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jimrandomh comments on Several Topics that May or May Not deserve their own Post - Less Wrong Discussion
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Simple miscommunication. Kids figure out that saying "why?" causes people to tell them interesting, related things. So they keep doing that. The adults who hear this, however, are applying an additional constraint - the things have to be related in a particular way - which the child probably doesn't care much about. Unfortunately, that constraint sometimes leads to dead ends; there are many concepts where all the answers to "why" are either unknown, or uninteresting, or built on prerequisite knowledge not available to small children. The graceless way to handle this is to get frustrated and dismiss them. The right way is to segue the conversation to something that isn't related by an is-cause-of or is-purpose-of relation, but which is interesting and worth talking about.
Definitely true. Also, once kids figure out they can frustrate adults, an element of "game playing" enters the picture and they do it on purpose. For adults, though, I see "Why?" as the lazy question. It throws all the effort of actually formulating an answerable question on whoever tries to answer it. Young children don't know enough to be more precise, so "Why?" is a general-purpose question simply asking for more information.
I think this touches on something huge. Asking why, and seeking to answer it yourself, is not childish or annoying or looked down upon - it's science! Asking why, and expecting someone else to figure out the particular question and find an answer for you is absolutely childish. It may in fact be appropriate for a child, but it does hit a point where the work being demanded is far more than is appropriate to the interaction, and difficulty in dealing with this leads to frustration; it is not easy to explain to a child why asking "why?" and expecting the adult to provide a response in the context of a short interaction was reasonable the past 4 times and now is unreasonable.
Note that while I would say, "answer this for me" is generally childish, "come answer this with me" is more often not - I don't mean to exclude involvement by others. In all cases, though, it depends somewhat on circumstance.
Agreed that asking yourself why isn't childish, nor as in my earlier post is it "lazy" to ask it of yourself, but I don't think it is particularly useful either. "Why?" is too big a question to answer. You need to break it down into answerable bites, as science does as a practical matter in requiring testable hypotheses.
Right. "Why?" is a starting point.
Is it possible/valuable to tackle the question of causality versus correlation versus coincidence with a young child? I think people are built to see causality in an agent-oriented way; explaining a more Judea Pearl-ish view of causality might be too complicated for most kids, but if it isn't it could provide a way of explaining why some answers to "why" are unsatisfying to their intuition.
"Why?"
"I'll tell you when you've finished reading 'Causality'"
As the parent of a child who's in the "why?" stage, the above seems about right. The other thing is when she doesn't actually listen to the answer at all, already thinking about something else ...
I think that some times children really want to know why, but your idea should usually work well in those cases, too. You're basically suggesting distracting the child so that they forget the undesirable thing they were asking or doing, and move on. That is a basic parenting technique.