On Tuesday I wrote about the morning I found our puppy held hostage in a hammock, and about the son who put her there — the one who has never once accepted a rule on arrival. I said then that I knew exactly what I was looking at, because I was looking at myself. I also said that was a longer story.
This is the longer story. A child who questions everything is not a discipline problem, and I know that because I was one, and because the way the adults around me handled it is most of the reason I handle my son the way I do.
What It Feels Like to Be the Child Who Questions Everything
I want to start here, because I think most parents misread the posture.
When a child questions everything, it does not feel, from inside that child, like a challenge. It feels like a request for the missing piece. A rule arrives, and there’s a hole in it where the reason should be, and until that hole is filled the rule is genuinely hard to carry — not emotionally hard, structurally hard. It won’t sit right.
I needed things to make sense before I’d agree to hold them. That wasn’t rebellion. It was closer to bookkeeping.
And I’d note something that surprises people: I was not a bold kid. I was shy at school and I dreaded standing up in front of an audience. A negotiation was a completely different activity, and I’d walk into one any day of the week. The two things aren’t related at all — though the adults around me tended to read the questions as nerve.
The Thirty-Page Proposal
The question that cost me the most was about a youth camp.
I’d been running youth camps for TCKs in Korea for the better part of a decade by then, so this wasn’t a hunch. I looked at the schedule for our church’s youth retreat and saw a generalized adult retreat schedule that had been handed to teenagers. Lecture, then lecture, then lecture. If the audience had been the fifty- and seventy-year-old elders of the church, it would have been a perfectly good weekend. But it was a camp for kids, and there was no fun anywhere in it.
Lectures are not activities. That was my entire stance, and I still think it’s correct.
So I asked why it was run that way. And what came back was the version of an answer that isn’t one — because I said so, delivered to a young man being looked at like a student who’d wandered out of his lane.
I knew at that point that the Senior Pastor and the elders were not going to simply hear me out and agree. So I did it the way I do it.
I wrote a thirty-page proposal.
Data pulled from several thesis papers. Sources cited. A mocked-up alternative schedule, built for the age group it was actually for. Then I gave the presentation.
That is my style of negotiation and it hasn’t changed since: bring the paperwork, make the case, be civil, be reasonable, and put the thing on a table where it can be argued with instead of just felt about. Thirty pages isn’t an act of defiance. Thirty pages is what it looks like when somebody has decided to be impossible to dismiss.
What It Cost
The camp went well. For the youth group the outcome was genuinely good, and that part I’d do again tomorrow.
For me, it meant a long stretch on thin ice.
Here’s the piece that took me years to understand properly, and I want to say it carefully, because it would be easy to make it sound uglier than it was.
Changing the program meant redistributing money.
I’ve watched a lot of people call churches corrupt. Flatly, as a category, as though the word church is evidence enough on its own. And I’ll be honest that I carried some of that skepticism myself, before I’d ever been on the inside of a budget.
Then I saw how it actually works, and what I found wasn’t corruption. It was weight.
Every little spending gets reported — not just the big line items, every one. A church is handling money that people gave out of conviction, often out of very little, and the institution knows exactly what that means. So it builds an accounting culture heavy enough to prove itself over and over to anyone who asks. Ours held quarterly general reportings after service, where the sheets were opened and any member of the congregation could walk up and see precisely where the money had gone.
That transparency is a good thing and I wouldn’t trade it for a lighter process. But it has a consequence nobody mentions: when money is that visible, moving any of it is never a quiet administrative act. Every line on that sheet is something people can watch you move, which means changing anything has to be defended in public, to everyone, by name.
And I moved lines on it. Young, with thirty pages, without fully appreciating what I was touching.
So I was on thin ice, and I stayed there a while. It took time for the elders to come around, and when they finally did it arrived the way these things usually arrive — as a joke. They started calling me brave. That was the sign the ice had thickened.
Don’t misread any of this. I loved that church. I still do. But change comes whether or not anyone schedules it, because the lives inside a church keep changing, and something has to keep up.
Why the Question Landed That Way
It would be easy to turn this into a complaint about the church, and that isn’t what it is.
Part of what I ran into is cultural. In a lot of the rooms I grew up and later served in, a question directed upward reads as a challenge to the person rather than an inquiry into the thing. The question and the questioning of authority arrive as a single object. So the honest answer to “why did that go badly” often isn’t that anybody was being unreasonable — it’s that two people were running different definitions of what a question even is, and nobody said so out loud.
I’m not going to generalize that into a rule about pastors, or professors, or Korean churches, or anybody. Plenty of people handled me well. But where it’s real, it’s real — and a kid who asks upward is going to run into it eventually with no idea what just happened to him.
What I Do With Number 2 Because of It
Here’s the part that’s actually a system, and it’s short.
He gets the reason. Every time. Not a full debate every time — I don’t have the hours, and some rules aren’t up for discussion the same day they’re issued. But he gets the reason, on the spot, without having to earn it. Because I said so is not a sentence in this house — it’s an assertion wearing an answer’s clothes, and it isn’t a sentence in this house specifically because of what it felt like to be handed one.
When I told him no on holding the puppy while sitting down, I owed him the reason and he got it: his youngest brother copies him and won’t retain the sitting clause. He didn’t like the answer. He accepted it, because it was an answer.
The question is never the offense. He can be wrong. He can be told no. He can lose a privilege for what he did. But he has never once been in trouble in this house for asking. I keep those two things surgically separate, because the adults who blurred them taught me something I’d rather he never learn — that the safest thing to do with a question is not ask it.
A good case can actually move a rule. This is what makes the rest of it credible. He knows the puppy rule has a date on it now, because he made the case and the case worked. If a rule can never move, then the reason was never real — it was decoration on top of because I said so, and kids work that out faster than we’d like.
Privately, one to one. I asked my hardest questions in private, and I think that instinct was right. I’m teaching him the same thing — not to hide the question, but to understand that where you ask it changes how it gets heard. That isn’t cowardice. It’s the difference between wanting an answer and wanting an audience.
What I’m Actually Protecting
The hardest thing about a child who questions everything is how easy it would be to switch it off. I could raise a boy who stops asking. It wouldn’t even be hard — a few unanswered questions, a couple of moments where asking clearly costs him something, and he’d file the instinct away and be much easier to parent.
I’d get a more compliant kid and lose the thing that makes him himself.
Because the wiring that sends him at a hammock in the morning is the same wiring that will make him unwilling to sign onto something he doesn’t believe in twenty years, in a room where that’s expensive. I’d like him to still have it then. Which means it has to survive me now — and the person most likely to talk him out of it isn’t a professor or a pastor. It’s his father, on a tired Tuesday, saying because I said so and meaning it.
So he gets the reason. Every time. Even when I’m tired. Especially then.
What He Brought Me Instead
There’s one thing he has that I didn’t, and I only noticed it writing this down.
When I asked my questions upward, I was asking rooms. People with authority over me and no particular investment in why I was asking. Thirty pages was the price of admission — that’s what it took to be impossible to dismiss in a room like that.
My son walked over to me in the living room and asked whether it would be okay if he sat down on the floor first, and then held the puppy.
Same move, exactly. He found the hazard in my rule — she can fall — engineered it out, and brought me back the improved version. He just didn’t need thirty pages to do it, because he wasn’t dealing with a room.
He was dealing with his dad.
That’s the whole thing I’m trying to hand him. Not the willingness to ask — he came with that, same as I did, and I couldn’t have talked him out of it if I’d tried. Just a cheaper price for asking than the one I paid.
