“You will understand when you get older” : Parental strategies for handling children’s ‘difficult’ questions

Abstract: Adults’ (parents’) sensitivity and awareness of their children’s issues and thoughts are important in order to answer their children. There is a need to investigate how parents try to find an appropriate strategy to answer their children’s life questions. The research question of the current study is how parents answer their children’s ‘difficult’ questions. The data set has been collected using semi-structured interviews and audio taping of ten participants with different backgrounds. The data set has been thematized as ‘responsive’, ‘avoiding’ and ‘dominant’ answers using thematic analysis in order to analyze the interviewees’ stories and investigate how they use different strategies of answering their children’s questions. The results show that almost all of the parents try to be responsive about their children’s life questions. Furthermore, it is shown that some of the parenting’s styles of answering could be included in more than one category of answering style, for example parents try to be responsive and meanwhile intended to avoid answering.