This guest post by Cary Maloney, writing for Learning Disability Resource, suggests several ways you can encourage your kid’s curiosity and spark a love of learning.
I sometimes forget that my daughter’s best questions happen when we’re late. There’s something about shoes half-on and keys barely in hand that unlocks her brain. Like, “Why do people lie?” or “What would it feel like to shrink really small and live in the fridge?” And everything in me wants to say, “Babe, now is not the time.” But lately, I’ve been trying not to squash those moments. Because the truth is — that is the time. Curiosity doesn’t schedule itself around our convenience. It just shows up. Bursts in. Makes a mess. And if you’re not careful, you start teaching your kid that their questions are too loud, too weird, too extra.
Stop Filling in the Gaps for Them
It’s easy to become the explainer. You’ve got Google-level recall, right? You know stuff. But kids don’t need a walking search engine. They need someone who lets them chew on their own thoughts. I’ve started asking my daughter more often, “What do you think?” even when I know the answer. Especially when I know the answer. Giving her space to talk through something is how she’s learning to trust her brain. That’s where children’s intrinsic motivation comes from — not because they got it “right,” but because they stayed curious long enough to build something of their own.
Allow Them to Build Their Own Learning Trail
One of the coolest shifts we’ve made? Helping her keep a little “idea log” — just drawings, notes, questions, poems, whatever. She adds to it whenever something clicks or confuses her. It’s like her brain’s playground on paper. Sometimes she wants to do it digital, so we’ve been stitching her entries together into a growing PDF. And it helps that it’s super easy to add pages to a PDF file now — so she doesn’t have to start fresh every time. It feels less like homework and more like she’s archiving her curiosity. Which is a weirdly beautiful thing to watch.
Let Them Choose. Then Back Off.
I used to over-orchestrate her learning. I thought I was “supporting” her curiosity, but really I was micromanaging it. Now? I offer choices and leave the room. Do you want to explore magnets or mix random kitchen ingredients into a volcano? Up to you. That tiny bit of control flips something on for her. It’s how you develop intrinsic motivation in kids. They feel like it’s theirs. Not ours. Not school’s. Just… theirs.
Learn Something New (and Be Bad at It)
There’s a weird pressure to look like we’ve got it all figured out. But your kid needs to see you not know things — and go after them anyway. A few months back, I started poking around some psych stuff online, half for work, half because parenting had me asking questions I didn’t have language for. Turns out, online psychology degrees provide flexibility that actually works when you’ve got a family in motion. What mattered most? My kid seeing me wrestle with something new, instead of acting like I already had the answers. If you like the sound of that, check this out.
Your House Doesn’t Need to Look Like a Science Museum
Pinterest will lie to you. It’ll tell you that your kid needs a perfectly lit learning corner and shelves full of wooden toys. What they actually need is less noise. Less hovering. Less scripted play. Just space to go off-script. Half the time, the most curious thing my daughter gets is when she’s playing in the dirt with a stick. We’ve been keeping an eye on how to encourage curiosity in young learners by paying more attention to what makes her forget to ask for screen time. And it’s never an app. It’s usually mud, string, or duct tape.
Make It Real So They Know It’s Real
A lot of what we’re calling “learning” doesn’t feel like anything to them. They do a worksheet, it goes in a folder, and then what? Gone. I’ve been trying to help her see the arc — what she wondered, what she tried, what she figured out. We hang drawings. We jot down quotes from our walks. Sometimes we rewatch videos of her explaining her theories about clouds. It’s not about proving anything. It’s about helping her feel her own growth. Some of the best ideas for parents to encourage curiosity are weirdly small. But they hit deep.
Celebrate the Weird Stuff, Not Just the Polished
This might be the biggest one. Your kid draws a mutant squirrel in a rocket ship, and you say, “Cool, honey!” but what if you asked why the squirrel needed a rocket? What if you paused long enough to let them explain? Curiosity is messy. It’s rarely cute. But if you treat their weird questions like little gold coins, they’ll keep mining. There are so many ways to encourage children’s curiosity that most parents ignore — mostly because we’re afraid of the chaos that comes with it. Let it get a little chaotic. That’s where the good stuff lives.
And listen — you’re not going to get this perfect. None of us do. You’ll shut down a question too fast. You’ll rush bedtime and miss a moment. But if your kid knows there’s room to be weird, to wonder, to try things without always finishing them… they’ll trust that learning is safe. That it belongs to them. And that’s the kind of knowing that doesn’t just last — it grows.
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