set him off. Two, their mom has already answered them multiple times every day during her children’s earthly existence. And unless she is an unusually grace-filled person (sometime before lunch or right after nap-time, if her kids are small), she could respond with seemingly-unwarranted wrath. It’s how the term psycho-mom was birthed.

This is the list of the ten most annoying questions my kids ask me:

• What’s for dinner?
• Can I have that? (and the follow-up:) Why not?
• Where’s the tape?
• Where’s the scissors?
• How long will this take?
• When are we eating?
• Do I have to? (and the follow-up:) Why?
• Where are you?
• What time is it?
• Are you gonna pay me back?

I know there are more. There have to be, because we all carry around little pet peeves about what sane individuals ought to think and say. And when people say the opposite, especially people who have been carefully taught to do otherwise–well, that’s for you to decide how to respond. I decided to write a blog post.

What questions bug you?